I come from the trenches of community college,
and I don't worry much about whether students have
Anglo culture or civilization.
I worry that they don't have their own culture,
they have nothing, except what they
can buy for their movie ticket or whatever
is given to them commercially.
Yeah.
Well, because-- yeah you grew up in a vacuum.
If you're not getting that culture,
that's the only culture that they get.
So-- so I suppose the thing is that the poetry is
an antidote to that but they're not getting the book.
I mean, if I was in charge of education in this country,
I'd send people like [? Achebe ?] and Sekou
and Marilyn just around every single high school
in the country.
And I'd have them reading every single high school
in the country and there'd be kids that go Oh, poetry this
is interesting.
And if you mix them up with a couple of spoken word poets
and get all of them together, I mean
the kids wouldn't know if everything is appropriate,
this is great, this is speaking to my life.
Yeah, the commercial culture is like [INAUDIBLE] Hicks,
one soul and it doesn't really tell you anything,
it's-- just it's because people you don't want people to know
that this is--
they don't want to live in democracy.
You talked about teaching a class on colonialism
where you taught a lot of authors
and you said that if you tried to put Ashbery in there
someone like that they would totally stick out.
What exactly precisely did you find
in the language of those writers in which more contemporary,
Anglo dudes, couldn't fit?
Well, look many different things.
First of all that they looked at themselves, all the writers
as members of the group not simply as an individual.
OK.
Now, what does it mean to be a white writer?
OK.
Most white writers don't even ask them.
What does it mean to be white in this country?
What is white identity?
What would be a creation of a new white identity?
In other words, Ashbery and those people
I would imagine just think of themselves as individuals.
I'm an individual, which is a strain in American society.
But they think of themselves as a member of the group,
you don't do that.
But the thing is if you put Ashbery and you had
him read in--
Quincy Troupe says, I read in Harlem,
I go read Indian reservations, I go read at Harvard,
I go read at the [INAUDIBLE].
Someone like Ashbery, he reads at the [INAUDIBLE] or Harvard,
he doesn't go to the Nuyorican Cafe,
he doesn't go to the Native American reservation.
Now, when Asheury gets up and speaks and reads,
and Lucille Clifton is reading to an audience,
certain things are--
so Lucille Clifton is aware that she's a member of a group.
She is aware that by definition what it means to be
Black is contrast to what it means to be white.
Ashbery doesn't think like my whiteness plays off
all these people of color, what does it mean?
Secondly, it's a whole history.
It's a history of race and colonialism in this country
and around the globe that all of these people take into account.
It is the notion that the public event bleeds into the private.
Salman Rushdie talks about how Jane--
Jane Austen can write these novels
without the Battle of Waterloo bleeding
into the reality of her story.
OK.
All of these writers never felt and this
is including white writers like Coetzee and Gordimer
that the public historical political events bleed
into the private events.
They are in a separate room, it is assumption
that values are constantly in flux because Naipaul talks
about how this British woman author writes about how
these little moral questions like,
should I condemn others if I model myself?
And-- and/or the Hampstead novel where it's like can
the lower class boy make it with the middle class girl?
OK.
And he says if the pound drops--
pound drops and they said that after the novel came out
some huge amount.
He says the values change once things like that happen.
Oh, the other thing is that Ishiguro talks about this,
he says he used to be if you're a British author,
you could write and assume that people in Kuala Lumpur,
you could write about Eaton or Oxford.
OK, or society in London and you would just
assume that the people in Kuala Lumpur
should be interested in it.
And if they didn't know enough to understand
what was going on in the novel they'd damn well better.
Now, he says the British can no longer make that assumption,
we Americans still make that assumption.
Oh, it is also a relationship to language as it's spoken.
It's the colloquial language and the attempt
to get colloquial language into poetry.
The different languages that people speak
and that requires being up in the street
and hearing those languages.
And I don't feel like somebody like, Merrill
is out on the street listening to those languages.
I'm not saying that they're terrible poets,
but I have to-- when Helen Vendler talks about James
Merrill and she goes there comes a point in the great poet's
career when you feel like somebody
is writing down your time your generation.
And she's saying that about James Merrill,
I want to say-- say what I mean, it's a very rarefied world
that Merrill lives in.
I mean, politics of the 70s and 60s
never intrudes, race never intrudes,
the revolutions that took place all over the globe
never intruded.
The uncovering of buried histories
is another part of this.
In other words, when Chinua Achebe looks at Marlow
and says there's another history,
there's a history of those people on the shore.
When he takes --when Walter Benjamin says history
is a tale of victors.
Well, there's other people who write
in the tales of the losers and those
are the tales that is the history of this [INAUDIBLE]..
Now, what the difference I would say between someone
like Gordimer and Coetzee, compared to American writers
is they assume race is important,
they assume colonialism is live issue,
they assume the political impacts on the person.
They're looking at the consequences of history
on the lives of individuals.
And they do not they see themselves
as members of the group partly because they
knew before apartheid coming that some great thing was--
some great change was coming and they were no longer
going to be in power.
And so they were at that point when
Baldwin is talking about identities change,
it's changed only when it is menaced,
is when the wretched begin to rise.
The splendid began to fall, they knew that was happening.
America, most of white middle class America,
would-- they get the sense once in a while.
But most of the time, we don't like to think about,
that our power may be on the wane
or that we're meeting strangers. it also
has to do with your own personal interactions with the society.
I mean, it's like Beverly Daniel Tatum writes this book,
Why Do All the Black Kids Sit in the Lunchroom Together.
So it looks like at colleges and high schools,
the Black kids are segregating themselves.
But when they actually looked at it,
the Black kids had more interracial interactions
per person than the White kids.
But it was the Black kids that were separating themselves.
It's a question if you go out and you're dealing
with the various others or not.
And then finally, it has to do with the notion that Miłosz
said, you mean somebody like Ashbery or say
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is questioning the ability
of language to describe reality.
I understand that theoretically.
I had-- I took those drugs of my rhetoric,
I suffered through Derrida, but Miłosz I think is right?
In other situations language is important.
And it does name reality and we know that.
And the question it in the certain ways seems in those
instances, a luxury that some people can afford and some
people can't.
In other words and the other thing
is that there's a whole theoretical thing,
which I won't get but it has to do with modernism and realism.
And how modernism assumes by moving into myth that we
understand what the realistic text is behind the text
that we read modernist texts like Kafka,
there's an ur, sort of palimpsest
of a realistic text behind it that we
use to make sense of the mythic or surreal text.
But if you're a writer of color, there's
not that realistic text in the culture.
You have to build that realistic text
before you can even begin to do that-- to do that reference.
In my current book of poetry, I have a sci-fi sonnet sequence,
which is really about the internment camps.
But it's only there because I've written
so much about the internment camps,
I can assume somebody's reading my book they understand,
well, there were the internment camps, this happened.
And then I can write in a very unrealistic way
about the internment camps because people
know what the reference is.
But I had to do all this writing to make sure
that I felt like people know what the referent is.
It's like in the middle of China Man Maxine
Hong Kingston just lists the anti-immigration laws
against Asians.
And she said, I just did that I mean, it's not very artistic
but she said, I just-- people thought I didn't know it.
So I wanted to prove I knew it and then I want to just put it
there, so that ever after no Asian-American writer
would have to write those things again.
Well, thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]