For anybody who's interested in engaging in discussion, I'd be curious to see what your takes are on the aesthetic claims made in the New Yorker piece and in Kunin's essay.
If my social media window is any barometer, my hunch is that the essay on Place will provide more room for heated debate for the purposes of our class. The KG article...I mean come on, it's vile. But of course if you disagree with me and want to say "Hey actually this guy says some pretty spot on things about, I don't know, lyric v. conceptual," I'd be happy to start a discussion there.
But yeah, with respect to the VP article: my read is that Kunin admits that hey, maybe VP is a bad poet and we should critique her on "aesthetic" terms, and that calling her a racist is like, a bad move. But my issue with this is that is, well, there's no such thing as the purely aesthetic argument that this guy wants to have. And by framing the critique as he does, Kunin effectively comes to the defense of VP, because he says No no, don't call her a racist, she's actually antiracist in attitude so your critiques of racism are invalid, just call her a bad poet, that's way nicer and plays nice with my conception of poetry as such. So yes, my assertion: Kunin sneakily defends VP by ostensibly entertaining the notion that she is a mere "bad poet"--he is not on board with my critique that VP's work merely reifies the white supremacy of American poetry and is therefore, you know, bad, and by calling VP merely a "bad poet" he is able to erase the critique of racism advanced by scores of poets and critics of color.
My assertion: calling a work of art racist is also an aesthetic critique, because aesthetics as we're talking about it are always and already a product of racial violence.
Here's a handful of what I find to be some particularly problematic assertions--we can talk about the entire essay, but I'd be interested in discussing (in light of our readings, I'm thinkin Kant especially but can go any which way) claims such as:
"In my view, accusing Place of racism is intellectually irresponsible. The idea behind this accusation seems to be that any writing that uses racist language or imagery is itself racist, and, if the writer is white, white supremacist. By that logic, any representation of racism would be racist. The study of racism would become impossible. At best, the study of racism could proceed only by further inflicting or exploiting the pain of what it studies."
"Aesthetic judgment involves making discriminations between values within works of art. Some representations are more enjoyable than others. Many readers have enjoyed Citizen, where Rankine meditates on varieties of racism in American history. Many readers have been pained by Tweeting Gone with the Wind. Readers are responding to the strategies that Rankine and Place use for representing racism, but both poets are representing racism, which means that they are aestheticizing racism, turning it into an object for readers to enjoy."
"I want to stress this point. Any antiracist art worthy of the name needs strategies for the depiction of racist language and images. This is different from the problem of having the right attitude. It’s a problem for an artist who already has an antiracist attitude. That is to say, it’s an aesthetic problem. The failure to find an effective strategy is an aesthetic failure."
and:
"This year we have seen waves of denunciations of the racism of a writer whose ideas about race are pretty much identical to those of the writers who are denouncing her. What, then, motivates the charge of racism? I have three thoughts about that.
1) This controversy occurs during a time of increased public awareness of the systematic racism and violence of U.S. law enforcement, and consequent organization of antiracist protests online and in city streets. Place’s accusers associate her with a racist system, and see themselves extending the protest movement to the domain of literary politics.
2) Place’s accusers either don’t understand power, don’t like power, or are pretending not to like power. Based on my observations, I’m going with the third option.
Ostensibly Place’s accusers speak on behalf of the powerless, and are powerless themselves. Meanwhile they associate Place with the power structure of white supremacy and with the elite institutions (AWP, the University of Colorado, the University of California, and the Whitney Museum) that sponsor her appearances. From a position of seeming powerlessness, Place’s accusers leveraged the cancelation of most of her appearances in May, June, and July. I call that power. In fact, I call it an abuse of power.
Some of my readers, thoroughly committed to the idea that power runs in straight lines from subject positions, will be skeptical of the claim that Place’s accusers have some power. Try putting it this way. By using the little bit of rhetorical power that they have, they are showing what they would do if they had other kinds of power. It isn’t pretty. One thing they would do, clearly, would be to stop her from presenting her work in public ever again.
This is not a winning strategy. Even in the short term, Place’s accusers have miscalculated: By attacking her personal liberty, they have given additional power to her writing, which, taken on its own merits, would seem very weak indeed. Ultimately, such abuses of power do nothing to help the cause of antiracism. They also do no good for poetry. As a poet, I find that significant too.
3) Place’s accusers prefer to call her a racist rather than a bad writer because they are afraid of making aesthetic judgments. This fear, which may be the most pernicious legacy of conceptual writing, ultimately bespeaks a lack of poetic ambition."
Thoughts?
Thoughts?
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