WEBVTT

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I come from the trenches
of community college,

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and I don't worry much
about whether students have

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Anglo culture or civilization.

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I worry that they don't
have their own culture,

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they have nothing,
except what they

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can buy for their movie
ticket or whatever

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is given to them commercially.

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Yeah.

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Well, because-- yeah
you grew up in a vacuum.

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If you're not
getting that culture,

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that's the only
culture that they get.

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So-- so I suppose the
thing is that the poetry is

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an antidote to that but
they're not getting the book.

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I mean, if I was in charge
of education in this country,

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I'd send people like
[? Achebe ?] and Sekou

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and Marilyn just around
every single high school

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in the country.

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And I'd have them reading
every single high school

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in the country and there'd be
kids that go Oh, poetry this

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is interesting.

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And if you mix them up with
a couple of spoken word poets

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and get all of them
together, I mean

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the kids wouldn't know if
everything is appropriate,

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this is great, this is
speaking to my life.

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Yeah, the commercial culture
is like [INAUDIBLE] Hicks,

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one soul and it doesn't
really tell you anything,

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it's-- just it's because people
you don't want people to know

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that this is--

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they don't want to
live in democracy.

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You talked about teaching
a class on colonialism

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where you taught
a lot of authors

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and you said that if you
tried to put Ashbery in there

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someone like that they
would totally stick out.

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What exactly
precisely did you find

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in the language of those writers
in which more contemporary,

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Anglo dudes, couldn't fit?

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Well, look many
different things.

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First of all that they looked
at themselves, all the writers

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as members of the group not
simply as an individual.

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OK.

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Now, what does it mean
to be a white writer?

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OK.

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Most white writers
don't even ask them.

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What does it mean to be
white in this country?

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What is white identity?

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What would be a creation
of a new white identity?

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In other words, Ashbery
and those people

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I would imagine just think
of themselves as individuals.

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I'm an individual, which is
a strain in American society.

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But they think of themselves
as a member of the group,

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you don't do that.

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But the thing is if you
put Ashbery and you had

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him read in--

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Quincy Troupe says,
I read in Harlem,

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I go read Indian reservations,
I go read at Harvard,

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I go read at the [INAUDIBLE].

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Someone like Ashbery, he reads
at the [INAUDIBLE] or Harvard,

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he doesn't go to
the Nuyorican Cafe,

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he doesn't go to the Native
American reservation.

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Now, when Asheury gets
up and speaks and reads,

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and Lucille Clifton is
reading to an audience,

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certain things are--

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so Lucille Clifton is aware
that she's a member of a group.

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She is aware that by
definition what it means to be

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Black is contrast to what
it means to be white.

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Ashbery doesn't think like
my whiteness plays off

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all these people of
color, what does it mean?

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Secondly, it's a whole history.

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It's a history of race and
colonialism in this country

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and around the globe that all of
these people take into account.

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It is the notion that the public
event bleeds into the private.

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Salman Rushdie talks
about how Jane--

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Jane Austen can
write these novels

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without the Battle
of Waterloo bleeding

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into the reality of her story.

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OK.

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All of these writers
never felt and this

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is including white writers
like Coetzee and Gordimer

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that the public historical
political events bleed

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into the private events.

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They are in a separate
room, it is assumption

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that values are constantly
in flux because Naipaul talks

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about how this British woman
author writes about how

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these little moral
questions like,

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should I condemn others
if I model myself?

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And-- and/or the Hampstead
novel where it's like can

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the lower class boy make it
with the middle class girl?

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OK.

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And he says if the pound drops--

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pound drops and they said
that after the novel came out

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some huge amount.

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He says the values change
once things like that happen.

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Oh, the other thing is that
Ishiguro talks about this,

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he says he used to be if
you're a British author,

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you could write and assume
that people in Kuala Lumpur,

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you could write about
Eaton or Oxford.

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OK, or society in London
and you would just

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assume that the
people in Kuala Lumpur

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should be interested in it.

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And if they didn't know
enough to understand

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what was going on in the
novel they'd damn well better.

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Now, he says the British can
no longer make that assumption,

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we Americans still
make that assumption.

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Oh, it is also a relationship
to language as it's spoken.

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It's the colloquial
language and the attempt

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to get colloquial
language into poetry.

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The different languages
that people speak

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and that requires
being up in the street

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and hearing those languages.

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And I don't feel like
somebody like, Merrill

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is out on the street
listening to those languages.

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I'm not saying that
they're terrible poets,

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but I have to-- when Helen
Vendler talks about James

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Merrill and she goes there comes
a point in the great poet's

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career when you
feel like somebody

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is writing down your
time your generation.

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And she's saying that
about James Merrill,

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I want to say-- say what I
mean, it's a very rarefied world

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that Merrill lives in.

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I mean, politics
of the 70s and 60s

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never intrudes,
race never intrudes,

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the revolutions that took
place all over the globe

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never intruded.

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The uncovering of
buried histories

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is another part of this.

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In other words, when Chinua
Achebe looks at Marlow

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and says there's
another history,

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there's a history of
those people on the shore.

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When he takes --when Walter
Benjamin says history

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is a tale of victors.

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Well, there's other
people who write

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in the tales of the
losers and those

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are the tales that is the
history of this [INAUDIBLE]..

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Now, what the difference I
would say between someone

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like Gordimer and Coetzee,
compared to American writers

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is they assume
race is important,

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they assume colonialism
is live issue,

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they assume the political
impacts on the person.

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They're looking at the
consequences of history

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on the lives of individuals.

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And they do not
they see themselves

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as members of the group
partly because they

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knew before apartheid coming
that some great thing was--

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some great change was coming
and they were no longer

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going to be in power.

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And so they were
at that point when

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Baldwin is talking
about identities change,

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it's changed only
when it is menaced,

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is when the wretched
begin to rise.

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The splendid began to fall,
they knew that was happening.

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America, most of white
middle class America,

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would-- they get the
sense once in a while.

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But most of the time, we
don't like to think about,

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that our power
may be on the wane

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or that we're meeting
strangers. it also

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has to do with your own personal
interactions with the society.

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I mean, it's like Beverly
Daniel Tatum writes this book,

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Why Do All the Black Kids Sit
in the Lunchroom Together.

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So it looks like at
colleges and high schools,

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the Black kids are
segregating themselves.

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But when they
actually looked at it,

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the Black kids had more
interracial interactions

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per person than the White kids.

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But it was the Black kids that
were separating themselves.

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It's a question if you
go out and you're dealing

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with the various others or not.

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And then finally, it has to
do with the notion that Miłosz

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said, you mean somebody
like Ashbery or say

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the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets
is questioning the ability

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of language to describe reality.

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I understand that theoretically.

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I had-- I took those
drugs of my rhetoric,

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I suffered through Derrida,
but Miłosz I think is right?

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In other situations
language is important.

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And it does name reality
and we know that.

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And the question it in the
certain ways seems in those

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instances, a luxury that some
people can afford and some

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people can't.

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In other words and
the other thing

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is that there's a whole
theoretical thing,

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which I won't get but it has to
do with modernism and realism.

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And how modernism assumes
by moving into myth that we

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understand what the realistic
text is behind the text

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that we read modernist
texts like Kafka,

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there's an ur,
sort of palimpsest

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of a realistic text
behind it that we

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use to make sense of the
mythic or surreal text.

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But if you're a writer
of color, there's

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not that realistic
text in the culture.

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You have to build
that realistic text

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before you can even begin to
do that-- to do that reference.

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In my current book of poetry, I
have a sci-fi sonnet sequence,

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which is really about
the internment camps.

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But it's only there
because I've written

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so much about the
internment camps,

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I can assume somebody's reading
my book they understand,

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well, there were the internment
camps, this happened.

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And then I can write in
a very unrealistic way

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about the internment
camps because people

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know what the reference is.

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But I had to do all this
writing to make sure

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that I felt like people
know what the referent is.

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It's like in the middle
of China Man Maxine

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Hong Kingston just lists
the anti-immigration laws

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against Asians.

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And she said, I just did that
I mean, it's not very artistic

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but she said, I just-- people
thought I didn't know it.

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So I wanted to prove I knew it
and then I want to just put it

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there, so that ever after
no Asian-American writer

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would have to write
those things again.

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Well, thank you very much.

00:11:02.480 --> 00:11:05.830 align:middle line:90%
[APPLAUSE]

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