Self Portrait in an Academic Poetry Industrial Complex Mirror

Life of a Poet

I’m wearing worn-out Vans featuring raccoons in unicorn hoodies. It’s cold and I’m unwisely in ankle socks that slip down with every step of my 2.5 mile walk to the office. I’m listening to the next chapter of White Trash on my headphones, forlorn at the ugly state of mass accumulations of wealth, inequity, the idiocy of contemporary life. Basically, all the things.

I apply bright lipstick and eyeliner as a way to seem polished and tell myself my disheveled-ness is part of my charm. I evaluate my community outreach impacts in terms of demographics engaged and dollars out the door. That night as I get into bed, I eat a homemade cannabis lozenge a friend gave me and watch people binge eat online, liking fat animals or soft animals, many with long necks, big ears, or silly teeth.

This is my glamorous poet’s life. It’s actually quite a lovely life, and it often looks like the day I described above. I opened this piece in this way because I’m one of the few writers and scholars in my community who is not academic faculty anywhere and who isn’t seeking to be. I work as a director at a social justice foundation.

When I was asked to write this blog post, I had many topics I considered, but I kept returning to this—that the relative rareness of my not being in academia is in fact a rare thing… especially when I can’t help but feel that my work is so, well, academic.

What I’ll try to touch on is the relationship between experimental aesthetics and economic exploitation in the academic poetry industrial complex. Are you a PhD escapee, like me? Do you want to get an advanced creative writing degree? Are you writing faculty somewhere? My post will hopefully resonate with you.

I didn’t start off wanting to be an academic poet. After college, I worked for a few years as a paid organizer on environmental and democracy initiatives. It was incredibly eye opening and disillusioning on many levels. Before I left that world, I helped open a field office in New Orleans. By 2013, I was fairly well-positioned for an academic creative writing career. I had an MFA from a well-regarded program, two poetry books out, was finishing a PhD in literature, and had some scholarly publications under my belt. Many things took left turns that year, and I abandoned that trajectory. But even without the personal losses (divorce, a friend’s death), or amazing surprises (a Pew Fellowship), I was already feeling that I didn’t want to work in academia. I had many reasons for leaving, but here are my top two:

1. Writing programs are rooted in an incredibly exploitative economic system. Most writing faculty are not tenured, not unionized, work for low pay, little benefits, and have almost no job security—all things that have been well articulated in many spaces. But even if all those faculty were unionized, paid fairly, and had reasonable job security, I’d have still quit because of the disaster that is student loans.

I taught briefly as a visiting Assistant Professor for a well-regarded MFA program. Nearly all the students I worked with were focused on their writing careers—book prizes, publication, possible teaching opportunities. For many of them, their dream job was to do what I was getting the rare opportunity to do—get paid well to teach creative writing. At the end of the semester, one of my MFA students shared with me that she had over $100,000 in student loan debt and was moving 500 miles to take an adjunct job. I was too astonished to say anything substantial to her. How long will it take her to pay that down? Will she be able to pay it down?

I felt an intense complicity in her economic straits—as should anyone who draws an income that is financed by cashing out students’ futures. I’ll back down from that opinion when more faculty actively support efforts to abolish student loans, and when MFA writing programs a) prepare students for jobs outside of the academy, b) publish the amount of debt their students graduate with, and c) make public how their graduates support themselves once they have their degrees. Regardless the personal decisions my former student made to take on that much debt, her choices do not absolve me of the fact that I benefited from her future financial struggles. And she was just the one whose plight I knew about.

2. Ugly power dynamics. Oh my gawd, this is for real! I witnessed this and was a target for various abuses of power in both my MFA and PhD programs. My worst experience was when a tenured professor threatened to keep me from job opportunities—luckily, I wasn’t on the market. This person’s behavior towards me likely qualified as professional misconduct, and the other women and women of color faculty involved pretty much ran from it as fast as they could. In a gross way, I’m grateful that my experiences never included sexual assault or harassment.

As for my own experiences—as much as I fault those individuals involved for their narcissism, pettiness, indifference, or cowardice, I also see it as a system problem. Though there are many inspiring, courageous, generous faculty I have met and worked with, the culture as a whole felt quite toxic. I think it’s because resources are scarce and the small prestige many people have worked years—whole lifetimes—to accrue tends to evaporate when they step outside their department. I can appreciate how vigilant, how over-reactive, how deeply defensive that kind of environment invites people to be. It’s sad and ugly.

Suffice to say, I had my reasons and I left.

But I often wonder, did I? I’m not teaching, but I also don’t know if I’d have much of a readership without all those MFA and PhD programs out there. I also, truthfully, miss the vast amounts of unstructured time I had to pursue my lines of thought. I’ve been brainstorming how and when I can work less and do some substantial writing again. Anyways, I promise to end this post on cute animals.

Difference, Difficulty, Disciplinarity

“Your difference is making a contribution.”
—Myung Mi Kim

Why are you so difficult? I’m actually pretty cheery and easy going. My difficulty coagulates in how I write. My last boyfriend, a musician and filmmaker, self-admittedly had a hard time reading my poetry. I forgave him—in fact, I didn’t even hold it against him. “It’s not for everyone,” I reassured him when he fessed up about it. I think he got through the first two poems of Solar Maximum then called it quits.

I know my poetry isn’t “easy.” I used to pride myself on my difficulty—not for difficulty’s sake, but because I thought what I was trying to express required it. I also had immense faith in the reader—I trusted they would flex into the writing to examine what I was exploring and how I was exploring it.

((Vetting, discerning, judging, disciplining, challenging. Discriminating.
((Oh, he has a discriminating taste, as in his preferences are salutatory,
((high class, of merit—

I hope my difficulty is making a difference. At a reading of Colorado-based Asian American authors in 2016, hosted by the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, I stuck out. I read a poem in series about light (I’ve also blogged about a Poetics of Light here if you want to follow that train of thought with me). The other writers opted to read about growing up, elders, cultural dissonances. I didn’t intend it to be, but my work was disruptive. I think in a helpful way. We’re not all that we have to think we are.

I also feel, though, that my “difference” is complicit in—or has at least been disciplined and rewarded by—the academic poetry industrial complex… the very complex I left out of a sense of self-righteous critique. Is there an escape from this without abandoning my aesthetic interests and intellectual queries?

A different way of asking this—Can I keep doing what I’m doing and not be captured by the academic system? Can my institutional and system critiques allow me to continue in my aesthetic trajectories, or must I become a populist poet? Consider Amiri Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus” and “Somebody Blew up America” as examples to the questions I find myself having and how they may show up in my writing.

One could argue for a classist swerve in all this on my end—that my over-education is the problem. I was once told I use big words, which can be alienating. So now, I try not to use big words when I’m among people I don’t know well. Am I being inclusive or patronizing? I can’t tell. Big words can be precise in very particular ways, and lovers of language tend to love collecting words. But big words can also be used as tools to exclude and oppress. How do I get to be me?

In Return of the Real, art critic Hal Foster discusses historical recurrences he observes in avant-garde movements. Avant-garde practitioners, aka “discontented artists” (yay!) were drawn to “reposition art in relation not only to mundane space-time but to social practice” (emphasis mine). His emphasis on the radical nature of counter-cultural aesthetic movements having a basis in social practice is an important one—these artists cleave their artistic interventions to their attitudes/beliefs about social relations, their role as artists, and the institutionalization of prior art movements’ successes as examples of their capture by a broken system. A new imagination and form is needed!

Of importance is the relationship between avant-gardes and the institutions they critique. The ascendant avant-garde has “a new theoretical rigor” and is fluent in the institutional forms it challenges. He doesn’t use this term, but what he’s describing is disciplinarity. Despite lobbying a critique, the new artists are still fluent in the institutions they ostensibly strive to dismantle. Their fluency and rigor help sharpen their difficulty, the challenge they put forth. For me, this is what leads to their eventual institutional capture. To demonstrate this: a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is on display at the Philadelphia Art Museum as if it were holy reliquary.

From what I have observed, especially in poetry, avant-garde work tends to be highly “sophisticated,” responding to critical discourse in ways that foster the ongoing professionalization (aka academicization) of the field by requiring study and discussion to highlight their aesthetic contributions. This serves to deepen the division between enthusiasts/hobbyists and “serious practitioners”—the latter usually requiring advanced degrees and years of study to be legible and fluent in the “right” kinds of experimentation. The discipline is ascendant.

In some essential ways, disciplines serve as necessary vehicles. As a scholar, I am often an interlocuter for experimental Asian American writing, providing theoretical and historical context to challenging work by people like Summi Kaipa, Bhanu Kapil, John Yau, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Myung Mi Kim, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Tan Lin. I’ve written about offensive conceptual poetry and the poetic production of time. As a poetry reviewer for The Constant Critic, I applied the same rigorous lens to experimental new work by Rachel Levitsky, Don Mee Choi’s translations of Kim Hyesoon, Urayoan Noel, and others. It was an act of respect to investigate and write about these works so intensively, especially when entire careers and conferences have been devoted to the work of one white author. I was academicizing their work and was part of a movement of emerging scholars seeking to bring critical attention to authors from marginalized and oppressed communities. But I should be more explicit. Scholars often say “critical attention,” but what we really mean is power and money in the form of access to wider audiences and their dollars, publication opportunities, invitations to read, awards, fellowships, and even jobs.

Where I am particularly angsty right now is when the power and money I’m describing come at the expense of student debt. I can’t help but see strong links between academic poetry’s disciplinarity and economic exploitation. This phenomenon isn’t limited to poetry or the arts. Any time power and especially massive institutional money is involved, there’s the threat of capture. In philanthropy, the world I work in now, there’s a term for it: movement capture. That’s when funders derail the work of oppressed people organizing for their own liberation. What I’m describing isn’t as dire as all that—but it is fueled by massive economic exploitation and perpetuates ongoing abuses of power.

I feel personally indicted by the fact that what I tend to value as a writer, and what I have gravitated towards in my own work, is writing that ultimately upholds poetry’s disciplinarity. However, I am not a poet of the streets, and that concerns me since I also chose to leave a life in the ivory halls. I’d like an alternate terrain. 

Overall, things worked out well for me and I miraculously have opportunities to say what I can. But the how of it, and how it circulates—that’s stumping me.

*

Instagram Bebez 4EVA

Ollie
Udonchan
Nyankichi Noraneko
Griffin and Haru
Tintin
Squid
Mang Co
Marnie
Alfie
Kunta

These are just some of the animals I follow on Instagram. They’re so goddam cute. Who can resist Mang Co’s fiery eyes and golden belly? Or the brilliance of Griffin’s ASMR mukbangs?! I find myself looking at them and many others before sleep. It’s slightly addictive, I’ll admit. I linger over the fuzziness of a nose, the floofiness of a paw, the ridiculousness of a trust fall or waddle. What I’m really doing, of course, is escaping into the vortex of their cuteness. Aesthetic theorist Sianne Ngai has explored this phenomenon in great detail:

Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak, which is why cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there’s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as people like Daniel Harris have noted. The prototypically cute object is the child’s toy or stuffed animal.

Cuteness is also a commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption. As Walter Benjamin put it: “If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.” Cuteness could also be thought of as a kind of pastoral or romance, in that it indexes the paradoxical complexity of our desire for a simpler relation to our commodities, one that tries in a utopian fashion to recover their qualitative dimension as use.

(Interview with Adam Jasper for Cabinet magazine)

Their cuteness anesthetizes me from things like my angsty self-reflections and general political nihilism. Looking at them awakens a safe experience of tenderness; I see one, say, Aw!!!, have a gushy pleasure course through my heart, and don’t have to worry about caring after the beast while fully enjoying and consuming its cuteness.

Their cuteness also becomes a circulation among my friends. I send particularly good images to them; we comment over them, they send me others to heart and respond to. We participate in an economy of intimacy by consuming this cuteness together. It’s special to share one. I feel an obligation to respond to one. The fact of sharing these demonstrate a unique connection, a special type of closeness that is tender but also disposable.

If cuteness aestheticizes powerlessness, it also—in the case of these animals—aestheticizes the incredibly carefree, fairly privileged lives those animals lead outside of the horror show of our political climate. They mask the powerlessness we feel on a regular basis in our daily lives, for sure. They also provide me a way to connect with people I have very little in common with, regardless identity, profession, or creed. Their cuteness is ascendant.   

I close on these adorable animals to illustrate that perhaps THIS space, this space of cooing over the inanity of a lollipop-headed alpaca trying to chew a piece of curled romaine or a fat hamster wearing a crocheted Elmo cap while he sleeps, is one of the rare spaces that I can enjoy without adulteration right now. We can theorize the sleeping bunny. We can coo over the sleeping bunny. We can enjoy the sleeping bunny. The sleeping bunny is totally aesthetically woke, the sleeping bunny is a raging populist.

All hail the sleeping bunny.