White Poem
A meta-poem is a poem about tis own poem-ness, about itself.
How you experience such a poem is a matter of conjecture.
According to one theory, you're having lunch at the counter
For whites only and one of them takes the empty stool next to you.
According to another theory, you shave in the mirror early
One morning after a night of terror, and it stares back at you.
You can probably experience this poem with less uncertainty,
As it appears to point to something other than itself.
But conjecture, as you can see, often takes a grain of salt,
Which you normally find in the shaker on the whites only counter.
You can sprinkle it onto the fried egg Delores just served up,
Or you can put it in your pocket and go out again tonight.
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I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago for our group's project on couplets and have labored over it since. I hadn't intended for it to become what it became, became in part, anyway. I set out to make a poem of couplets, nothing more, without regard to content or subject matter of any particular kind. Content would flow from whatever thoughts, feelings and rhythms arose from making couplets--letting a first line be a guide to a second in each pairing, and one "coupleted" idea generate another. The process led it where it led. As the author, I could have interrupted this process at any point--something I sometimes do--turned the poem down another channel of thought and feeling, or stopped it altogether and begun again with a different intent, maybe even a different process (such as selecting the theme, then setting it to verse).
But I chose to stay with this process and this poem to see where it might lead me, feeling this was the more organic approach to let the poem develop as it "wanted," like a discovery engine. And the engine took the poem, me, and my W@1 cohort partly to Jim Crow racism and how a white male writes a poem (that is, makes art) within that cruel history.
(Right there, have I used a qualifying term, the word cruel, as if I can identify with the many objects of Jim Crow cruelty? Or have I tried to pre-empt at least in my own mind any objection that of course I cannot possibly identify? That I cannot because I am a product of a privileged class of Americans, and necessarily blinded, always and ever blinded?)
And so this poem dwells on what it means to make art in a fraught world, what it means for a white male writer to make art in a world fraught with racism. All the world is fraught, all possible worlds are fraught, fraughtness being one definition of "world," and the world is ever fraught. Fraught by what are, in this time and place that is meaningful enough to build a poem from, race and racism. The poem, rather than call out racism or cry out against it (Seriously, what am I going to write, racism is bad?), wants to break open if it can the assumptions that art can be created under the circumstances of racism, so-called white art at any rate, that a poet like I can write from his privileged and blinkered point of view of the subject, or should even attempt to, and whether the attempt is valuable to anyone. At least I think this is where the poem goes, wants to say.
The first reaction today was that the poem pushes some boundaries and transgresses one in particular, with the phrase "one of them" in the fourth line. I say "reaction" because, to be fair to all participating, all of our responses on a given Wednesday are reactive. Our format doesn't give us time to dwell on a poem's various facets, features, fidelities, failures. The critique of being over the line was positioned as the phrase's potential for offending people of color. The leveler of the critique, I think, really meant that the phrase is privileged or worse, racist, and I wish those characterizations had come out, for honesty's sake. This reader suggested that the phrase be changed to something like "a Black person."
In another certain kind of context, this critique would be spot on, and I would have immediately seen the error not just in thinking but in feeling. There lies one of my objections to the critique (which, had I been myself more prepared to talk about the poem, I might have expressed more honestly and forthrightly). To object to such a phrase, in and of itself, on race grounds is to commit a very un-nuanced reading of the poem in hand. Worse yet, it is to import a context to the poem that clearly is not there. This is a reading that surprised and disappointed me, given that many in our group are not just practiced writers of poetry who should understand the role of context in art, but also people with advanced degrees in the art form or at least in literature, who really should be expected to read for nuance, even if ultimately it's not there or has been left hanging. There are reactions, and there are knee-jerk reactions.
(It's entirely possible that a lack of nuance or a faulty execution of it is one major fault of this poem, which is why I shared it with the group, to help determine whether the poem got to where I thought it had.)
For another objection, the phrase "a Black person" narrows the poem's scope to mere social comment--not necessarily a bad poetic objective, but not the one of this poem. It would mean a different poem. This poem almost studiously avoids social comment of that kind. My objection came across a bit more strident than I intended at the time because I overreacted to a solution built on a misreading of the poem, a "downward" but not also an "upward" reading. What's this mean? I get to that below.
The poem, as I say above, wants to be about the conditionality or provisionality or contingency of "writing white" in a fraught world (thus the title). "White" carries of course racial and political meaning in the context of this poem; but it also has some bearing on the very idea of art. "Writing white" has artistic implications in the sense that such writing is ever (or thought ever to be) safe, unassailable, pre-emptive . . . but is empty. If you write white, you write from privilege; and I argue--and I hope the poem argues--that if you are white, that is of privilege, you write white. How can you not? And therefore, how can you say anything about anything that is not infused with that whiteness? Even when you write racism is bad, you write from privilege, and you write safely, unassailably, and pre-emptively. But you write emptily.
Another critique in this discussion went something like this: Why do you take us back there? The critique refers to the image of the whites only counter and the allusion to night-riders. Those things, after all belong to another time. To which I reply, Yes! To a whites only time! But those images and allusions do not belong to another racism. They belong to the racism we still practice today, of the knee in the neck, the red-lined neighborhood, the token hire. So why then doesn't the poem introduce those more current expressions of racism? Why does it "take us back there"? Because to me, these more "contemporary" expressions of racism are equivalent to saying racism is bad. Why would I say or write something that rolls across every screen you own every hour of every day of every year? The poem takes us back there because we never left.
But shouldn't I just say that, then, and let the poem be: we never stopped being a racist country. Why don't I just say racism is bad, if that's what I really mean? Well, that is not what I mean, and I hope not what the poem means. That is what I have struggled to not make the poem mean!
Which leads me back to the loaded phrase "one of them." To object to this phrase as if it were the only words of the line it appears in, indeed of the poem, is to load it with only the fraughtness of our current moment, familiar and disheartening as it is. I understand, I think, the urge to load up on the fraught (in this case, racist) world--it's done every day everywhere. But that's only reading down the poem. The pronoun, "them," also looks back up the poem to another more present antecedent: the meta-poem of the opening line. The connection being drawn here--and it occurred to me literally as I turned from the fist couplet to write the second and set the table for the rest of the poem--is between making art and living in the fraught world. How does one do it? How does one justify it? How does one make it meaningful?
And this is the meta condition of this poem, how it is about itself and about something else at the same time. In one drafting session, I recognized the fraught possibilities of the very phrase "one of them," and considered revising it to something like "and it takes the empty stool next to you." This change made the reference more explicit, easier to trace, more certain and less dependent (on context, on my reader's sensibility and historical knowledge), but does it improve the poem or your experience of it? Maybe so, if what you're after is a White Poem, if that's where you feel comfortable. I don't.
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