Cathy Park Hong Tells Another Story to New Yorker Journalist Alec Wilkinson: 'I won't be reduced to a sound bite'
At The New Republic, Cathy Park Hong recalls her recent two-hour discussion with New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson in preparation for his profile of Kenny Goldsmith, later reduced to sound bites in order to justify another "lazy template," as she has it: "the mea culpa story of the contrite racist, the aging enfant terrible, the comeback kid who is resurfacing just in time to publicize his book (or the con artist who pulls a fast one by using racial shock tactics to win himself a New Yorker profile)." Hong instead addresses the importance of a new movement in poetry that has much less to do with Goldsmith as fallen (anti)hero: "The more interesting, relevant, and current story is that the poetry world has been riven by a crisis where the old guard—epitomized by Goldsmith—has collapsed." More:
I thought it was essential to contextualize Goldsmith’s scandal within a new movement in American poetry, a movement galvanized by the activism of Black Lives Matter, spearheaded by writers of color who are at home in social media activism and print magazines; some poets are redefining the avant-garde while others are fueling a raw politics into the personal lyric. Their aesthetic may be divergent, but they share a common belief that as poets, they must engage in social practice, whether it is protesting against police brutality or calling out Goldsmith himself who thought it would be a “provocative gesture” to recite an autopsy report of Michael Brown’s body at Brown University.
She notes that "it became clear ... in the interview that Wilkinson didn’t want to write about that. His take on Goldsmith was that his Conceptual Poetry represented a new 'revolutionary poetry movement.'" Wilkinson's characterization of Hong as resentful also did not go unnoticed.
I was not surprised by this dismissal. Of course, Wilkinson would call me resentful, a classic accusation leveled against women and people of color. I made my points calmly, but translated in print, I become resentful (or whiny or hostile or, if I raise my voice slightly, hysterical). Wilkinson discredits my lucid points about institutional inequality by characterizing me as envious of the attention Goldsmith received. Envy is an emotion that is—according to the scholar Sianne Ngai, in her book Ugly Feelings—“unjustified, frustrated, and effete,” a “private dissatisfaction” or “psychological flaw.”
I was also not surprised by the characterization of other poets of color in the profile. Lined up like a politically correct jury, poets and scholars like Dorothy Wang or Tan Lin—who are both formidable thinkers—offer their one soundbite against Goldsmith and it is implied that they too are jealous of his fame: “Goldsmith’s hegemony as conceptual poet … has led a number of other conceptual poets to feel that he monopolizes a territory that excludes them.” Wilkinson casts Goldsmith as the persecuted bad boy who’s gone too far. The artist Rin Johnson is “scolding” him, the poet CA Conrad is “inflamed” and “sternly lecturing” him. We—the hoard, the rabble—are interchangeable in our outrage.
Before Wilkinson interviewed me, I checked Wilkinson’s archives and noticed that many of his profiles were of white male artists and musicians from the baby boomer generation, a category that both Goldsmith and Wilkinson neatly fit into. Then, during our interview, we became embroiled in a disagreement about gender bias in literature. Despite overwhelming statistics, Wilkinson didn’t believe there was any. He also said there were plenty of successful writers of color, citing Junot Diaz, and implied that Diaz shouldn’t complain about racial bias because he won a MacArthur. (A friend, hearing this, retorted that Junot Diaz’s MacArthur grant proves there’s no bias against writers of color the way Barack Obama’s election proves there’s no bias against black people).
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