PHBW blog
August 2, 2012
Satanic Prostitutes/Poetry/Demonic Pimps
Today would have been James Baldwin’s 88th
birthday, and we should celebrate the fact with sweetness and light and the
gentle moral irony that informed Baldwin’s writings. I am feeling anything but genteel
today. My thoughts are informed by David
Walker rather than Baldwin, by indignation rather than civility.
When Baldwin screwed up enough courage to confront the
horrors of the Atlanta Child Murders, he was only able to behold cosmic evil
through a glass darkly. Walker, on the
other hand, saw cosmic evil up close. He
saw cosmic evil kidnap people,
champion ignorance and wretchedness, rape and dehumanize women and men, slash
and brand skin, dislocate children from their parents, and dissolve human
spirits as effectively as certain acids dissolve flesh.
Having a privileged
view of cosmic evil’s progress in American life and letters, I must follow Walker and save my
soul.
Poetry in America was far from a state of bliss in the early
years of the 21st century, but it was possible to believe that a
Walt Whitmanesque evolution was in progress with avatars of Emily Dickinson
crispening and critiquing the boundaries and margins of growth. Anti-democratic snobs and democratic clowns,
lamb-like conservatives, ferocious liberals, the filthy rich and the dirt poor,
ordained thugs and wannabe saints, and gothic unnameables
-----virtually all registers of sound and sense and nonsense were being published and read, performed and
heard. Poetry was poetry was poetry. Credit Robert Pinsky for doing much to nurture
such a progressive atmosphere.
Suddenly in 2011, defecation hit the air-conditioning. Cosmic evil tore off its Gucci and Calvin
Klein underwear, exposed its androgynous genitals and opened the doors of the
brothel of high-ground criticism.
Suddenly, the satanic prostitutes and demonic pimps began advertising
their wares in some elitist and high-brow venues.
What had happened? Nothing vulgar , reprehensible or lurid. Rita Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate had
edited The Penguin Anthology of
Twentieth-Century American Poetry. But for the poetry pimps and
prostitutes, Dove had not edited an
anthology. She had committed the unpardonable sin of broadcasting that the
dreadful hegemony that enslaved the American poetic imagination was dead. The
devotees of race-inflected hegemony made haste to teach her and the masses of
people who favored the Whitmanesque evolution that the power of cosmic evil should
prevail.
I am far too indignant to call names and kick the private
parts of the pimps and prostitutes who have made such a critical and
unpatriotic spectacle, such a public black mass/masque. I am too angry in knowing the children of the
Devil have prepared a cesspool before me in the presence of the enemies of genuine
poetry. It is not in anyone’s best interest
that I should try to be a serial killer of the American whorehouse nightmare,
that antithesis of Whitman’s dream of inclusion.
The people for whom I write are intelligent. They do not possess
race-blind, castrated mentalities. They
think.
To them I suggest the following:
Read “A Dialogic Forum on Cosmic Evil as it Becomes Manifest
in our Global Realities” at
Read Helen Vendler’s “Are These the Poems to Remember?,” New York Review of Books, November 24,
2011
Read Rita Dove’s “Defending An Anthology,” New York Review of Books, December 22,
2011 [Vendler’s single sentence reply (page 99) is more than precious: “I have
written the review and I stand by it.”
Read Jericho Brown’s interview with Rita Dove at
Read Honorée Fannone Jeffers, “The Subjective
Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry, Virginia
Quarterly Review, Spring 2012 at
Read Honorée Fannone Jeffers, “The Blues: A
Craft Manifesto,” Kenyon Review,
Summer 2012 at
Read Marjorie Perloff’s
“Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric,” Boston Review, May/June 2012 at
Read “Problems of Evil:
Reflections on Aurora Massacre: A Dialogue between Daughter and Mother” at
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