I find myself retorting to a reader, Nancy, who emailed me to say — in response to my calling something "a sincere effort at poetic polemic" — "Polemic, yes, but who would call that a poem?"
At the link there's video of a performance called "White Privilege," which Slate called a "poem." I can see that I repeated that word, "poem," before my sentence that began with "I think": "I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic." I know I wrote "poetic polemic" to nudge the reader to question whether something that's too polemical deserves to be considered poetry.
But, speaking of "White Privilege," isn't it white-privilege-y to question whether this set of words is a poem? I'm resisting googling "What is a poem?" but I do remember watching the "Master Class" course with Billy Collins teaching reading and writing poetry, so let me give you this from the old white man:
"No one else could have written that. This voice is just yours, and yours alone."
ADDED: I went back to the email to tell Nancy: "I made a poem post out of this."
And I see that Nancy has written back to me: "She calls it a poem."
"She" is the reciter of "White Privilege," who I see I haven't yet dignified with a naming in this post, so let me say, it's Kyla Jenee Lacey.
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3 comments:
Owen writes:
"Thanks for that clip of Billy being wonderfully Billy. He’s one of my favorites. By his measure, the polemic is a poem. By my measure, yes; just not a very interesting one. Where is her second subject? Where is the dynamic range, that can show us the gentlest inward thing and then shake apart the sky? She is stuck on the obvious with the volume at 11; riding a crowded subway with a boom box on her angry shoulder."
Tina writes:
"Well, first off (all other things such as prior crime being equal), blacks do not receive 20% longer sentences for the same crimes committed by whites.
"So the poet is lying.
"Is this "poetic license"? No, because poetry stopped being poetry a long time ago. It is now unadulterated, abusive, racist agitprop, and to subject students to it in academic settings where they may not object to obvious falsehoods like this without literally risking their academic and job futures is not pedagogy..
"This is merely a crude exercise of power disguised as poetic expression. Calling it poetry doesn't excuse the behavior. Think of it as political polemic imposed on captive audiences made up of children, with severe, possible life-long consequences for anyone who dares interpret the purported "poem" even slightly differently.
"We are a long way from "literary criticism" here. All that is gone now. Let's stop pretending it isn't.
"Amusingly, I once pointed out the intentional fallacy maring one of Audrey Lourde's many terrible poems. In the poem, she spoke of "licking the living whiteness flowing from her lover's nether regions to her knee. I pointed out that if one's female lover had that sort of gynecological issue, one might consider not consuming it. With my usual luck, Lourde up and died a few days later (unrelatedly), and my transgression was duly punished in the classroom; recorded in my academic file, and later used as supporting evidence to purge me from the department.
"I doubt my professor or anyone else in the class had a fraction of my classical training in poetic tropes, nor my knowledge of Lourde's oeuvre. They were clapping seals -- if clapping seals destroy academic careers by smacking their fishy-smelling flippers in unison."
Chris writes:
"I guess a poem today is any short creative composition meant to be read or recited aloud.
"Two things struck me about Lacey’s poem. One was her deep animosity toward white people and toward America. And second, the applause from her audience. That feeling resonated with her listeners. It doesn’t resonate with me. It leaves me silent and apprehensive about the future.
"For poetry, I’ll stick with Emily Dickinson and the Book of Psalms."
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