It's not very often that an essay published in a literary journal stops me in my tracks. The December issue of POETRY features an essay, "A Politics of Mere Being," from the esteemed poet and critic Carl Phillips.
Check it out. I hope it will challenge, if not cause you to rethink, your allegiance to identity politics that are mostly external and reader-response based.
A Politics of Mere Being by Carl Phillips [An excerpt]
When my first book of poems came out in 1992, I learned what it could mean to be seen as a political poet for no other reason than because of who or what one is. Rachel Hadas, who selected the book for publication, wrote a wonderful and uncannily accurate introduction, from which the publisher excerpted the following for the back cover:
Internal evidence would seem to indicate that [this] is a poet of color who is erotically drawn to other men. The reductiveness of such terms is one lesson of In the Blood, with its ... constant dissolving of one world into another.
I say uncannily accurate because I had yet to acknowledge to myself, let alone others, my being gay; about the color part, I’d been pretty aware, of course, all my life. Sexuality would end up being the primary lens through which my early work got read; and given how relatively new it still was to speak of queerness openly, and given the relative newness — and unknown-ness — of HIV and AIDS, the poems were seen as particularly relevant: political, let’s say.
As for color — blackness — there are only two poems in the book that speak to this issue specifically (or as others have put it, there are only two “black poems” in the book). The first, “Passing,” is a kind of resistance to being told that black experience has to come down to a single experience:
The Famous Black Poet isspeaking of the dark river in the mindthat runs thick with the heroes of color,Jackie R., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyonewho knew how to sing or when to run.I think of my grandmother, saidto have dropped dead from the evil eye,of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer anda generally difficult future headed her wayin the still waterof her brother’s commode.I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans,and I want to tell the poet that the bluesis not my name, that Alabamais something I cannot usein my business.
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