WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.570 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.570 --> 00:00:04.440 align:middle line:84% Part of what I call this journey that somebody like Miłosz 00:00:04.440 --> 00:00:06.690 align:middle line:84% made, and in a way, Eavan Boland made, 00:00:06.690 --> 00:00:10.680 align:middle line:84% and people like VS Naipaul or Salman Rushdie, 00:00:10.680 --> 00:00:15.790 align:middle line:84% Chinua Achebe made, is the scholarship boy or girl. 00:00:15.790 --> 00:00:19.080 align:middle line:84% They're the one who was bright and chosen from the village 00:00:19.080 --> 00:00:22.110 align:middle line:84% or from the town or from the school in the country 00:00:22.110 --> 00:00:24.960 align:middle line:84% to go to the capital of the world 00:00:24.960 --> 00:00:29.730 align:middle line:84% and to be educated and be educated 00:00:29.730 --> 00:00:32.460 align:middle line:84% by the colonial rulers or the colonial masters 00:00:32.460 --> 00:00:36.600 align:middle line:84% or be educated in Paris at the center of the universe, 00:00:36.600 --> 00:00:41.640 align:middle line:84% and then to make sense of that whole experience of migration 00:00:41.640 --> 00:00:46.350 align:middle line:84% of differences and culture, differences in language. 00:00:46.350 --> 00:00:48.480 align:middle line:84% And that forms a sort of tradition 00:00:48.480 --> 00:00:52.530 align:middle line:84% which contextualizes a lot of what 00:00:52.530 --> 00:00:54.480 align:middle line:84% I see as the great writers of the second half 00:00:54.480 --> 00:00:56.610 align:middle line:90% of the 20th century. 00:00:56.610 --> 00:01:03.090 align:middle line:84% Now, to go from the sort of sublime to the very mundane, 00:01:03.090 --> 00:01:05.610 align:middle line:84% I will talk about my own journey. 00:01:05.610 --> 00:01:08.700 align:middle line:90% 00:01:08.700 --> 00:01:11.100 align:middle line:84% You know, I'm a third generation Japanese-American. 00:01:11.100 --> 00:01:15.990 align:middle line:84% I grew up in a white suburb, mainly Jewish suburb. 00:01:15.990 --> 00:01:19.277 align:middle line:84% When I was in high school if a white friend said to me, 00:01:19.277 --> 00:01:21.360 align:middle line:84% "I think of you, David, just like a white person." 00:01:21.360 --> 00:01:23.430 align:middle line:84% I would go, "That's what I want to be. 00:01:23.430 --> 00:01:26.503 align:middle line:90% I want to be a white person." 00:01:26.503 --> 00:01:28.920 align:middle line:84% If somebody would say to me, "You're a Japanese-American." 00:01:28.920 --> 00:01:29.610 align:middle line:90% I said, "no, I'm not. 00:01:29.610 --> 00:01:30.240 align:middle line:90% I'm American. 00:01:30.240 --> 00:01:32.850 align:middle line:90% I'm just an individual." 00:01:32.850 --> 00:01:35.730 align:middle line:84% I went to English graduate school, 00:01:35.730 --> 00:01:40.680 align:middle line:84% and I was really told either explicitly or implicitly there 00:01:40.680 --> 00:01:43.167 align:middle line:84% to call myself a Japanese-American writer, 00:01:43.167 --> 00:01:45.000 align:middle line:84% an Asian-American writer, a writer of color, 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:47.880 align:middle line:84% was to relegate myself to the literary ghetto, 00:01:47.880 --> 00:01:50.490 align:middle line:84% was to get into literature by sort of back door 00:01:50.490 --> 00:01:52.660 align:middle line:90% affirmative action. 00:01:52.660 --> 00:01:55.470 align:middle line:84% So I said to myself, I don't want to do that. 00:01:55.470 --> 00:01:57.840 align:middle line:84% I want to be judged as an individual. 00:01:57.840 --> 00:02:00.150 align:middle line:90% I was like Amy Tan is now. 00:02:00.150 --> 00:02:01.963 align:middle line:90% I'm just a writer. 00:02:01.963 --> 00:02:03.380 align:middle line:84% I'm not a Chinese-American writer. 00:02:03.380 --> 00:02:07.560 align:middle line:90% 00:02:07.560 --> 00:02:11.800 align:middle line:84% But at a certain point in my 20s, I fell into depression. 00:02:11.800 --> 00:02:14.700 align:middle line:84% I got kicked out of graduate school, 00:02:14.700 --> 00:02:16.817 align:middle line:84% and I realized that something was wrong. 00:02:16.817 --> 00:02:18.900 align:middle line:84% And there were many different things wrong with me 00:02:18.900 --> 00:02:21.030 align:middle line:84% at that time, but one of the things I see now 00:02:21.030 --> 00:02:26.095 align:middle line:84% was that I had no language to express who I was. 00:02:26.095 --> 00:02:27.720 align:middle line:84% When the writers that I identified with 00:02:27.720 --> 00:02:33.450 align:middle line:84% were people like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, 00:02:33.450 --> 00:02:38.490 align:middle line:84% Ivy League educated, mainly male, white poets. 00:02:38.490 --> 00:02:41.340 align:middle line:90% 00:02:41.340 --> 00:02:45.090 align:middle line:84% And yet when I looked at my poems and what was my poems 00:02:45.090 --> 00:02:48.390 align:middle line:84% I was writing about, I wrote some sort 00:02:48.390 --> 00:02:51.330 align:middle line:84% of bad surrealistic poems, like everybody was writing then, 00:02:51.330 --> 00:02:53.700 align:middle line:84% but then the most interesting poems 00:02:53.700 --> 00:02:55.916 align:middle line:84% were about my Japanese-American background. 00:02:55.916 --> 00:02:59.680 align:middle line:90% 00:02:59.680 --> 00:03:02.650 align:middle line:84% I went on, and at a certain point 00:03:02.650 --> 00:03:08.170 align:middle line:84% I was reading Frantz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks," 00:03:08.170 --> 00:03:11.020 align:middle line:84% and Fanon talks about how the Black school 00:03:11.020 --> 00:03:14.170 align:middle line:84% child in the French West Indies colonial education system 00:03:14.170 --> 00:03:18.430 align:middle line:84% reads about our ancestors the Gauls, the French, and reads 00:03:18.430 --> 00:03:20.770 align:middle line:84% about how the great white hunters went into Africa 00:03:20.770 --> 00:03:23.260 align:middle line:90% to civilize the savages. 00:03:23.260 --> 00:03:27.700 align:middle line:84% And Fanon says what is that Black school child learning? 00:03:27.700 --> 00:03:30.730 align:middle line:84% He or she is learning self alienation, self-hatred, 00:03:30.730 --> 00:03:34.090 align:middle line:84% and that identification with their colonial ruler, 00:03:34.090 --> 00:03:39.192 align:middle line:84% and I read that going, oh, that's what I've been doing. 00:03:39.192 --> 00:03:40.900 align:middle line:84% Now the other sort of non-political thing 00:03:40.900 --> 00:03:44.410 align:middle line:84% about that was Frantz also says that the Black man who 00:03:44.410 --> 00:03:46.120 align:middle line:84% constantly sleeps with white women 00:03:46.120 --> 00:03:48.970 align:middle line:84% believes that somehow sleeping with white women 00:03:48.970 --> 00:03:52.210 align:middle line:84% will relieve his feelings of inferiority. 00:03:52.210 --> 00:03:56.230 align:middle line:84% I was like, wow, that's what I've been doing. 00:03:56.230 --> 00:03:58.780 align:middle line:84% And in certain places, the different themes of my poetry 00:03:58.780 --> 00:04:02.230 align:middle line:90% were sort of born right then. 00:04:02.230 --> 00:04:07.360 align:middle line:84% I went on, and I went to Japan, which 00:04:07.360 --> 00:04:13.480 align:middle line:84% I had a whole epiphany about rethinking my own background. 00:04:13.480 --> 00:04:16.450 align:middle line:84% I began reading Black writers and finding language for race 00:04:16.450 --> 00:04:19.339 align:middle line:84% that I found nowhere in my graduate school training. 00:04:19.339 --> 00:04:20.620 align:middle line:90% So I was very educated. 00:04:20.620 --> 00:04:22.870 align:middle line:84% I'd gone through four years of the English major, five 00:04:22.870 --> 00:04:25.660 align:middle line:84% years of English graduate school, 00:04:25.660 --> 00:04:28.710 align:middle line:84% but I really hadn't read very many Black writers at all. 00:04:28.710 --> 00:04:30.918 align:middle line:84% In fact, I'd read a handful of poems by Amiri Baraka, 00:04:30.918 --> 00:04:32.530 align:middle line:90% and that was it. 00:04:32.530 --> 00:04:34.330 align:middle line:84% And I was finding in these Black writers, 00:04:34.330 --> 00:04:37.390 align:middle line:84% like Aimé Césaire, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, 00:04:37.390 --> 00:04:40.330 align:middle line:84% Alice Walker, a language to talk about my own experience 00:04:40.330 --> 00:04:44.470 align:middle line:84% that I couldn't find anywhere in the traditional Anglo-American 00:04:44.470 --> 00:04:46.420 align:middle line:90% canon. 00:04:46.420 --> 00:04:52.990 align:middle line:84% So I went to graduate school, and at MFA graduate school-- 00:04:52.990 --> 00:04:55.600 align:middle line:84% because after I got kicked out of English graduate school 00:04:55.600 --> 00:04:58.240 align:middle line:84% I started writing, and then I went to the MFA graduate 00:04:58.240 --> 00:05:00.470 align:middle line:90% school. 00:05:00.470 --> 00:05:03.340 align:middle line:84% There's some interesting things that happened there. 00:05:03.340 --> 00:05:09.460 align:middle line:84% I was talking to a Black writer and this Black student writer 00:05:09.460 --> 00:05:16.270 align:middle line:84% won a NEA grant, when a lot of the faculty didn't. 00:05:16.270 --> 00:05:17.830 align:middle line:84% And one of the white faculty said 00:05:17.830 --> 00:05:20.590 align:middle line:84% to a friend, a white friend of mine, 00:05:20.590 --> 00:05:24.100 align:middle line:84% us white guys didn't have a chance this year. 00:05:24.100 --> 00:05:27.370 align:middle line:84% There were a lot of minority judges on the panel. 00:05:27.370 --> 00:05:28.930 align:middle line:90% And I mean, OK. 00:05:28.930 --> 00:05:31.210 align:middle line:84% That teacher is never going to say that to me. 00:05:31.210 --> 00:05:32.140 align:middle line:90% All right. 00:05:32.140 --> 00:05:34.480 align:middle line:84% Now this Black student who won an NEA, 00:05:34.480 --> 00:05:36.430 align:middle line:84% he was told by one of his teachers: 00:05:36.430 --> 00:05:40.660 align:middle line:84% literature which drops the -g from an -ing word doesn't last. 00:05:40.660 --> 00:05:44.693 align:middle line:84% When he got up to give his lecture on the Black aesthetic, 00:05:44.693 --> 00:05:47.110 align:middle line:84% one of his professors said in the back of the room, that's 00:05:47.110 --> 00:05:47.740 align:middle line:90% not aesthetics. 00:05:47.740 --> 00:05:48.407 align:middle line:90% That's paranoia. 00:05:48.407 --> 00:05:53.380 align:middle line:90% 00:05:53.380 --> 00:05:58.900 align:middle line:84% The other thing that happened to me there was this Black student 00:05:58.900 --> 00:06:03.400 align:middle line:84% gave his graduation reading, and the room was just rocking. 00:06:03.400 --> 00:06:06.040 align:middle line:84% And there were certain poems that he had told me 00:06:06.040 --> 00:06:08.170 align:middle line:84% he wrote for the page, certain poems 00:06:08.170 --> 00:06:10.480 align:middle line:84% that he'd written to be orally transmitted. 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:14.890 align:middle line:84% And the mixture of that just was a really terrific reading. 00:06:14.890 --> 00:06:20.650 align:middle line:84% The next night a well-known established poet 00:06:20.650 --> 00:06:24.430 align:middle line:84% came in, read what I call the short little series of poems 00:06:24.430 --> 00:06:27.310 align:middle line:90% about being depressed. 00:06:27.310 --> 00:06:31.150 align:middle line:84% And the energy in the audience was just dead. 00:06:31.150 --> 00:06:32.350 align:middle line:90% All right? 00:06:32.350 --> 00:06:36.220 align:middle line:84% So I sat there after that, and I thought, now why 00:06:36.220 --> 00:06:38.950 align:middle line:84% is it that I think that this famous, white writer is 00:06:38.950 --> 00:06:43.270 align:middle line:84% more literary than the poems of my Black friend? 00:06:43.270 --> 00:06:45.010 align:middle line:90% Why do I think that? 00:06:45.010 --> 00:06:47.560 align:middle line:84% When in actuality my Black, poet friend 00:06:47.560 --> 00:06:49.000 align:middle line:84% was doing things with the language 00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:50.208 align:middle line:90% that I didn't know how to do. 00:06:50.208 --> 00:06:52.600 align:middle line:90% 00:06:52.600 --> 00:06:55.810 align:middle line:84% Whereas I could write, I think, a passable imitation 00:06:55.810 --> 00:06:57.190 align:middle line:84% of what the white poet was doing. 00:06:57.190 --> 00:07:00.350 align:middle line:90% 00:07:00.350 --> 00:07:02.630 align:middle line:84% And then I had to ask myself, why 00:07:02.630 --> 00:07:06.230 align:middle line:84% is it that given the reaction of the audience to the two 00:07:06.230 --> 00:07:11.240 align:middle line:84% different poets, somehow the white poet is 00:07:11.240 --> 00:07:13.100 align:middle line:90% the famous prize-winning poet? 00:07:13.100 --> 00:07:17.170 align:middle line:90% 00:07:17.170 --> 00:07:20.710 align:middle line:84% And I just began to think, well, what's going on here? 00:07:20.710 --> 00:07:24.310 align:middle line:90% 00:07:24.310 --> 00:07:27.880 align:middle line:84% I don't want to get in make this whole complete talk about race, 00:07:27.880 --> 00:07:31.270 align:middle line:84% but let's suffice it to say that in the discovery 00:07:31.270 --> 00:07:34.930 align:middle line:84% of my own identity I have learned 00:07:34.930 --> 00:07:39.670 align:middle line:84% that my education, the culture taught me nothing about what 00:07:39.670 --> 00:07:43.090 align:middle line:84% it's like to grow up Black in this country, 00:07:43.090 --> 00:07:46.300 align:middle line:84% and that I had not done an education of myself 00:07:46.300 --> 00:07:49.120 align:middle line:84% to understand African-American poetry. 00:07:49.120 --> 00:07:52.870 align:middle line:84% When I read TS Eliot first as an undergraduate, 00:07:52.870 --> 00:07:55.030 align:middle line:90% it felt like gobbledygook to me. 00:07:55.030 --> 00:07:56.380 align:middle line:90% So what did I do? 00:07:56.380 --> 00:07:58.840 align:middle line:84% I run back, and I read all of Eliot. 00:07:58.840 --> 00:08:00.610 align:middle line:84% I went back and read his criticism. 00:08:00.610 --> 00:08:02.860 align:middle line:84% I went back and read the writers that he references to 00:08:02.860 --> 00:08:03.910 align:middle line:90% in his criticism. 00:08:03.910 --> 00:08:08.140 align:middle line:84% I went back and read all the things in the footnotes 00:08:08.140 --> 00:08:10.630 align:middle line:90% to The Waste Land. 00:08:10.630 --> 00:08:14.440 align:middle line:84% By the end of that, the poem was transparent to me, 00:08:14.440 --> 00:08:17.715 align:middle line:84% and I understood why it was a great poem. 00:08:17.715 --> 00:08:19.090 align:middle line:84% But I realized I hadn't done that 00:08:19.090 --> 00:08:21.130 align:middle line:84% with African-American literature. 00:08:21.130 --> 00:08:23.020 align:middle line:84% I hadn't gone back and looked into tradition. 00:08:23.020 --> 00:08:24.940 align:middle line:84% I didn't know the basis of the oral tradition. 00:08:24.940 --> 00:08:27.400 align:middle line:84% I did not understand the history or the context 00:08:27.400 --> 00:08:30.400 align:middle line:84% or the thought of which that poetry came out of. 00:08:30.400 --> 00:08:34.570 align:middle line:84% But I felt qualified to judge it. 00:08:34.570 --> 00:08:41.750 align:middle line:84% Now what happened is I began to think very differently 00:08:41.750 --> 00:08:45.390 align:middle line:84% about literature, and then a few years after that, 00:08:45.390 --> 00:08:49.820 align:middle line:84% I was teaching a course in third world postcolonial literature. 00:08:49.820 --> 00:08:52.100 align:middle line:84% And this is literature in English, 00:08:52.100 --> 00:08:58.580 align:middle line:84% so it was like VS Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, 00:08:58.580 --> 00:09:04.310 align:middle line:84% Salman Rushdie, Ama [? Ata ?] Aidoo, Bessie Head, 00:09:04.310 --> 00:09:11.090 align:middle line:84% Chinua Achebe, and J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, 00:09:11.090 --> 00:09:13.850 align:middle line:84% and then we also read like Sade and Fanon and all that sort 00:09:13.850 --> 00:09:16.720 align:middle line:90% of postcolonial stuff. 00:09:16.720 --> 00:09:20.600 align:middle line:84% At the end of the course I realized that something 00:09:20.600 --> 00:09:23.960 align:middle line:84% about how we define tradition because I realized 00:09:23.960 --> 00:09:28.430 align:middle line:84% that if I had put Toni Morrison or Leslie Marmon Silko 00:09:28.430 --> 00:09:31.970 align:middle line:84% into that group of writers, they would fit in. 00:09:31.970 --> 00:09:37.970 align:middle line:84% But if I put John Updike or John Ashbery in that group, 00:09:37.970 --> 00:09:42.090 align:middle line:84% they would look like they come from another planet. 00:09:42.090 --> 00:09:43.910 align:middle line:84% So I sat there and thought, well, 00:09:43.910 --> 00:09:45.980 align:middle line:84% what if we're talking about universal standards? 00:09:45.980 --> 00:09:47.810 align:middle line:84% Whose universe are we talking about? 00:09:47.810 --> 00:09:48.710 align:middle line:90% Whose world? 00:09:48.710 --> 00:09:52.680 align:middle line:90% 00:09:52.680 --> 00:09:59.550 align:middle line:84% And there were themes and ways of writing 00:09:59.550 --> 00:10:04.860 align:middle line:84% about the self in the work which made those words cohere 00:10:04.860 --> 00:10:09.930 align:middle line:84% in a way that made sense to me as well as 00:10:09.930 --> 00:10:12.180 align:middle line:84% a different view about literature, a different view 00:10:12.180 --> 00:10:13.320 align:middle line:90% about tradition. 00:10:13.320 --> 00:10:17.370 align:middle line:84% There were less boundaries, we say between politics 00:10:17.370 --> 00:10:18.420 align:middle line:90% and literature. 00:10:18.420 --> 00:10:20.155 align:middle line:84% There was a sense that they were taught, 00:10:20.155 --> 00:10:21.780 align:middle line:84% that history and literature was taught, 00:10:21.780 --> 00:10:26.070 align:middle line:84% that you had to take in the issues and the context 00:10:26.070 --> 00:10:28.155 align:middle line:90% of colonialism and race. 00:10:28.155 --> 00:10:32.050 align:middle line:90% 00:10:32.050 --> 00:10:36.880 align:middle line:84% One of the ways in which I contextualize that comes out 00:10:36.880 --> 00:10:41.540 align:middle line:84% of this statement by James Baldwin from "The Devil Finds 00:10:41.540 --> 00:10:42.040 align:middle line:90% Work." 00:10:42.040 --> 00:10:45.880 align:middle line:90% 00:10:45.880 --> 00:10:50.050 align:middle line:84% And I think this defines why the issues of identity 00:10:50.050 --> 00:10:52.150 align:middle line:84% seem to me very important to my own work 00:10:52.150 --> 00:10:54.445 align:middle line:84% and to a lot of writers like myself. 00:10:54.445 --> 00:10:58.640 align:middle line:90% 00:10:58.640 --> 00:11:02.110 align:middle line:84% And part of what Baldwin is saying in this quotation 00:11:02.110 --> 00:11:05.770 align:middle line:84% is that if you live in a village or somebody strange comes 00:11:05.770 --> 00:11:08.830 align:middle line:84% into your village, you suddenly understand 00:11:08.830 --> 00:11:13.240 align:middle line:84% that there's somebody else outside your own set of values, 00:11:13.240 --> 00:11:15.430 align:middle line:84% your own way of looking at the world, 00:11:15.430 --> 00:11:19.720 align:middle line:84% and your awareness of that person not only is 00:11:19.720 --> 00:11:23.140 align:middle line:84% an awareness of the stranger but he says it causes you to look 00:11:23.140 --> 00:11:26.118 align:middle line:84% at yourself differently because you understand 00:11:26.118 --> 00:11:27.910 align:middle line:84% there's another way of looking at yourself. 00:11:27.910 --> 00:11:30.990 align:middle line:84% There's another way of looking at the world. 00:11:30.990 --> 00:11:33.600 align:middle line:84% The question of identity is a question involving the most 00:11:33.600 --> 00:11:35.400 align:middle line:90% profound panic-- 00:11:35.400 --> 00:11:40.020 align:middle line:84% a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall. 00:11:40.020 --> 00:11:41.910 align:middle line:84% This question can scarcely be said 00:11:41.910 --> 00:11:44.250 align:middle line:84% to exist among the wretched who know merely 00:11:44.250 --> 00:11:48.630 align:middle line:84% that they are wretched and who bear it day by day. 00:11:48.630 --> 00:11:51.120 align:middle line:84% It is a mistake to suppose that the wretched do not 00:11:51.120 --> 00:11:53.640 align:middle line:90% know that they are wretched. 00:11:53.640 --> 00:11:55.747 align:middle line:84% Nor does this question exist among the splendid 00:11:55.747 --> 00:11:57.330 align:middle line:84% who know merely that they are splendid 00:11:57.330 --> 00:11:59.490 align:middle line:90% and who flaunt it day by day. 00:11:59.490 --> 00:12:01.770 align:middle line:84% It is a mistake to suppose that the splendid have 00:12:01.770 --> 00:12:05.850 align:middle line:84% any intention of surrendering their splendor, 00:12:05.850 --> 00:12:09.210 align:middle line:84% and identity is questioned only when it is menaced, 00:12:09.210 --> 00:12:11.970 align:middle line:84% as when the mighty begins to fall 00:12:11.970 --> 00:12:15.420 align:middle line:84% or when the wretched begin to rise 00:12:15.420 --> 00:12:19.890 align:middle line:84% or when the stranger enters the gates never thereafter 00:12:19.890 --> 00:12:21.480 align:middle line:90% to be a stranger. 00:12:21.480 --> 00:12:23.700 align:middle line:84% The stranger's presence making you 00:12:23.700 --> 00:12:29.850 align:middle line:84% the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself. 00:12:29.850 --> 00:12:32.730 align:middle line:84% Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers 00:12:32.730 --> 00:12:35.070 align:middle line:84% the nakedness of the self, in which case 00:12:35.070 --> 00:12:37.470 align:middle line:84% it is best that the garment be loose a little, 00:12:37.470 --> 00:12:40.380 align:middle line:84% like the robes of the desert through which robes one's 00:12:40.380 --> 00:12:45.210 align:middle line:84% nakedness can always be felt and, sometimes, discerned. 00:12:45.210 --> 00:12:49.230 align:middle line:84% This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power 00:12:49.230 --> 00:12:50.700 align:middle line:90% to change one's robes. 00:12:50.700 --> 00:12:54.080 align:middle line:90% 00:12:54.080 --> 00:12:57.320 align:middle line:84% Now, this notion of changing identity 00:12:57.320 --> 00:13:00.800 align:middle line:84% when you meet strangers is really 00:13:00.800 --> 00:13:05.630 align:middle line:84% something which we are going through in our culture 00:13:05.630 --> 00:13:09.680 align:middle line:90% more and more, obviously. 00:13:09.680 --> 00:13:12.680 align:middle line:84% I have this poem, which I'll read tonight about how 00:13:12.680 --> 00:13:14.630 align:middle line:90% my kids go to a school. 00:13:14.630 --> 00:13:17.270 align:middle line:84% Their grade school has 35 first languages. 00:13:17.270 --> 00:13:19.160 align:middle line:84% The Minneapolis School System, everybody 00:13:19.160 --> 00:13:21.705 align:middle line:84% thinks it looks like Lake Wobegon, 00:13:21.705 --> 00:13:23.330 align:middle line:84% like a bunch of Scandinavian Lutherans, 00:13:23.330 --> 00:13:25.160 align:middle line:84% but actually the Minneapolis school system 00:13:25.160 --> 00:13:28.490 align:middle line:84% is 80% students of color, 150 first languages. 00:13:28.490 --> 00:13:31.020 align:middle line:90% 00:13:31.020 --> 00:13:33.700 align:middle line:84% It's an entirely different world. 00:13:33.700 --> 00:13:35.850 align:middle line:84% It's not the world that I grew up in. 00:13:35.850 --> 00:13:38.670 align:middle line:90% 00:13:38.670 --> 00:13:40.800 align:middle line:84% And so when strangers are meeting strangers, 00:13:40.800 --> 00:13:42.120 align:middle line:90% we're all constantly shifting. 00:13:42.120 --> 00:13:45.240 align:middle line:84% And we have to reconfigure, and we understand our identity. 00:13:45.240 --> 00:13:47.340 align:middle line:84% We understand and look at ourselves 00:13:47.340 --> 00:13:54.790 align:middle line:84% in the light of a larger sense of culture, a sense of history. 00:13:54.790 --> 00:14:00.270 align:middle line:84% Now, I want to invoke here a great [INAUDIBLE] father, TS 00:14:00.270 --> 00:14:01.920 align:middle line:90% Eliot. 00:14:01.920 --> 00:14:03.220 align:middle line:90% TS Eliot said two things. 00:14:03.220 --> 00:14:07.950 align:middle line:84% One, he said about tradition, he said, the tradition, 00:14:07.950 --> 00:14:10.600 align:middle line:90% the canon is not unchanging. 00:14:10.600 --> 00:14:12.228 align:middle line:84% It is constantly changing, and he 00:14:12.228 --> 00:14:14.520 align:middle line:84% says, you bring new writers in at the end of tradition, 00:14:14.520 --> 00:14:17.710 align:middle line:84% it alters your sense of the tradition. 00:14:17.710 --> 00:14:19.200 align:middle line:90% This is what Eliot himself did. 00:14:19.200 --> 00:14:20.220 align:middle line:90% I mean, he came in. 00:14:20.220 --> 00:14:23.280 align:middle line:84% He elevated the metaphysicals and the Elizabethans. 00:14:23.280 --> 00:14:28.230 align:middle line:84% He downgraded the romantics because that was his lineage, 00:14:28.230 --> 00:14:31.290 align:middle line:84% and in a sense, he redefined the tradition. 00:14:31.290 --> 00:14:38.190 align:middle line:84% Well, if you put Toni Morrison or VS Naipaul 00:14:38.190 --> 00:14:43.470 align:middle line:84% or Maxine Hong Kingston at the end of 20th century literature, 00:14:43.470 --> 00:14:47.310 align:middle line:84% then your sense of the Anglo-American tradition 00:14:47.310 --> 00:14:50.010 align:middle line:90% changes. 00:14:50.010 --> 00:14:52.963 align:middle line:90% Certain things look differently. 00:14:52.963 --> 00:14:54.630 align:middle line:84% You know, Toni Morrison talks about this 00:14:54.630 --> 00:14:59.460 align:middle line:84% in "Playing In The Dark" about how once race, for instance, 00:14:59.460 --> 00:15:01.890 align:middle line:84% becomes a central American theme, as opposed 00:15:01.890 --> 00:15:05.130 align:middle line:84% to something that's peripheral, certain works become 00:15:05.130 --> 00:15:06.330 align:middle line:90% more central. 00:15:06.330 --> 00:15:10.470 align:middle line:84% Benito Cereno becomes more interesting. 00:15:10.470 --> 00:15:12.910 align:middle line:84% The Pequot looks like a multicultural group, 00:15:12.910 --> 00:15:14.610 align:middle line:90% which it is. 00:15:14.610 --> 00:15:17.400 align:middle line:84% But somebody like Fitzgerald looks like, well, he sort 00:15:17.400 --> 00:15:19.980 align:middle line:90% of missed the boat, didn't he? 00:15:19.980 --> 00:15:26.190 align:middle line:84% Whereas Faulkner becomes I think more central 00:15:26.190 --> 00:15:29.760 align:middle line:84% because he realizes that there were 00:15:29.760 --> 00:15:32.410 align:middle line:84% two primal scenes at the center of the founding of the country, 00:15:32.410 --> 00:15:35.010 align:middle line:84% which was the relation to the Native Americans 00:15:35.010 --> 00:15:36.930 align:middle line:90% and African-American slaves. 00:15:36.930 --> 00:15:40.620 align:middle line:90% 00:15:40.620 --> 00:15:44.460 align:middle line:84% The second thing Elliot said is what writers want is wit, 00:15:44.460 --> 00:15:48.240 align:middle line:84% and he said by wit, we don't simply mean great erudition. 00:15:48.240 --> 00:15:53.460 align:middle line:84% He says wit is a sense that people at different times 00:15:53.460 --> 00:16:01.860 align:middle line:84% and in different places have lived and thought differently, 00:16:01.860 --> 00:16:05.900 align:middle line:84% which is simply an argument for a multicultural society, 00:16:05.900 --> 00:16:08.150 align:middle line:90% for multicultural writing. 00:16:08.150 --> 00:16:11.472 align:middle line:90% Not for a monoculture. 00:16:11.472 --> 00:16:13.430 align:middle line:84% And if you look back to what The Waste Land is, 00:16:13.430 --> 00:16:15.985 align:middle line:84% The Waste Land is in a certain way, 00:16:15.985 --> 00:16:17.360 align:middle line:84% it's one of the first performance 00:16:17.360 --> 00:16:20.150 align:middle line:90% poems in the 20th century. 00:16:20.150 --> 00:16:22.250 align:middle line:84% You listen to Elliot read it, that's what it is. 00:16:22.250 --> 00:16:28.040 align:middle line:90% 00:16:28.040 --> 00:16:30.320 align:middle line:84% If you recontextualize work differently, 00:16:30.320 --> 00:16:32.240 align:middle line:84% if you define the tradition differently, 00:16:32.240 --> 00:16:34.340 align:middle line:84% then different things happen about the way 00:16:34.340 --> 00:16:37.903 align:middle line:90% you judge literature. 00:16:37.903 --> 00:16:40.070 align:middle line:84% A few years ago, there was a whole controversy where 00:16:40.070 --> 00:16:43.580 align:middle line:84% Harold Bloom wrote about the introduction to The Best 00:16:43.580 --> 00:16:47.330 align:middle line:84% American Poetry, and in the year that Adrienne Rich chose, 00:16:47.330 --> 00:16:51.140 align:middle line:84% he chose none of the poems from Adrienne Rich's year. 00:16:51.140 --> 00:16:55.130 align:middle line:84% And his idea was that these are my criteria 00:16:55.130 --> 00:16:59.840 align:middle line:84% and these poems are just don't cut it. 00:16:59.840 --> 00:17:07.170 align:middle line:84% Now he's entitled to set up his aesthetic criteria that way, 00:17:07.170 --> 00:17:10.050 align:middle line:84% but it doesn't mean it's the only game in town. 00:17:10.050 --> 00:17:11.800 align:middle line:90% It doesn't mean that you can-- 00:17:11.800 --> 00:17:15.359 align:middle line:84% for instance, I mean I think Bloom judges poetry mainly 00:17:15.359 --> 00:17:16.950 align:middle line:84% from an Anglo-American tradition, 00:17:16.950 --> 00:17:19.890 align:middle line:84% and it's a specific type of Anglo American tradition. 00:17:19.890 --> 00:17:23.065 align:middle line:90% 00:17:23.065 --> 00:17:24.339 align:middle line:90% Or like Helen Vendler. 00:17:24.339 --> 00:17:26.230 align:middle line:84% When Helen Vendler talks about formal verse, 00:17:26.230 --> 00:17:29.020 align:middle line:90% she talks about her verse. 00:17:29.020 --> 00:17:30.460 align:middle line:84% But if you talk about formal verse 00:17:30.460 --> 00:17:35.950 align:middle line:84% and you go you talk about say, public poetry, 00:17:35.950 --> 00:17:44.980 align:middle line:84% and you take Dante, Villon, Blake, Kipling, and Brecht, 00:17:44.980 --> 00:17:49.960 align:middle line:84% and Langston Hughes, you get a very different definition 00:17:49.960 --> 00:17:52.500 align:middle line:90% of what formal poetry is. 00:17:52.500 --> 00:17:53.000 align:middle line:90%