In the same way--
I think it's David Lodge that talks
about Irish literature, in which you can define [? outsider ?]
literature in a certain way, where you relegate
to a secondary status popular ballads and dialect poems.
But who makes those decisions about how
you define what is the major condition
and what are the minor conditions?
Now, one of the things that happens
when you begin to help people who
are in exile, in immigration-- either internally
within a country or externally-- is
you have people confronting many different languages.
Now, in The Dialectical Imagination,
here's what M. Bakhtin, the Russian critic,
says about the novel.
But it really, I think, is about what
the condition of the 20th century
is, and certainly the 21st century.
"The new cultural and creative consciousness
lies in an actively polyglot world.
The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly.
The period of national languages,
coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end.
Languages throw light on each other.
One language can, after all, see itself only
in the light of another language.
The naive and stubborn coexistence
of languages within a given language also comes to an end.
That is, there is no more peaceful coexistence
between territorial dialects, social and professional
dialects and jargons, literary language, generic languages
within literary languages, epochs in languages,
and so forth."
So this idea of a polyglot world,
which is the world that we're living in,
which is obviously-- my kids go to school
where there's 150 first languages-- that's
the condition of our society at this point.
That's the condition of the globe.
And the writers who are attuned to these differences, who've
taken them in as the course of their experience of growing
up or becoming educated, are best
able to give back to us what we are living through.
I'll read to you just a couple of poems on this.
I'll read you three of them.
Here's "Midsummer" by Derek Walcott.
Actually, it's number 23 from "Midsummer,"
which is that book of [? sort of episodic ?]
short poems that he wrote.
And this is about Walcott's experience
about being a scholarship kid.
Except he comes to this adult in this way.
But one of the things that the scholarship kid does
is when he reads about-- he or she-- reads about the capital,
they have dreams of becoming like the writers
in the capital.
It's like V.S. Naipaul talks about how
when he traveled to England for the first time,
he thought he was going to become Somerset Maugham.
And not really recognizing that his own subject was not
to become Somerset Maugham, but was
something entirely different.
So here's Walcott.
"With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings,
midsummer's leaves race to extinction
like the roar of a Brixton riot tunnel by water hoses.
They seethe towards autumn's fire--
it is their nature, being men as well as leaves,
to die for the sun.
The leaf stems tug at their chains, the branches bending
like Boer cattle under Tory whips that drag every wagon
nearer to apartheid.
And, for me, that closes the child's fairy tale
of an antique England--
fairy rings, thatched cottages fenced
with dog roses, a green gale lifting
the hair of Warwickshire.
I was there to add some color to the British theater.
'But Blacks can't do Shakespeare,
they have no experience.'
This was true.
Their thick skulls bled with rancor
when the riot police and the skinheads exchanged
quips you could trace to the sonnets, or the Moor's eclipse.
Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger,
and snow had inducted me into white fellowships,
like Calibans howled down the barred streets
of an empire that began with Caedmon's raceless dew,
and is ending in the alleys of Brixton,
burning like Turner's ships."
And I love what he does in the [? tradition ?] in that,
"Praise had bled my lines of any more white anger, snow inducted
me into white fellowships, while Calibans howled down
the barred streets of an empire that began with Caedmon's
raceless dew and is ending in the streets of Brixton,
burning like Turner's ships."
He's creating a whole different vision
of the British, a whole different vision
of Shakespeare.
It's like when Chinua Achebe says--
he says he was reading Heart of Darkness,
and he's identifying with Marlow and Kurtz.
And there's a passage where they're
looking at the unintelligible savages,
screaming and shouting like caricatures on the shore,
and suddenly Achebe goes, wait a second, that could
be like my great-grandparents.
Do I think my great grandparents were unintelligible savages?
And for Achebe, that moment causes
him to question the artistry of Conrad,
and he argues that the novel is less great than it is.
We could argue.
But what is also crucial is that that moment leads
to Achebe writing Things Fall Apart,
which is about the Igbo civilization in Nigeria
just before and just when the Europeans are coming in.
And what we see is no, they were not unintelligible savages.
They had a culture, they had a judicial system,
they had an economic system.
If he had continued to read Marlow the way he was taught,
he would have never written Things Fall Apart.
For Walcott to come to this realization
is to realize something about himself
and his place in the world, and to reread history differently.
I was going to read you "Philosophy of the Cool"
by Sekou Sundiata.
Instead, I'll read "How I Got That Name" by Marilyn
Chin, an essay on assimilation.
"I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin.
Oh, how I love that resoluteness of that first person singular,
followed by that stalwart indicative of 'be' without
the uncertain i-n-g of 'becoming.'
Of course, the name has been changed somewhere between Angel
Island and the sea, when my father, the paper person,
in the late 1950s, obsessed with a bombshell blonde,
transliterated Mei Ling to Marilyn.
And nobody dared question his initial impulse--
for we all know lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.
My mother couldn't pronounce the 'r.'
She dubbed me 'numba one female offshoot' for brevity--
henceforth, she will live and die in sublime ignorance,
flanked by loving children and the 'kitchen deity.'
While my father dithers, a tomcat in Hong Kong trash--
a gambler, a petty thug, who bought
a chain of chopsuey joints in Piss River, Oregon
with bootlegged Gucci cash.
Nobody dared question his integrity
given his nice, devout daughters and his bright, industrious
sons, as if filial piety were the standard by which
all earthly men were measured.
Oh, how trustworthy our daughters,
how thrifty our sons.
How we've managed to fool the experts in education,
statistics, and demography--
we're not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning.
Indeed, they can use us.
But the 'Model Minority' is a tease.
We know you are watching, so we refuse to give you any.
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots.
The further west we go, we'll hit east.
The deeper down we dig, we'll find China.
History has turned its stomach on a black polluted beach--
where life doesn't hinge on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our lover in the final episode of Santa
Barbara will lean over a scented candle and call us 'bitch.'
Oh God, where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources.
Then, one redolent and spring morning, the Great Patriarch
Chin peered down from his kiosk in heaven
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a square head and a nose without a bridge.
Another's profile long and knobbed as a gourd.
A third, the sad, brutish one, may never, never marry.
And I, his least favorite-- 'not quite boiled,
not quite cooked,' a plump pomfret simmering
in my juices--
too listless to fight for my people's destiny.
'To kill without resistance is not slaughter,' says
the proverb.
So, I wait for imminent death.
The fact that this death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.
So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong,
granddaughter of Jack 'the patriarch' and brooding Suilin
Fong, daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong and G.G. Chin
the infamous, sister of a dozen, cousin of a million,
survived by everybody and forgotten by all.
She was neither black nor white, neither cherished
nor vanquished, just another squatter in her own bamboo
grove minding her poetry--
when one day heaven was unmerciful,
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She did not flinch nor writhe, nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed.
Solid as wood, happily a little gnawed, tattered,
mesmerized by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away."
And one of the things you can see in this
is she's just turning [? the tradition ?]
in on itself.
And there's all these sort of sly little textual
to Williams's wheelbarrow or Berryman's line,
"My mother said, to admit you're bored
is to have no inner resources.
I conclude, I have no inner resources."
And then bringing a whole another language and history
into the tradition.
One of the things I feel--
I talked to Marilyn about, is how
she needs to write some criticism
to get people to understand the contextual history and way
of writing her poems.
Because she's drawing from the traditional Anglo-American
canon, she studied under Donald Justice,
but actually she retreated from the Writers' Workshop
off to go to the international section of the Writers'
Workshop, because she didn't feel welcome,
like a lot of writers of color who went to the Iowa workshop.
[INAUDIBLE] And so she goes back to Du Fu
and Li Po, the classical Chinese texts.
And so if we want to say that in order
to understand and evaluate some of these literature
you have to understand that sources,
well then I have to ask Harold Bloom, for instance,
well, do you know Chinese literature?
How well do you know Chinese literature?
How well do you know this [? content? ?]
And so in a way, and this goes off
the subject of why I think a lot of writers of color
have ended up writing memoirs--
Garrett Hongo and I talked about this--
is because the intellectual, cultural, and historical
background for our poetry isn't there in the culture.
If I'm Robert Lowell, and I come from the Lowells of Boston,
and I come from a long line of lovely poets, ambassadors
and presidents of Harvard and I refer
to my family and my family history, everybody knows it.
I don't have to footnote a thing.
It's all mainstream knowledge.
So, I understood almost immediately,
being educated in the culture, how
to read Robert Lowell's poems.
But that's not necessarily true with other people's poems.
And so I wrote my memoirs in a way
to give that background to understanding what it is I'm
doing in my poetry.
One of the things I realized--
I was actually looking at my poetry
last night thinking about this lecture
and reading my criticism, and realizing that sometimes I
don't even realize the context of what I'm working on.
Because it's not common knowledge in the culture.
I have to constantly make myself conscious of what actually
is going on in the world.
I was reading the other day Dana Gioia,
who actually has in new book an interesting essay
about literature in the post-book age.
One of the things I admire about the essay
is he at least acknowledges there's
this whole other phenomenon going on in the country,
of spoken word, of rap, of cowboy poetry,
of popular poetry.
Now, we are in this point in the culture where those things seem
divided between, say, the Academy of American Poets
or the poetry you see in poetry magazines.
What I would suggest is--
this isn't quite the same parallel,
but it's interesting to think about--
to think about the anthologies in the 50s.
If you go back to the 50s, there were two main anthologies.
One was written by Donald Allen, which is the New American
Poetry, and the other was the New Poets of England
and America, and it's by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis
Simpson.
And in the Pack, Hall, Simpson are
people like Wilbur and Lowell and Douglas Snodgrass,
and I think Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich.
OK.
And the other one are people like Gary Snyder
and John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg.
OK.
Now in the 50s, those people in the Allen anthology
were looked at as the Indians.
And the people in the other one, we're
looking at the pale faces.
The [INAUDIBLE] was that the people in the Allen anthology
were the raw, and the people in the Hall, Pack, Simpson
anthology were the cooked.
OK.
And the people in the Hall, Pack, Simpson anthology
looked at the people in the [? Hall ?] anthology
as uncouth savages.
But obviously now, you can't do an anthology of that generation
without including all the poets I just named.
And we don't think--
Ginsberg or Snyder or Denise Leverov,
they're no longer outré or savages--
or Ashbery-- they're part--
or O'Hara-- they're of just our tradition
of contemporary poetry.
So the question is, then, when we
divide say the Nuyorican Poetry anthology, Poetry Aloud,
and say, the Morrow Anthology of Young American Poets
or the Weingarten anthology from Godine,
and you look at those two anthologies, they're divided.
The poets-- there's little cross--
actually Jimmy Santiago Baca, who we're gonna talk about
in a second--
is the one the few crossovers.
But what our argument is that maybe in 20,
30 years that division is not going to be there.
And we're going to--
the huge division between spoken word and the academic poetry
is going to seem much less.
Because we're going to have a poetry
that comes out of those things.
One of the poets that I love in this is Sekou Sundiata.
And then the other thing that you have to ask is--
two questions-- is one, is how we evaluate poetry?
Why is why do we think that poetry
on the page in certain quarters is somehow superior to poetry
delivered oral?
Why is it popular or, given the traditions of poetry,
we should go back to oral?
And [INAUDIBLE].
So this is "Philosophy of the Cool" by Sekou Sundiata.
"I've been swimming since water, learning
to sing like the songs.
The oldest one I know goes like this, some people
came from the trees, I remember coming out
of the undertow, the ocean of seas.
The electricity, the explosion, billions
of us crashing with the waves, then blown away into memory.
You can still hear us in the piece of a beat
or in that music made from scratch.
The first word still had roots like a James Brown syllable.
A single cell one minute, a slam dunk the next.
Speed was our need.
I remember salt and air, water, slime, and mud, upright
and thumb, fire and iron.
And most of all, the poetry we had then.
It was open verse, later called Africa.
I remember human life beginning female, gamete that I was then,
zygote that I was when I recalled it.
The Earth was yet negative space,
a canvas stretched from hymen to foreskin to drumskin.
And sleep told us in those days to stay awake.
The Blackness begins, the Blackness ends.
Whoever said there was a light at the end never lived
at the end, never had to run up ahead
to see what it's going to be.
Womb to tomb, to womb, to tomb, to womb.
Who so know so, I mean, I've seen Buddha and Krishna
on the D train, and you wouldn't know the river gods,
the prophets, or the turn of the century
if you couldn't read the latest fashion like proverbs
on t-shirts.
The best things in life are toll-free.
I don't like questions, I don't like answers,
I just like to dance.
I don't have to drive, I'm already driven.
What you got is what you love.
Good things come to those who wait,
better things come to those who don't.
Some people look down and find money,
some people look down and lose their souls.
Shit happens, and it floats.
I recall the first ships that appeared like shadows
on the horizon, and we ran out to greet them with our sweet
palm wine and guaguanco, thinking their books
and their homologues could tell us something about love
and beauty.
But it was more than a nation in the middle
of that frigid Atlantic.
The vomit, the sharks, the babies
with umbilical cords around their necks,
the Earthless rhythm with the water pitching to and fro.
I witnessed the birth of rock and roll.
My mama named Lucy, her real name Lucille.
Without the blues, we go under."
Now, in conclusion, I will say that, invariably,
when I read poems in The New Yorker, I read them and go, eh.
I just go, who cares?
I mean, some of them are good, some are bad, but most of them,
I think who cares?
And the question is what is it that you want from literature?
Kenneth Burke said that literature
should be equipment for living.
OK, that's a very different definition
than an aesthetic definition.
And it also says that perhaps the equipment that each of us
needs for a living might be different.
Here's a quotation from Czeslaw Milosz,
and it speaks about what I'm talking about finally.
It is also a question of what you value, what is important,
and what things seem important in one situation
and not in another.
"A hierarchy of needs is built into the very fabric of reality
and is revealed when a misfortune touches
a human collective, whether that be war, or the rule of terror,
or natural catastrophe.
Then to satisfy hunger is more important than finding food
that suits one's taste--
the simple act of human kindness towards a fellow being
acquires more importance than any refinement of mind.
The fate of a city, of a country,
becomes a center of everyone's attention,
and there is a sudden drop in the number of suicides
committed because of disappointed
love or psychological problems.
A great simplification of everything
occurs, and an individual asks himself
why he took to heart matters that
now seem to have no weight.
And evidently, people's attitudes towards the language
also changes.
It recovers the simplest function
and is again an instrument serving a purpose--
no one doubts that the language must
name reality, which exists objectively,
massive tangible, and terrifying in its concreteness.
All reality is hierarchical simply
because human needs and the dangers threatening people
are arranged on a scale.
No easy agreement can be reached as to what
should occupy first place.
It is not always bread--
often it is the word.
And death is not always the greatest menace,
often slavery is.
Nevertheless, anyone who accepts the existence of such a scale
behaves differently than one who denies it.
The poetic act changes with the amount of background reality
embraced by the poet's consciousness."
[? Read it ?] [? again, ?] "The poetic act changes with
the amount of background reality embraced
by the poet's consciousness.
In our century, that background is, in my opinion,
related to the fragility of things we
call civilization or culture.
What surrounds us here and now is not guaranteed.
It could just as well not exist.
And so man constructs poetry out of the remnants
found in ruins."
One of the ways that I think I judge poetry
and I think about poetry is not only what is there on the page,
but in terms of technical or formal pleasures,
aesthetic pleasures, what we think
of the aesthetic pleasures one gets from the book.
It is also that sense that Milosz talked about,
the amount of background reality that the poet takes in.
And then it also is, we have to think about how--
if poetry has two jobs, in a way,
one is to bring the tradition into the present,
and one is to acknowledge the present.
Then, at times, the difficulty is
to bring what is present in the present that has not
been present in the tradition, and create a language world.
And that job is inherently more difficult
than writing within the givens of the tradition.
In other words, if I write a poem about a still life
by Van Gogh.
OK, there's a whole tradition of poems about that.
But certain other experiences that I go through
or people go through in society--
there are no poems like that.
You have to find those poems, you
have to create a language for this contemporary reality.
And so what I say is when I judge poems,
I also think about it like diving,
the degree of difficulty.
And if you do a simple dive and you may be perfect,
but the degree of difficulty was a one, so the person gets 10.
Where somebody does a more difficult dive
and it's imperfect, so they get an eight.
But the degree of difficulty is three times more, so it's 24.
Now if you don't allow that degree of difficulty in,
if you just keep it on this sort of formal level
then you have one scale.