Tony Hoagland's Q&A with Major Jackson and Alicia Ostriker

Last night, here in Houston, Major Jackson and Alicia Ostriker read for the Inprint/Brown Reading Series. The reading was followed by a Q&A, where Tony Hoagland, post-claudiarankine.com Tony Hoagland, sat down for a discussion with the two poets. I haven't really been involved with all the online discussions surrounding this issue. But I feel almost a journalistic obligation to describe this event for some kind of public consideration. 

It should come as no surprise that Tony wasn't interested in throwing the two poets any "softballs." The questions had specific intention, and they brought the discussion at least to the boundary of this current controversy. He started with a question to Ostriker, working from the title of her book Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America: How have women stolen language in writing poetry? In her answer, Ostriker set up a dichotomy between "inside" and "outside" the poetry establishment. These were phrases that would be used for the remainder of the discussion. She explained that when she was a woman writer in the 60s and 70s, she felt that she started "outside" the male-dominated poetry world, and that she had to find a way where her language received equal validation to the established language. Ultimately, her experience was one where she managed to get one foot "inside" the establishment, while keeping one foot "outside." And that in this vague limbo, where she didn't really fit, she could continue to write good poems. She explained that she needs this discomfort if she's going to write good poems. 

Thankfully, Major Jackson took up this question and commented on how he is interested in the full spectrum of language, from Rhyme Royal to the contemporary lyric, from a catalogue of French Painters to Kanye West. Jackson continued the "inside" and "outside" conversation, as many of the poems from Hoops touch on the line between these types of experiences. Most poignantly, at one point in the evening, Jackson read the poem "Urban Renewal," a poem about a teacher who finds all her students' African names too difficult to pronounce, so one day she changes all their names to those of French painters. The audience at the reading laughed. "Oh, how cute. How funny. It is tough to pronounce African names." The audience laughed again when the poem made that turn. In my opinion, Jackson never presented this as a joke. Some part of the audience thought it was funny. And considering the racial sensitivity of this poem, I should mention the audience was about 80% white.

Ulimately, the poem points out that these French painters had painted slaves, and so changing someone's name from an African king to a French painter isn't funny or cute or easier to remember. It's insulting. And the poem implies the teacher should have known better, because the speaker, as a child, knew this. No one was laughing at the end of the poem.

This leads me to one of the truly resonant observations Jackson made during the Q&A. In trying to undestand what "inside" and "outside" means, he observed that the audiences for poetry are the same as they were in the 1950s and 60s. Meaning we go to see the poets who we think fit who we are. The observation wasn't pressed further, but I would have liked to hear what we are supposed to do when we encounter a poetry "outside" our group. Was it uncomfortable for Major Jackson to hear the audience laughing as he introduced "Urban Renewal?" Should the audience have known better than to laugh? 

I fully agree with what Ostriker said later in the Q&A about American poetry. It is heterogeneous. Unfortunately, in my observation, there aren't many heterogeneous readers out there. I realize, in this time when there is such a plenty of poetry publishing, the challenge is to balance aesthetic taste with aesthetic breadth, but I think it is all too common, and comfortable, to stay in your own audience.

This post is not intended to chart, then, whether Claudia Rankine and Tony Hoagland are "inside" or "outside" each other's audiences or aesthetics or communities. I am an enthusiastic reader of both poets' work. I can say that Tony is my teacher, and I have no doubt of his commitment to poetry, however provocatively his opinions are phrased. Anyone who has seen the essays that have appeared in Poetry and APR these last two years should have no doubt of that. What I would like to see in this controversy is how we become "colleagues." And I would like to know what role provocation has in a conversation. I hope, in some way, last night's Q&A contributes toward those thoughts.

Comments

[Nordette Adams]

Thanks for sharing what you heard last night.

[Blankbunny]

Weird how you don't mention Tony being called out (unfairly) for being "condescending." Your call as a journalist is what now? To keep it all polite even when it isn't? You know I love you Kent but glossing is glossing. Reporting is commenting.

I mean you want to talk about provocation, maybe you shouldn't uh, ignore it?

Just a thought.

[kentdshaw]

Thanks for the comment, Russel. I didn't mention the issue of "condescending," though I think my quotes around "colleague" in the end has some intentions behind it. Perhaps those intentions are too subtle.

Essentially, Rankine points to Tony as her colleague many times in her open letter, and I wonder what that means to her. I would venture to say any colleague to Tony would know his role as provocateur in an academic discussion. I don't feel that that fact is taken into account, especially in a discussion that's politically charged as this one is.

Quite honestly, I'm not interested in which party in this is being more condescending. As I try to make light in this entry, I'm interested in people being generous readers of many different types of poetry, and then being equal to a discussion that values the art of the poetry being published.

[Diann Blakely]

I am SO far behind on so many things--my study looks like a madwoman's nest abandoned because it was too messy--that I can't say how grateful I am to have read this, but how tears welled in my eyes when I read your account of "Urban Renewal." My attempts to pay homage to this great man and poet seem all the more useless, paltry, and completely unhelpful.

Yet how right that he was paired with Ostriker. STEALING THE LANGUAGE mean the world to me when I first began writing. I remember being my reader at Bread Loaf literally GROWLing when he detected the echo of Plath in my poems. I protested that I liked Hughes too--and yes, I have reviewed both and think certain of his books very fine, though others just plain awful--and he said that was okay. Thus how perfect that Major read "Daddy" at Plath's induction into Poets' Corner at St. John the Cathedral, as did Paul Muldoon. These men know all about being from disenfranchised cultures and their big boots which crush the spirits and souls of most people and silence them forever.

[ray gibbs]

for me, the greatest of poets & writers are courageous & humane...thank you...

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