Missive From Outside the Academy. Really!

Hi, my name is Patricia. I’m approximately 5’6” tall, a black woman with reddish-brown hair (paid in full), a thick waist and world hips. I love wearing sun hues—deep golds, copper, bronzes—and, probably because of those aforementioned world hips, I prefer flowing garments. Since I would rather eat glass then drive in Manhattan, I can usually be found on Metro North, Hudson Line, or on the subway—usually the 4 or 6 lines, which whiz me to the poetry I care most about.
I just looked into a mirror and saw me. I just asked my granddaughter if she could see me, and—after widening and rolling her eyes—she said that she could.
I had to make sure. You see, Kenneth Goldsmith is going around telling people I don’t exist.

On April 8, my post responded to Kenneth’s observation that, although we PF bloggers were all poets, we had never encountered one another, didn’t travel in the same circles. I’d been enjoying the cultural/creative clash between the two Ks (Ken, Kwame), and would stick my 2 cents in occasionally, in an attempt to enrich the conversation—but soon I noticed that Ken returned none of my volleys, even when they were hit solidly into his court. Instead he preferred to directly, and pretty much exclusively, to Mr. Dawes. No prob. I’ve seen testosterone aflow before, and know enough to get the hell out of the way.
In that April post (entitled “More Elephant Poop), I told of my lifelong disconnect from the academy. I admitted that, because of it, I’d struggled for years to gain a legitimacy that had been mine for the taking all along. I wasted time waiting for the academy to give me permission to be a poet. I believe, as Kenneth seems to, that I had no viable creative life until I was officially sanctioned by the powers that be.
Here’s a little (OK, a lot) of what I said:
Almost 20 years ago, I stepped onto a stage in Chicago and read a poem. Some people said that I “performed” the poem. What followed that moment was a glorious whirlwind decade of poetry slamming, stark spotlights and hundreds of other stages. Over short tumblers of whiskey and beer-splotched legal pads, a whole generation of poetic “rebels” got together to bellow our distaste for and celebrate our disconnect from the canon. We helped forge a false division, claiming that our way was the only way. We didn’t need to study poetry. We were poetry. Those lush grants funding the creative dreams of academia’s darlings? Haaruumph. Blood money.
We were vilified, discounted and summarily dismissed because we veered wildly from the prescribed path, and because we publicly declared that traveling the path was a coward’s way out. Performance poetry (an unfortunate term for work that dares give a damn about its audience) was called mere theater, and performance poets (another even more unfortunate term) were wily manipulators, deftly pushing audience buttons to elicit sexy, dramatic responses. Our detractors declared that we were actors, not writers.
The division was always there: The important, thickly-educated, academically connected true artisans vs. those wacky kids shrieking their neuroses to bars crammed with their ale-addled ilk. The artisans were suspicious of our passion and burgeoning popularity. We sniffed in their general direction—but secretly feared their brand of legitimacy. Would we have to be rebels forever?
And there’s something else. Years ago, I sat at a table across from Joseph Parisi, who at the time was editor of Poetry Magazine. We were at one of those functions where an insanely established academy poet received an insane amount of money for a lifetime body of work. People said nice things about the poet, dry hors oeuvres were bandied about, and then the man/woman of the hour was introduced.
I won’t say who the honoree that year was, because he/she is dead now and it wouldn’t be nice. Suffice it to say that I’d attended a couple of these things, and the lowlight was the poet expressing gratitude and then wheezing from their work, all self-absorbed and ponderous. All I could think of as the award-winner rose to waddle to the podium (if anyone honors you for lifetime achievement, odds are you’ve already lived a big chunk o’ that life) was Charlie Brown’s pal Pigpen. You know how every time he moves, dust billows?
Anyhoo, there I was across from THE Joseph Parisi, and I was all sweaty palms because he held the key to the academy in his hand. One nod from the THE and I’d have it made—I could leave that chaotic, unpredictable and raucous world of the poetry slam behind. I could officially enter the chilly, suppressed arena of white men and measured lines. I will have—wait for it—arrived.
But, hallelujah, I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted anymore. Instead, I decided to reach out a little to the THE. So I said:
“How often do you get out to hear poetry?” Naïve little Patty was going to invite Joseph Parisi to the slam, as her guest. Really.
“Poetry Magazine receives thousands of poems a week,” he said. “I don’t have to go anywhere to hear poetry.”
Heh?
That little exchange nudged me back toward the officially unsanctioned chaos, and later I decided that I liked it there. If living within the clutches of the academy meant having to isolate myself and experience poetry through the filter of my own celebrity, well—no thanks.
Saying that no poet or poetry truly exists outside of the academy—that there is no innovation except as it dictates—is thumbing a big nose to those of us who thrive on creative disorder. Give me competition and collaboration and bongos and video snippets and hip-hop and poetry circuses and readings on subways and brainstorming with dancers and electronic music and Def Jam and stanzas in theaters and teaching in prisons and the revolution of Cave Canem. Let me wallow among unbridled words, and—I’ll be damned—the awards and recognition and little circle of limelight come anyway.
They came despite the fact that I didn’t allow the academy to define me.
They came, Kenneth, because I exist. And every word I've ever written shouts my name.