Poetry and identity

It looks as if Lucia Perillo’s post entitled “Why are poets aligned with the left?” will have generated the most extensive and heated comment stream for the month of June (provided no Harriet blogger attacks Language Poetry in the next 72 hours). Though commentators jumped on her statement that memorable war poetry is in short supply, the main concern of her post was the question, “Why do poets coalesce around leftist ideals”? A number of responders usefully delineated the wide spectrum of positions encompassed by the phrase “leftist,” and especially how liberal, leftist, and Democrat aren’t necessarily synonymous. As one respondent pointed out, Mark Nowak probably wouldn’t describe the political organizing he does as in the “liberal” tradition, even if some of the people he works with might.

And this is really the larger question: why are poetry and its communities based so much on consent? As the art form with the least to lose, I’ve always wondered why poetry doesn’t risk more, why it doesn’t dissent from itself more—its institutional forms, its modes of establishing community, its inherited schools and traditions. That’s not true. When I was younger, I believed that poetry was fundamental in constructing alternative communities and cultures. As I got older (I’m not that old), it became clear to me that the poetry world isn’t structured all that differently from the rest of the world it proposes to modify, transform, critique, or simply provide another perspective on. It perpetuates many of the same kinds of hierarchies, exclusions, sectarianisms, and obsequiousness that I think many poets would like to see at least partially dismantled in the larger society. That’s why as much as I consider myself occupying a position on the political left, it’s always difficult for me to listen to poets tell other people to get their houses in order when their own dwellings are in disarray.
There are of course very good reasons why marginalized communities, of which poetry is one, orient themselves around identity as opposed to non-identity. It’s a question of survival. At the same time, poetry is generally a privileged occupation, and a better awareness of this might make poetry worlds more self-reflective on their own power structures. An acknowledgment of complicity can be almost as liberating as one of resistance. In the art world, this practice is called institutional critique. Nevertheless, poetry does create flashes of alternative culture and communities—“temporary autonomous zones,” Hakim Bey calls them. That was my experience of Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Kimako’s Blues People gatherings I mentioned in an earlier post. The Naropa Institute Summer Writing Program, from which I’ll be blogging in another week, has less identitarian group-think and quest for institutional approval than some other poetry communities with which I’ve been involved. I’d also list the numerous political protest marches—against a couple different wars, against racism, against police brutality, for housing rights, for the preservation of public spaces, etc.—that I’ve participated in with poets and people not all that engaged in poetry.