i check "rogue"

It is good to see Kenny and Kwame agree to exchange ideas and try to understand one another better. I am looking forward to what comes out of that. They very well may be aesthetically on opposite sides of something, but there are more than two sides. The very idea of two sides makes it sound like a football field, with the mainstream poets kicking off, wearing expensive, tweed, heavily logo-ed uniforms, with acceptance letters from The New Yorker for numbers, and ribbons from all the prizes they have won pinned to their shoulders, and pennyloafer cleats. On the other side of the field, the experimental poets, line up to receive the kick-off, wearing organic jerseys, with the letters of their names stitched into playful anagrams, and number signs where the numbers should be, with flowers from the avant garden painted on their helmets, only agreeing to play because they keep hoping after the first touchdown the scoreboard might read N+7.

While I sincerely look forward to the discussion between Kenny and Kwame, I do not buy into this construct of two sides, two teams, two factions, two dimensions. For one, where does Fence, and Verse Press (I mean [catch the] Wave Books), Jubilat, and many others fit into this construct? I thought those magazines had been exploring the outback between the experimental and the mainstream for years. Isn’t that where all the young poets are moving? I heard the real estate is cheap there? I heard it was the aesthetic equivalent of Williamsburg? Isn’t erasure the poetry equivalent of the hula hoop? And what about established poets like Jorie Graham and Carolyn Forche? I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that they had been appropriating experimental techniques for quite some time. Also where do poets that have come out of Cave Canem or the Dark Room Collective fit into all this?
In the heavily factionalized poetry world, I have always felt like a rogue nation. This is not to say that I have never been a part of any communities. I have, some very rich ones: a reading group when I was an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence in 1989 with Joel Brouwer, Tessa Rumsey, and Marisa de los Santos; part of a trio of surrealists (Cindy Goff and Greg Grummer) in grad school at George Mason in the early 90’s; a group of wonderful poets in DC from 1993-96 (Kenny Carroll, Silvana Straw, DJ Renegade, and Jose Padua), all loosely associated with DC WritersCorps and the Black Cat Club; spoken word poets like Matt Cook and many others from the National Slam scene during that same time period; poets in Los Angeles from 1996 to 2001 (Ellyn Maybe, Derrick Brown, June Melby) loosely associated with Beyond Baroque. But I have always felt different, always wished the performance people would read more, pay closer attention to their language, and always wished the literary poets would lighten up a bit, write with a little more abandon.
Perhaps I feel a remote sense of kinship when I see poets who defy easy compartmentalization, like Edwin Torres who has credibility in both the experimental and performance realms; Alicia Stallings, who is sometimes called a neo-formalist and yet can recite poems with pleasure from memory.
People in the poetry world most often pull me often at the seams of the literary and the performance. (No matter how often I get that seam fixed, it keeps coming undone.) A number of times I have actually been introduced at college readings as “a performance poet who knows how to write”. Is that like being called the smart bimbo? (I much preferred being a teenager in Philadelphia, when my delinquent friends would point at me scribbling into a notebook and whisper: “that’s Jeff, he writes poetry, but he’s cool”.)
I have not been in a slam in almost ten years, and still that term lingers. If I knew how that term would stick, how I’d have to show up at AWP with a scarlet S on my forehead, would I still have jumped in? Probably; I kind of love a lot of those kooky people I met along the way, and they expanded my definition of poetry, and they let me sleep on their floors when I was touring around America in the mid-90’s, and they’re part of my ancestry. According to the poetry census bureau’s latest figures, I’m 37% surrealist, 13% slammer, 25% populist/confessional (my maternal grandmother was freaky like that), and 25% undecided. When I read my poems aloud, I aim to embody them, to have an authentic, lived experience, but I do not jump around or do hand movements. I believe in the power of one speaker addressing a tribe of listeners. Somehow the word “audience” creates too much distance in my mind at this moment; I think of the live reading as a collaborative experience.
But even as I claim rogue status, even as I 100%-fully-believe in my heart that I am a rogue, there is one problem: I teach creative writing at a college. Can one be an outsider, a rogue, and also be a part of the academy? How does that change the football field if we get rid of the terms “mainstream” and “experimental”, and think of poets as “in the academy” or “out”?
Just for the record, I found the much debated “terror of the blank page” phrase to be cliche on a linguistic level; I have heard that exact phrase a number of dozen before. It might be emotionally true for Mr. Walcott that a fearful shiver wiggles through him as he looks at the blank page, but even a true emotion, when expressed in cliché language, ends up sounding less than true.