From Race, Poetics & the University

Lauri Scheyer, continued…

creativity in the study of literature and there is analysis in creative writing, which makes these fields allied over literary texts and experiences. But I think their fundamental differences in assumptions, outcomes, and intents are important in discussing race, poetics, and the university. In comparing the pedagogy of poetics from these two perspectives, issues of authorial identity, student assumptions, and institutional politics certainly are all in play. 

So, here’s the first story. My job has always included booking visiting poets to my universities. In one year, with great excitement, I was fortunate to schedule short residencies by Kalamu ya Salaam, Roi Kwabena, Malika Booker, Ruth Forman, Vanessa Richards, Patience Agbabi, Véronique Tadjo, and Anthony Joseph. It was a banner year of exceptional funding and a couple of grants, and these poets were engaged to spend time in both poetry writing and literature classes. In my selection, I wasn’t in any way trying to be provocative or prove some type of point. I simply invited brilliant poets at various stages of their lives and careers who were all willing and available, who loved working with students, and who I thought would offer a thrilling range of stimulating literary examples. 

The creative writing students were elated for the chance to meet and work with such an illustrious and dazzling variety of poets. From the high vatic postcolonial tradition of Trinidadian elder Roi Kwabena to the younger Afro-Canadian performance poet Vanessa Richards, to the often cross-dressing Welsh-Nigerian formalist poet Patience Agbabi, to the Francophone lyric prose of Véronique Tadjo from Côte d’Ivoire, the poetry writing students immediately understood that these poets were radically diverse in age, gender, sexuality, nationality, language, form, style, and artistic goals. 

In contrast, the literature students were angry and aggressive. They demanded to know why “all these poets are the same.” When I asked, “what do you mean by ‘the same?’” they insistently responded, “You know, the same.” What they meant, of course, was that all these poets were black, but they were never able to articulate it on their own. I think of so many poets throughout the African diasporic literary tradition who wanted to be regarded as poets—poets for whom their race was a deeply meaningful fact and factor, but poets above all. My poetry writing students want to be poets, though race—among other factors—is surely a factor in the process of learning to write as themselves. 

Literature students, in my experience, have sometimes had a harder time integrating the issue of race into a writer’s poetics. They’ve often struggled to evaluate the role of race in poetry as being differently conceived and manifested for different poets. They often view race as singularly explanatory, a cause of determinative essentialism in a one-size-fits-all. Ironically, despite this tendency towards a kind of unitary primacy of race in their interpretive perspective, they sometimes struggle to deal productively with its role from a theoretical, experiential, or evaluative perspective. 

On the first day of our colloquium “Poetics & the University in Crisis” in early March, I arrived slightly late because I had been teaching a poetry writing class. There was only one white student in a class of twenty—an exchange student from Ukraine—in this course. And in our class meeting that day, we naturally discussed poetry and poetics when workshopping the students’ writing. There was no explicit commentary on the representation of race that was separate from any other dimensions of the author’s poetics. It would be like mentioning that the poem was made of words. The issue was neither highlighted nor evaded, because it was so clearly and obviously an integral component of the poetry and poetics under discussion. 

After the second night of our colloquium ended, I taught an international poetry writing class. When the students shared and discussed their writing, they made no commentary about nationality or the myriad minority groups to which some of the students belong, or racial representation as something isolated from all other factors that led to the creation of their poems. In other words, whether in the US or an international university, my creative writing students largely have dealt with race in a similar organic way. 

I often teach a poetry class to PhD students in literature and the curriculum always includes poets of diverse races. Race doesn’t arise as an issue when we’re discussing white poets, but it’s a topic of eclipsing concern when we read poets of color. Very capable and earnest doctoral students in English literature sometimes struggle to receive and discuss this poetry except through the lens of race. But ironically, foregrounding that perspective often tends to occlude the fullest possible appreciation and understanding of differing poets and poetics. To some extent, I think we continue dealing with the legacy of how and where to position what we still call minority, multicultural, or ethnic literatures, while such categorizing doesn’t typically enter into creative writing classes in the same way.  

I want to clarify that I’m not saying creative writing students are race-blind or oblivious to race in poetry, or that literature students can’t see the poetic forest for the racial trees. All my students—like most of our students—are dear, conscientious, serious, caring, and smart people. But in my experience, poetry writing classes in a creative writing context offer a space in today’s university for students to address racial identities, contexts, assumptions, lineages, and impacts in ways that are intimate, organic, catholic, and authentic. Studying poetry in a literary context has sometimes created polarization, distancing, othering, stereotyping, and divisiveness with the obvious issue of race hiding—yet unspoken—in plain sight, as in the example of my literature students who wanted to know why all the visiting poets were “the same” yet couldn’t explain what they meant by that characterization.     

I want to close with one more story that highlights an example of institutional practices when dealing with race in the contexts of literary studies and creative writing. In dealing with a departmental self-study, a “dire need” was expressed by the external examiners, who called the absence of courses in African American literature an educational “betrayal” with a “demoralizing effect” on the students. In the context of this new self-study and the era of Black Lives Matter, and intensified national awareness of the ramifications of race, as well as claims by universities nationally to uphold standards of racial sensitivity and respect, I offered to teach a course in African American poetry, a field where I have some experience and knowledge. My offer to teach this class was denied because “department offerings must balance the curricular and scheduling needs of our students and faculty.” This is in a Hispanic Serving and African American serving institution whose population is approximately ninety percent minority students. No one would dare tell me that I cannot openly address the implications and presence of race in my teaching of poetry writing. Therefore, for many students, creative writing remains a protected—and perhaps the only—space for this topic. For race and poetics in a university context, creative writing remains an urgently needed place—sometimes the only place—where students can be themselves and breathe freely. 

Tyrone Williams, continued

committee in 1992, just as I was coming up for tenure. I had published almost nothing but poetry in little journals and magazines; I had maybe an article or two in minor journals. Still, I was awarded tenure the following year. And throughout all this period, I was trying to get a full-length poetry book published—I had reached the finalists twice in national contests, but no cigar. I still thought of myself as a poet, even if no one else in the university—with the exception of my colleague and friend, Norman Finkelstein—thought of me as one. 

Meanwhile the university had completely revamped its core curriculum, which was housed in the Xavier University College of Arts and Sciences. It had revamped the core largely due to concerns that the institution was “losing” its religious/cultural identity, because students were not getting a proper diet of Jesuit Catholicism. What that meant for the English Department was the mothballing of a course called “Narrative,” which had complemented our “Poetry” course within the major and minor. The curricular tradeoff was the addition of a course called “Literature & the Moral Imagination,” which I and a few of my colleagues (like Norman) objected to on the grounds that it would make literature classes less historical (e.g., the history of literary narrative in English Literature), and that this particular course would become a more service-oriented “literary appreciation” course. The a-historical approach is precisely what evolved as a result of this core revision of 1989 and continuing into the present era. Not only nonmajors and nonminors but also majors and minors complete their English course requirements largely ignorant of the general history of English literature. In other words, what had been forgotten or ignored in the drive to inject “the moral imagination” into literature courses was the raison d’etre for “narrative.” The earlier “Narrative” course had served to compensate for the piecemeal periodization/ topicalization of literature within Xavier’s traditional English Department. Though it may well have been the case, that the pressure brought to bear on one course to serve as the “glue” for an entire tradition was utopian from the start, the solution should have been additional--not fewer--historical-oriented courses, not a jettisoning of literary history altogether.

This question of history has preoccupied my poetics and poetry for a long time, and as the collective historical memory of the United States gets shorter and shorter every year, history continues to press upon my poetry, an urgency that is indispensable. That is, my poetry has continued to summon forth one of the driving forces of history, politics, surely a field as dependent upon lapses of memory as human weakness for confusing grandeur with the grandiose. For that reason and many more, I do not believe that one can evade one’s responsibility to the polis by claiming that one’s politics are only and adequately expressed in poetry. Had I believed this I would have remained a nonentity not only at this university but also in the city of Cincinnati. In 1985, the mainstream local newspaper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, published an editorial by a political-science professor from the University of Cincinnati, denouncing the shooting down of a passenger airplane by the USSR. I wrote an editorial in response, taking apart his argument point by point. Soon after my piece was published in the newspaper, my chair told me he’d received phone calls and letters demanding that I be fired. I cite this incident not as some form of self-importance, but as a demonstration of the difference between the public sphere of the news and the public sphere of that which supposedly stays news. No poem of mine, however radical, profane or outrageous, has ever received that kind of public response.

In other words, the university views my vocation as a poet the way the general public views poetry: as a largely invisible, esoteric practice on a par with toys and confections from one’s childhood that are no longer manufactured. That indifference has been, for me, liberating. As with my teaching, I have been fortunate to try out all kinds of experiments in course and texts, from teaching posthumanism via the thought of N. Katherine Hayles and Alan Turing to books by Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, William Kelley, and many more. And since no one knows or cares that I write poetry, I have not had to concern myself with the market, and have been able to indulge my penchant for both experimentalism and traditional lyricism. 

Contrast that freedom with the fact of being perceptibly of African descent. So, too, is the rest of the human species. But that fact hasn’t prevented university administers and staff from calling on my services to “bear witness” during the month of February. Of course, I understand that I represent a certain history—there’s that word again—within human history, and therefore I am to assist students, regardless of geno- or pheno-type, to understand what we call Black American history. And I generally don’t mind when I detect genuine interest to learn. Still, as carrier of a certain history susceptible to pedagogy at all levels of formal education, I don’t have the kind of uninhibited freedom I have as a poet, or even teacher. Even though Xavier University has a few more, though not many more, Black faculty members than it had back in 1983, the February spotlight still finds me on occasion. Being a poet at Xavier has been great; being a Black body, not so great.