New Mexico Mercury

In Amiri Baraka’s review of Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, I was struck by not only the vitriol, but how he was making a similar argument that I had made a few years ago during my review of In Company: An Anthology of New Mexico Poets After 1960.  Lacking the vitriol, I took the editors to task for trying to be inclusive but missing what was happening outside the Academy.   Similarly, Baraka argues that the Black Arts Movement had not gotten the attention it deserved in this anthology.  On the purpose of the movement he writes, “We wanted it to be a mass art, not hidden away on university campuses. We wanted an art that could function in the ghettos where we lived. And we wanted an art that would help liberate Black people.”  Baraka’s review, “A Post-Racial Anthology?,” basically makes an argument I find all too common in poetry circles:  poets aren’t inclusive enough in describing the history/importance of poetry and what they define as poetry.  

Here’s another example.  In the summer of 1984, I bought my first book of poetry and first anthology (for a class), the Norton’s Anthology of Poetry.   It was big, written on thin paper and included English poem after English poem arranged chronologically up until the date of publication (1970, the 3rd Edition).  At the time, I mostly read the poets from the first third of the anthology: Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, and the occasional poems for class:  Milton, Swift, Pope.  Of the latter poets in the anthology, the ones still alive (in the ‘80s):  Ginsberg, Simic, Tate, Atwood, Raab, Silko, Heaney, and Cohen, I didn’t read them and for the most part had never heard of them.  I was young, didn’t have a very sophisticated palate and thus gravitated to the stuff that contorted words in forms:  Shakespeare and Keats or emotional:  Shelley and Wordsworth.   Only later would I develop an appreciation for Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and more.  I still largely steered clear of the contemporary poets.   So in looking at Baraka’s article, I wondered who’d been added or deleted in the two editions since mine?   And why?

In the 5th edition, the book has become way more diverse, adding appropriately Amy Clampitt, Joanna Baillie, Sterling Brown, and Roy Campbell but they’d also taken out a few too:  Lawrence Raab, James Tate, and Leonard Cohen to name a few.   What causes someone’s “star” to fall?   Why was the poetry of Leonard Cohen good enough to include in 1970, but not good enough to include in 2004?   I’m sure the editors would have a complicated, and perhaps, good answer, but I want a little more transparency.   While Cohen had only modest success as a poet throughout the 60s, he moved to the United States in 1967 and became a folk singer.   Just last year, I saw him in a crowded auditorium with a full band, strumming a guitar and singing his poems, including poems that were at one time in the Norton’s Anthology of Poetry.  I thought, “Given the choice of having my poetry included in Norton’s Anthology or playing three encores to a full auditorium, I’d probably pick the auditorium too,” yet I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason he’s not included now is that he made his choice to become a singer and with that he was no longer embraced as a poet?  

This restriction, exclusion, insistence on our definition is something I see everywhere.   In the poetry slam world it lurks in the back of the bar, the quiet conversations at the end of the night hidden in the discussions of craft.   For example, in 2005 at the National Poetry Slam, the night opened with the finals for the Individual Champion.   As competitors were eliminated, the night ended with a tie between Janean Livingston and Anis Mojgani, both being proclaimed the Individual Champion.   As is usual after a slam, the discussions gravitated to who should’ve won and why.   The discussions, at least in some circles, all boiled down to one fine point:  Mojgani was the “better” poet and should’ve won.   What was the difference?   Now, I’m not saying that one is a better poet than the other, but I am saying that there is clearly a difference in style and content.   Anis’ poetry works in a traditional way a poem works and is very obviously “crafted:”   extended metaphor, anaphora, cadence.   Janean’s poetry works in a way a sermon works:  linear prose, narrative, moral lesson, emotional delivery (and crafted too).  The complaints boiled down to a definition of poetry.   Poetry is….  Thus, in this light, Baraka’s review boils down to this same argument.   He explains,   “We wanted to aid in the liberation of the Afro-American people with our art, with our poetry. But the deeper we got into the reality of this task, the more overtly political we became.”  Yet the complaint exists everywhere.   Here’s former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky’s views on Hip Hop. 

So what does this all mean?   In my mind, none of the definitions mean anything.  One can argue, like Baraka does, that poetry should be accessible, political, speak the truth of people living in oppressed conditions or one can argue that it speak a truth that isn’t so blatantly political or accessible like Pinsky does indirectly.   As I stated in an earlier article, “There are enough different types of poetry being created and enough celebrated historical models to suggest that poetry can be spoken word; poetry can be prose; poetry can be rap; poetry can be lyrics; and poetry can be narrative,” I’d add, poetry can be political; poetry can be performed; poetry can be clever; poetry can be traditional; poetry can be revolutionary, etc.   Poetry can do a lot more than we let it do if we’d just quit trying to stake out our turf.  

We are all so busy trying to create a legacy that we judge what we don’t appreciate as somehow inferior and if we create a consensus of what poetry is we can ease our way into history by making the field smaller.   As Pierre Bourdieu, would argue, we’re trying to maintain our cultural capital.  In reality, it’s just making the market for poetry smaller because we too willingly let other genres:  hip hop, folk music, sermons, monologues, prose take what is rightfully ours.  That is the real disservice because poetry can embrace us all.  If we keep making the field smaller and smaller by insisting on our definitions, we’ll wake up one day and see we’re the last poet standing and no one will care.