POETRY IS NOT A COUNTRY CLUB: Reflecting on "The Change"

According to Hofer's transcription of an event at the Where Were We Art Writing Festival in Denmark, Perloff stated: I think the romanticization, where everybody kept calling him the poor child Michael Brown, and they constantly showed photographs of him in the media when he had been about 12 y...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Callaloo 2017-06, Vol.40 (3), p.75-97
Main Author: Miller, Isaac Ginsberg
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
21st century
Aesthetics
African American literature
African Americans
American literature
Authenticity
Authorship
Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917-2000)
Brown, Michael
Caribbean literature
Chapbooks
Children
Collaboration
Disputes
Dove, Rita
Essays
Intersectionality
Literary canon
Literary criticism
Literary influences
Logic
Moten, Fred
Multiculturalism & pluralism
Pardlo, Gregory
Poetry
Poets
Politics
Publishing
Publishing industry
Race
Racism
Rankine, Claudia (1963- )
Recognition
Scandals
Transcription
Websites
Writers
Writing
Year in review
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Summary:According to Hofer's transcription of an event at the Where Were We Art Writing Festival in Denmark, Perloff stated: I think the romanticization, where everybody kept calling him the poor child Michael Brown, and they constantly showed photographs of him in the media when he had been about 12 years old. [...]Perloff's comments about Michael Brown offer a commentary (albeit an unintentional one) on the very aspect of Citizen that Perloff praises: the exposure of "a racism so guarded and carefully masked as to make it all the more insidious." According to Derricotte, Cave Canem "was established in recognition of a need for a safe space in which African-American poets, marginalized from mainstream American poetry, often writing in isolation or having to explain and/or justify their words, could meet, write, read their poetry, talk, listen, debate aesthetics, have fun, and, generally, celebrate each other's existence" (Derricotte, "Cave Canem" 974). [...]we might already begin to wonder what impacts on (post-Black Arts) African American poetry will emerge from newfound scholarly, aesthetic, and popular forms of institutional recognition.17 There are, of course, significant contradictions posed by the aesthetic and political stakes of institutional acceptance.
ISSN:0161-2492
1080-6512
1080-6512
DOI:10.1353/cal.2017.0121