Redressing the Emperor: Why Poets Matter

They say you can be a bad person and still make a great thing. They say you can use poetry cynically for your own selfish gain in the name of free speech. But what they don’t say so often, because there are shaming mechanisms in place, is that this Western inclination towards abstracting one’s speech actions into a removed cause and thereby exempting the speaker from accountability is a privileged thing. Such positioning pretends history doesn’t count, the person’s choices don’t count, the pain inflicted through harmful speech acts doesn’t count, only the work and its right to exist counts. Colonialism has been pulling variations of these white supremacist tricks for heaps of decades “for the good of the people,” “for the sake of freedom,” etc. Such maneuvers are ultimately the building blocks of how we value human lives on a hierarchy. And this is precisely why poets matter.

Generally speaking, mainstream populism doesn’t attend to the Woody Allens and Roman Polanskis the way poets attend to poets and poetry. We are regularly told that the issues and conflicts we discuss are so much navel-gazing and to look at the “real world” to witness “real problems.” Poets have classically tasked ourselves with the business of meaning-making, scrutinizing how meaning is made with language—and then attempting to make or conjure it. Critical acuity is cultivated by the very practice of being a poet. How many times have we heard about the poet’s eye? The poet’s ear? The poet’s insight? Philosophers are slightly removed by working within systems of meaning, but poets are making meaning in the daily culture while also examining how it functions on a more intimate and practical level.

And yet, we are still told to get back to the business of the real world when people discover we are embroiled in heated discussions about the actions and responsibilities of poets and our possibly harmful use of language in the world. But we are doing the work of the real world and holding ourselves to real world standards, perhaps even more complexly than the average status quo values demand. Since we are all co-existing members of a society—not simply islands unto ourselves—poets explore how language mediates our lived realities and demands accountability when speech acts reduce, misrepresent or harm others. Language is the real world because language is how we navigate life, how we consider meaning and craft the lenses we see through. And because poets’ lives are as real as anyone’s, we are not somehow exempt as artists to make art that harms. The typical tactic used to short circuit those who respond to the effects of harm is to claim one’s freedom of speech is under attack. However, vocalizing the harmful impact someone’s words have on groups of people is not censorship. It too is exercising one’s right to free speech. These reactions may also take the shape of a call for response to either alleviate the pain or to delimit power bestowed on the person committing harm, especially if they do so consistently and benefit from it.

For instance, why would one person via her poetry performance get to prioritize her intentions over the painful impact her selection and re-presentation of racist iconography and statements has on other people? Why should she craft such speech acts and remain unchallenged? How will she respond to the exposure of her privilege to make such choices? Will she continue to cause others pain because her aim is more important to her than the harmful effects repeatedly vocalized that her work has on others? If those harmed aren’t her intended audience, can she render their response moot? Will her privilege allow her to erase their words or diminish them with the implication of the societal standard bearer, “They are making it about race”? Is the response, “Sorry for your pain, but my prerogative is …” the basis of a Sociopathic Poetics? Of course, I have a real life example in mind as I pose these questions.

Vanessa Place recently quoted herself on Twitter, reductively stating, “Poetry is the police.” While such provocations follow her sensationalist racially-charged appropriations (“Artist's Statement: Gone With the Wind”), “I would be intentionally showing the whiteness behind the blackface,” as if we’ve all been fooled by such displays of hate all along, and Place has only just removed the wool from our eyes, finally revealing—simply by re-presenting—racist depictions in the world. Moreover, what her performances also do, unwittingly, is implicate another project that Place has yet to attempt, the difficult feat that her one-trick ponies fail: attempting the hard work of directly addressing the ways in which white supremacy is also a desperate identity, pulling away and considering what’s at work beyond the racist drivel, exploring the machinations behind the mask, identifying and dissecting the insecurities, anxieties and fears that charge people to commit racist speech acts and actions—for starters. This would require a more concerted, generative effort than simply pointing at the murder to say, “See.”

Instead, Place’s projects simply utilize and assert her privilege by repeating racist excerpts and lyrics, iconography (her “Jump Jim Crow” performances where she enacts the “coon shouter”) and tropes (her self-appointed Twitter “Mammy” avatar) in what her Conceptual Poetry counterpart, Kenneth Goldsmith, has publicly detailed as a larger, more ego-driven project to garner attention for themselves, or what Place refers to as “inches” whenever she gets a mention in the media (see my essay on The Rumpus, “Beauty and the Beastly Po-Biz”).

But these ego-driven projects that capitalize on the traumatizing details of survivors (see her curated rape and molestation trial excerpts in “Statement of Facts”) and people targeted by racial hate, conjure larger questions of Place’s position as a poet. Specifically, Toni Morrison asks on Charlie Rose’s show on PBS in 1993.

But when you take it away… all you got is your little self. And what is that? What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong? You still smart? You still like yourself?

What work has Place done to dismantle white supremacy beyond laying claim to using a technique that is admittedly harmful to people of color? She explains in “Artist's Statement: Gone With the Wind.”

These works are cruel. It is a cruelty to display these images. It is also a cruelty to insist that only people of color be responsible for the articulation or the embodiment of race …

Insisting that re-presenting racist images is her articulating “the embodiment of race” is not only a failure, but it is business as usual in the service of white privilege. Rather, exactly whose embodiment of race is she depicting? As if right on cue, she subverts the fact that whiteness is also a race by simply re-presenting racist depictions of people of color. It’s a classic inversion when it comes to discussions of race. I hear implicitly in her performances the guy next door asking, “Why do black people always make it about race?” In Place’s poetics, depictions of race are limited to people of color as crafted by white people. She not only grants herself but outright claims permission, as a white person, to be “cruel,” no matter who it harms, and reinforces racist speech acts as her right to performance. In fact, her right to perform trumps any pain she causes people of color.

This cynical re-presenting of racist visual and speech acts under the pretense of challenging white people is also a failure of the imagination. What does a poet like Place actually make without selecting and re-presenting racist depictions and the most traumatic excerpts of sexual assault from court transcripts? She selects and re-presents racist depictions as her poetics. Period. She then theorizes this as holding up a mirror to select individuals, namely white people, as if she can choose who will and will not hear and be impacted by her work. Incredibly, Marjorie Perloff has declared Place and her counterpart Kenneth Goldsmith as next in the poetics line after the Language Poets, which includes—as claimed by Perloff—Susan Howe. In Howe, Place has a perfect example of a poet whose projects are historicizing, mining and generative ones, imagining what is missing in the gaps where voices were not recorded, but Place does not take cue to that end either. Hers is simply to locate and repeat instances of racism and misogyny on stages and public platforms for any and all to bear the weight of. And if anyone is concerned that I appear to be prescribing morals or assigning projects, do not forget that Place’s own project is a self-declared moral one in which she proclaims she is taking Gone With the Wind’s author Margaret Mitchell and her estate to task:

[The] Estate of Margaret Mitchell owns the body and voice of those she puppets, and collects the money they earn. If Mitchell were going to speak through them, I would speak through Mitchell … For, like Mitchell, I would betray the voice I so willfully misappropriated. The difference perhaps being that I would be intentionally showing the whiteness behind the blackface. I believed that while this could not be done through a critical analysis, it might be possible through poetry.

—“Artist's Statement: Gone With the Wind”

After Place was removed from an AWP panel selection subcommittee in response to protests against her Gone with the Wind performance, in an interview on The Stranger, poet Shane McCrae answers Place’s latest assertion that she is being censored by the voices of people who respond to her speech acts and performances:

If she doesn't understand why that project might show insufficient sensitivity to the concerns of people of color, she is not well-suited for a position on that subcommittee. If she DOES understand why that project might show insufficient sensitivity to the concerns of people of color and goes through with the project anyway, she is not well-suited for a position on that subcommittee.

Some of Place’s defenders have stated that the AWP decision to remove Place from the subcommittee McCrae refers to is “censorship”; meanwhile, Place continues to publish her “poetry” and perform publicly. What in fact has happened is that a major writing conference finally listened to writers of color and their supporters and responded. Listening to how racism affects people and removing Place from a position where she would be making decisions directly related to those writers’ work is a step towards institutional change that is sorely needed. I can only reiterate that my poet’s gut has balked at some of the reiterations of racism Place has put forth over the years and at the institutions who continue to give her and writers like Goldsmith paid public platforms instead of writers of color who have not received those same invitations and microphones. One of these includes Place reading excerpts she selected from a court transcript in 2012, repeating a racist term for African Americans ad nauseum on a stage in front of University of Colorado’s student body as a “poetry performance” and many more at venues such NYU and RISD. As poets, we are aware of exactly how powerful language is, and we can certainly do better than this. And as poets with freedom of speech, we should certainly use our words to respond to sites of trauma being inflicted again. If Place wishes to attempt to diminish such responses with shaming tactics like “Poetry is the police,” I can sleep at night. But can she?

As James Baldwin suggested, the “relatively conscious” white poets of today are starting to feel the very necessary imperative to expose and challenge what has historically been the norm in this country: White Supremacy. We are its benefactors and some of us are uncertain in our approaches towards redressing a social system that has controlled the discourse to such a degree that even identifying what it means to be white and to benefit is difficult—but necessary. As well, we might strive to keep in mind Toni Morrison’s questions that indirectly implicate the need to break the colonialist habit of appropriating others’ cultures and experiences and determine who we might be and what we might make without doing harm. I know with certainty that we will not be able to proceed as poets who wish to participate in creating and shaping a discourse that rectifies so many historical and contemporary wrongs if we do not listen to people of color, most especially when they too exercise their right to free speech and publicly state that our work is further harming them. To work on the premise that we are artists and therefore our work is removed from ourselves even while we also hypocritically prioritize our intent is to work from a position of privilege. Insisting on that position of privilege is not liberating; it is only reinforcing our white supremacist power, no matter how many ways we dress the Emperor and explain our good intentions.