Notes on the Poet in a Capitalist Lurch

my intro from the LHUCA poetry reading series

The amazing LHUCA Literary Series, in Lubbock TX— a place that might not be on your literary map, but should, because the writers and thinkers and artists there are big-hearted and smart as hell— invited me to share some poems with them this past semester. They asked me to include a two-minute intro, remarks that might speak to the power of poetry in socio-political realms. I could not keep my intro under two minutes; I was too curious and excited about the writing that the prompt inspired. So, I’d like to share the longer version of this essay-in-progress with you.

I missed out on an opportunity to visit Prarie Dog Town while I was in Lubbock, but I was smitten with the idea of someone like him, looking up at the visiting humans, asking us, you know, like, what the hell are you guys doing up there?

—

We have been trained, by the USA’s capitalist powers-that-be, to try to transform every disobedient impulse into a plastic-wrappable art. Because freedom is at the heart of song, this conundrum leaves the poet in a lurch. I’m going to get personal, for a bit, about my lurch. 

My first stories and poems were about my parents. I recognized in my father a deep commitment to giving criminalized and voiceless people in my hometown an opportunity to heal, even as he made some life decisions that he would ultimately regret. My mother, whose soft Tennessee accent nearly evaporates anytime a server asks her what she wants, has always had a characteristic gentleness that I am both in awe of and exasperated by. I could always sense a cultural hierarchy that equated her worth to her willingness to serve others, and I wanted to tease that ugly knot out.

I sent these poem-things to a private liberal arts school in North Carolina because this is what you do when you’re 18 in this country: You take something that matters to you, and you try to figure out how good you are at it, and if someone would be willing to value you for being good at it. I laughed out loud when I dropped the submission in the snail mail post box. Fortuitously, something about my writing— I like to think it was my earnest love for my parents— landed me a scholarship. 

My writing life during college was beautiful. I’d found a place where my weirdnesses— my white, middle-class weirdnesses— could reverberate, largely without fear of repercussions. A series of brilliant professors gently urged me to explore deep, ineffable questions I had about my family’s past: my mother’s adoption by a Christian farmer in rural Tennessee; my father’s connection to the Appalachian mountains. I wondered, in a childish way, which version of the “characters” from my high school history textbooks my own ancestors had been. I’m sure you know which characters I hoped they’d been nothing like.

Around this time, I was gifted and read a white man’s rendition of Cherokee myths. I began to incorporate this second-hand imagery, these shuffled versions of indigenous stories— stories that existed in a terrain far away from the omnipresent Bible Belt I was hoping to escape (though of course, were geographically and historically situated in the land the Cherokee had been “removed” from). I felt desperate to solve some unnameable life equation with my reading and writing. Based on what I didn’t know then were my family’s damaging pretendian claims, I began to feel a shudder of recognition and excitement.

It’s embarrassing to admit now how naive I was, but I also feel tender for this version of myself: This was the moment I began to recognize there were other paradigms with which to look at the world, different ways to understand my place in it; there were alternatives to the structures I had taken for granted as being permanent monoliths, The Way Things Were— structures I had ambitions to master, by the way, ambitions to climb, because in the climbing, I thought, would lie my worth, a worth distinct from my ability to procreate. Distinct from a willingness to serve others.

During my final semester of college, I was coached on how to sound like a Scholar, which I now realize meant: how to sound like an upper-class white man. I was taught to banish “likes,” to rid myself of lilts that meant I was leaning too far into the audience’s perception of me, and to rewire specific words I’d pronounced in a way that betrayed my parents’ rural, Appalachian upbringings. I was receiving this advice, by the way, in a room full of female undergraduates, from a female professor, in the south. I’ve got a lot of irony for you today.

At the same time, I was reading Adrienne Rich— her collected prose included a graduation speech penned in 1985, the year I was born.

“Beyond your literacy,” Rich said to the women of Smith College,

“you have the privilege of training and tools… to debrief yourselves of the false messages of your education in this culture, the messages telling you that women have not really cared about power or learning or creative opportunities because of a psycho-biological need to serve men and produce children; that only a few atypical women have been exceptions to this rule; the messages telling you that woman’s experience is neither normative nor central to human experience.… This is a privilege only… if you refuse to give up your capacity to think as a woman, even though in the graduate schools and professions to which many of you will be going you will be praised and rewarded for ‘thinking like a man’” (5).

I wanted to write in a language that would both earn me entrance to those institutions and feel authentic to me and to my life experiences in a female body. I worshipped academia, even though something about the version of me I found there often felt unsettling. Eventually, I realized that such a voice would never exist, though you can see my panicked attempts to pin one down on the page if you search for my undergraduate thesis. Please don’t! 

Right now— in an institution that tokenizes minorities* and rewards patriarchal leadership styles, like many institutions in our country— in a state that has joined yours [Texas] in deciding that my reproductive organs should have more rights than me— I hear a panic, a deep-down panic, in my graduate students, as they lurch through their own set of unsolvable paradoxes. How can we put the slaughter device down? How can we afford to meditate when that means pressing pause on our witness of others’ immense suffering? What if what I say, when I attempt to say it, isn’t right?  

To them, and to me of the past, and to me of the present, every day, I say, Good poetry— great poetry— real poetry— doesn’t try to get it right. It just tries to get it: It tries to get you. 

Your safety, your comfort, the very thing likely allowing you to spend your days writing these poems, is rooted in structures that consistently deny your art’s ultimate value. In that denial, we can see the pattern of either repressing or othering minoritized points of view, goals that are inevitably intertwined with the militarized nation that our tax money funds. I have come to believe that any institutional language stating otherwise is almost always an attempt to avoid litigation and to save institutions/top administrators money. 

Yet— Poetry can be the antithesis of that performative language. Poetry accepts paradox. It does more than keep a record of the paradoxes of our lives: a poem, a true poem, activates the experience of paradox each time someone reads it.

I realize how ironic it is that I’m saying all of this to you, as a guest on an institutional paycheck, as an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. Am I uncomfortable with this? Yes. Am I a hypocrite? Yes.

In his essay “My Lyrical Self,” the poet Major Jackson writes,

“Our aim as writers is to not only hear the past, but to contribute to that song by activating and regenerating language that is reflective of our freedom. All the poems ever written are attempts to add one’s own sound to that collective cry of humanity.”

In addition to white supremacy, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the fetishization of/ stealing from minority cultural and literary histories (an act that, as you’ve just read, I have taken part in)—

and not to forget the deep misogyny rampant in the American southeast—

my upbringing is also embedded with the creation of the atomic bomb. So my first book of poems, Atom City, and my new poems— probably forever, my poems will grapple with the militarized institutions of science and my relationship to those institutions, cultural and literal. It took me a good twenty years of writing poems to realize this— alongside much and deep discomfort. So what, though, you know? I can use a little discomfort in my life.

*If you want evidence for this broad, conversational claim I’m making, I’d ask you to compare Yolanda Flores Niemann’s writing on tokenism (particularly the introduction) with the UA Faculty Demographics.