Blackface and the Poetry Foundation?
“[John Barr] is in fact an extraordinary man, both a poet of passion and the most delicate workmanship, and a man of the material world, especially the world of finance and diplomacy–where, I dare say, passion and delicate workmanship are also necessities. We, who honor literature, also live in this world [sic]… thus he renders the world good service, including in his poems for sure, good thought, and happiness.” [Mary Oliver, from a blurb on the jacket of Grace]
John Barr does indeed appear to be quite a man, widely admired for his financial and interpersonal skills, as Mary Oliver proclaims in the blurb above. There is no reason to doubt that good character and intention have played important roles in his success.
But what I wish to focus on in this post are matters pertaining to some of his writing, especially that found in Grace: An Epic Poem, his most recent book of poetry. And it is a bit amazing to me that this book (available now for ten years) appears to have received only two small notices so far: an enthusiastic paragraph in Library Journal in 1999, wherein Barr is likened to James Joyce, and a somewhat indifferent squib in an amusing 2007 New Yorker article about the Poetry Foundation, by Dana Goodyear, wherein it is revealed that the work was “inspired by family sailing trips around the Windwards and the British Virgin Islands,” back during the dot-com Bubble years. It could be there are some reviews of the book I haven’t seen, of course.
Most readers of Digital Emunction will know that Barr, a multimillionaire investment banker, was named President of the Poetry Foundation in 2004, charged with managing Poetry’s $100 million gift from Ruth Lilly, the late and eccentric pharmaceutical industry heiress. He has also been, according to biographical information on the web, the President of the Poetry Society of America, Chairman of the Board of Bennington College, member of the board at Yaddo, founder of the country’s largest natural gas marketing company, and head of a “prominent investment-banking boutique,” later to become the major broker in the utilities merger craze some years back.
Well, it is perhaps the most idiosyncratic Poet bio since the aviator-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s. And the résumé, of course, explains how the Barrs have managed all that fortunate sailing about the Windwards and other locales, where exotic peoples abound.
To make things even more unusual and interesting, perhaps, Barr is also, with Grace, the author of what some may judge to be, to put it somewhat euphemistically, the most racially outré work of poetic literature published in the United States since Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo.
I know the matter of the “Other” is a complicated thing (I’ve been involved myself in some of those discussions). But it’s not my point to engage with any identity theory or postcolonial analysis here, useful though such approaches often are. I’m not going to talk about the different and often complex ways otherness might be channeled, nor about how those channelings might be poetically deployed in ethically and politically worthwhile ways. I’m not going to talk about Lindsay, Stephen Foster, John Berryman, William Styron, or Araki Yasusada, for example, very different and interesting cases, each, I believe. In any discussion that may ensue from this post, I certainly think it would be valuable to consider these and numerous other historical instances for purposes of comparison and contrast. But for now, I’m merely going to make some framing comments, offer a couple of excerpts from Barr’s epic-length poem, and (though without in any way hiding my own stance and attitude) let people judge for themselves. Then I’ll conclude with a few questions, openly posed. The book is readily available, through Amazon, for those wishing to read more.
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It was the offhand accounts of torture — the main character is flayed alive, right? — that finally broke my mind.
There are several problems based on what you have revealed of the text but addressing them to you seems hardly reasonable.
It is selfish and ethnocentric in the way that Tokyo Express is to sushi, for this person to try to represent anything remotely similar even as parody (because that does require a knowledge of the real to represent it humorously doesn’t it?).
The biggest problem about this is why? Why does this matter and pulease, James Joyce? For cryin’ out loud. I don’t think so.
Another problem and it relates to the whole problem but mostly it relates to the second “why” issue….does it have to matter who the poet is and if it does, then why again? Is it not the case that the poet wants to erase themself from the page on this? You did Kent.
The sensationalism of it all…the licking and whatnot…the gratuitous begging for the attention of the reader…well it works. But to what end? It isn’t new or even spicy. Give me a plate of jerk already, I’d prefer that for my fifteen bucks to be honest. There’s more culture in a plate of crab infused rice than a rich white man doing this kind of SCHTICK.
And that is what all of that is Mr. Johnson. Schtick.
Is that in and of itself “injurious” to people of specific ethnicity?
Hmm. The authors advice i.e. we don’t get out enough…well. I guess most of us cannot afford to get out. You know, over the many years I lived and worked “out there”, I met how many handfuls of people who though were “out” never really went out into “it” for real. In that case, a person can write about the moon for cryin’ out loud and it is probably more believable than something like this because Lo! we have access to so much more information about this locale than we do about the moon. No one can question it and in that, the author takes a risk but I think it hardly a risk worth taking based on what you have revealed here.
Ay pues ni modo!
Of course it’s a problem, because the poem reaches for old, dumb, and offensive stereotypes in trying to make its parodic point.
But I don’t see why an employee of the PF, let alone a paid contractor (which I have previously and happily been) should be held to account for Barr’s insensitivities. It’s not like Poetry or Harriet is running around publishing or promoting porn-scat. No one wants a witch hunt, but you do have to wonder about the board(s): both the board that hired Barr and the board that implies this kind of thing does credit to the Poetry Foundation’s good name.
I’m told that Ruth Lilly is still living. My apologies for the error.
Kent
Not anymore! RIP friend of Poetry and Prozac.
Also, just to note that an earlier version of the essay had been posted by mistake. The correct version, which contains some added information and revisions, is now posted, as of 11 AM CDT!
Thanks to Bobby Baird for fixing the problem and for gracefully handling all the stuff that flies back and forth with this collective blogging thing!
Kent
Kent, a quick question (since I have grievously overslept and have to get to work): how do you figure the asymmetry between the term we seem compelled (for lack of a better other) to use for this kind of racial-drag performance–i.e. blackface–and the fact that what is being worn, as it were, in barr (and others we could think of) is *voice* and not *face*? does the distinction between voice and appearance visage matter, especially given the historical context in which blackface actually emerged as a low/middle-brow cultural practice? in other words, using the term “blackface” in this way is both anachronistic and genre-bending–which are, to my mind, only good things, and so I wonder if teasing out how you and we feel about the distinction and your shifting of its terms could help generate a critical vocabulary for this discussion without, as BB says, turning it into a witch-hunt.
Yo, I meant to delete “appearance” and leave “visage.” Now, to Hazlitt, rape, liberalism, etc.
To Hazlitt, rape, liberalism, etc.
Maybe this should be the default DE response to unnecessary apologies.
I take kizzash from the PF & make no apologies, blackface prez or no.
> this
Sounds good to me.
Jordan, I’m sorry I tossed your copy of Hazlitt off the GW last night, on my way to East Orange.
If it was my Liber Amoris I think I thank you.
If it was my Liber Amoris I think I thank you.
Is that a line from Grace?
> Is that
It might be. This thread is making me slightly protective of that unheimlich book, by the way. Not that I intend to read it again! But I would hope anyone commenting on it without having waded through the whole will seek it out and experience it firsthand.
It really ought to be read by everyone in Poetryland.
without having waded through the whole
I waded through ten or twelve pages of it in a used bookstore years ago and was only impressed by the misdirected nerve. But since you’ve done your homework, why not say more?
Oh, Jordan don’t scare people off: ‘LA” is like 75 incredibly wide-margined pages long. It is, however, agonizing, if that’s what you meant by “wade.”
The takeaway: I will now include the word “rape” in all of my comments and posts.
I think he meant that other book of love, AN, the one Kent’s talking about.
Ohhhhh….you boys with your >>>>>.
Anahid — hi. Bobby’s right, but I take your point too — LA is worth at least one painful reading. Whether everyone in Poetryland ought to read it I forbear to say.
That said, I haven’t read Hazlitt in too long. Where would you recommend to start.
I’ll try to fish it out of the Hudson later tonight, Jordan. Again, my deepest (literally unfathomable) apologies.
Poor WH has enough on his plate, shouldn’t have to swim with the toxic fishes of River Hudson.
Jordan and you all, I recommend, to start, “On the Pleasures of Hating,” “The Fight,” and “On the Spirit of Monarchy,” all available here….
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHaz.htm
….along with some essays on poetry which I fear to recommend to this crowd, which has a far more expansive understanding of the subject than I. My favorite Hazlitt is the “Letter to William Gifford,” which you can find in the Collected Works on Google Books by googling the immortal words, which I imagine/hope some of you will take to as fishes to a watery Book of Love:
“You are a little person, but a considerable cat’s-paw, and so far worthy of notice. Your clandestine connection with persons high in office constantly influences your opinions, and alone gives importance to them. You are the Government Critic, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy—the invisible link that connects literature with the police.”
And obviously ‘Liber Amoris.’ The whole thing is available online. Don’t you wish it had occurred to you to characterize an ex as having “lips as common as the stairs”? Cf. L’il Wayne, with a h/t to Michael R., “wet as a carpool.”
(BTW, if anyone wants to tell me how to link my links–you know, how to do that html thing–I’d appreciate it.)
That’s a good question, Anahid (refreshing to have it in midst of all the jokey comments: either the topic makes people want to release some “tension,” or it’s a chuckle to them, I don’t know).
Anyhow, in blackface tradition the visual and the “aural” usually go together, no? Think of Jolson. Sometimes it’s just voice, as with the Amos n Andy show on radio (though they also did early TV). Grace would be “voiced” blackface, though the image of the speaker is very much in the “rear,” of course.
For sure, but “face” might be a bit of a discursive displacement when it comes to talking about radio, too. It seems to me that voice–which in this case means something like diction or idiom–here (in ‘Grace’) has its puppet hand in the “rear” of class as a means of access to racial difference, while blackface as such takes its mandate from an epidermal epistemology of race and then infolds class as part of the minstrel-show narrative. These distinctions–btwn race and class–are not so simple as I’ve made them here (I’ve got rape on the brain and that’s a lot as it is), but I do think your essay raises a question about the priority of inflection when we’re talking about what I referred to above as racial drag performance.
Anahid said,
>It seems to me that voice–which in this case means something like diction or idiom–here (in ‘Grace’) has its puppet hand in the “rear” of class as a means of access to racial difference, while blackface as such takes its mandate from an epidermal epistemology of race and then infolds class as part of the minstrel-show narrative. These distinctions–btwn race and class–are not so simple as I’ve made them here[....]
Hey, now this is really interesting… Hm.
Kent
>now this is really interesting.
I try.
>I try.
Anahid, by the “now,” I in no way meant that you always aren’t!
Michael Robbins said:
>I take kizzash from the PF & make no apologies, blackface prez or no.
Fair ’nuff.
But as a “stockholder,” you have a “voice,” no?
Kent: oh, I know! Not that I am always interesting, but I am seldom touchy.
MR: “I take [the] kizzash” sounds like the beginning of a great rap to me. I’m thinking “Lazy Sunday” meets Spoonbill & Sugartown.
I never thought I’d want to defend John Barr, but isn’t this really a post about how superior we are? Who, honestly, cares whether dude wrote a poem that uses black dialect? This is verboten? Don’t tell Seidel, he’ll just write even more of them.
@Anahid: I think that was the first line of an expunged Dream Song about Henry Ford. Also, you are not using the word “rape” in all of yr posts as you promised you would. I for one am disappointed.
Also, as long as I’m being disappointed, let’s see a little more love for Hazlitt! The Oxford selection has been my constant companion these last few months. On Coleridge:
His Conciones ad Populum, Watchman, &c. are dreary trash. Of his Friend, I have spoken the truth elsewhere. But I may say of him here, that he is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt anything. There is only one thing he could learn from me in return but that he has not. He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time had angelic wings, and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought. His mind was clothed with wings; and raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his descriptions, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and never-ending succession, like the steps of Jacob’s ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder. And shall I, who heard him then, listen to him now? Not I! That spell is broke; that time is gone for ever; that voice is heard no more: but still the recollection comes rushing by with thoughts of long-past years, and rings in my ears with never-dying sound.
(I haven’t, I confess, read LA.)
isn’t this really a post about how superior we are?
Well shit, if we’re taking those off the table we might as well close up shop right now.
But seriously:
Who, honestly, cares whether dude wrote a poem that uses black dialect? This is verboten?
Not verboten, but at least worth a thought, no? Especially when the dialect reads (whether it was supposed to or not) as a form of mockery. And even more especially when dude is not just a dude or even Seidel but the man who controls the largest pot of money available to American poets today.
>And even more especially when dude is not just a dude or even Seidel but the man who controls the largest pot of money available to American poets today.
Now Bobby, you’re not suggesting that *this* would influence the discussion, are you?
Well, that’s it, I’m out. Kent has astutely diagnosed my fear that my Poetry Foundation money will be withheld.
Seriously, why not just add the subtitle “I wrote this post in bad faith”?
We’re talking more than money, as you know.
Or to put it another way, in rhyme with my last:
So much for Bourdieu!
Michael,
And I wanted to say, since I think you took it the wrong way, and apologies if so:
In no way was I accusing you of “bad faith” for accepting money from the Poetry Foundation for your reviews! In the comment where I referred to you as a “stockholder” (I can see how the word might have been taken as sarcastic, I honestly didn’t mean it to be, though it’s true I was thinking about the PF endowment funds, which I am glad exist) who had a “voice,” I was pointing back to my final question at the end of the post (and I realize it’s a sensitive one), which asks if poets who have written–or plan to write–for the PF, or work for the organization in some capacity, have a reason or responsibility to address, in some way, the matter I raised in the post.
I made a point to raise my questions in the conditional mood, knowing that for some people the language in Barr’s book wouldn’t be a problem in the least. But I do believe that for some, it would be, maybe particularly for some poets of color, though I could be wrong, I don’t know.
So the thing about holding a “stake” and offering one’s voice in that comment was not aimed at you personally– the question was more broadly proffered.
OK, but I don’t think I have a “responsibility” to address Barr’s poetry at all. There are lot of things to question about Barr’s tenure, but whether he wrote a poem in “blackface” isn’t, for me, one of them.
Let’s keep in mind that “blackface”, “minstrelsy” etc. are loose metaphors – applied here & there with polemic intent – for dialect use in poetry. They are in reality 2 different things.
Dialect & slang can easily slip into negative (or positive) stereotyping – but not necessarily. I think it requires a “case by case” evaluation. & where would our lousy jive lingo be without dialect & slang, I ask ya. We’d be deep-frozen in sociological robotics for eternity. Just sayin’.
Michael,
That’s perfectly fine. Again, I can see how my question, since it was responding to your comment, came off as too directed at you personally, even though I meant it in the broadest way and to point back at my questions at the end of the post. Truly.
I apologize for not framing the comment in a better way. And I salute you for at least addressing the issue!
I stand by my point that many, and for reasons fairly obvious, will *not* wish to say anything about the matter, and no matter their position on the topic. To quote someone else, who wrote me back-channel:
In the literary field, “$100 million buys a lot of closed lips.” (Not even the link-manic Silliman wants to connect to the post today, even as he pulls up, in his Tuesday web-fishing net, a link to a blackface photo!)
Kent
When a poet really doesn’t want a book to be talked about, they tend to go about suppressing it — buying up and destroying copies, threatening lawsuits etc. I believe Barr stands by his work.
I’m not lending anybody my copy, by the way.
>I believe Barr stands by his work.
I believe he does, too.
Who is saying otherwise?
> otherwise?
Oh, nobody. I just wanted to shine some light on the side of the near-universal silence about Grace. I don’t believe Barr minds people talking about his book, and he certainly wouldn’t have written extended torture scenes in a Caribbean patois if he didn’t want to get a rise out of somebody.
When the read the book, I was horrified. Looking back at it, I’m still horrified, but I can register some appreciation for the Dostoevsky-like metaphysical argument at the book’s core.
Kent, I know you’ve spoken openly here about your tendency to call people out for qualities that you recognize in your own work. Would you say there’s any overlap between Grace and your Homage?
Interesting question, Jordan. Homage is a very eclectic book, so I assume you’re referring to specific pieces, probably one or a couple in its last section, Eight Poems for The World, which pertains to our current wars abroad. There is one in particular, a letter to David Bromige, that I think would apply to what you are saying?
I think Eight Poems is the one I remember.
Forgive me if I don’t remember seeing you discuss this elsewhere — would you be willing to point an interested reader toward your favorite contemporary poets of the Middle East? I’ve been reading a lot of Darwish lately, and some Taha and Zach and Avidan etc etc.
I’m interested in Jordan’s question too, Kent.
And I suspect most people here know it already, but coincidentally, there’s a discussion on a related theme running over at Harriet right now.
I like Darwish a lot, too. Adonis would be my “favorite” contemporary. You probably know more about contemporary Arab poetry than I do, though. Lots of great ancient stuff, obviously. Some great poets from Israel. Not the Middle East, but there are some wonderful Muslim poets from Bosnia, some of whom I’ve has the fortune to meet. Why do you ask, though?
> Why
Strictly out of curiosity. I only know a few of Adonis’s poems, fwiw. I’m more of a fan of the classic Arabic works — the Seven Odes, the poems of al-Mutanabbi, etc. I have a Peter Cole anthology of medieval Hebrew poetry from Spain, but am at a loss for most of the rest of that story.
Who are the Bosnians?
Jordan, I said ancient, but classic is the word, yes.
As for the Bosnians, here are some of them!
http://jacketmagazine.com/35/bosnia-diary.shtml
Kent
I don’t believe Barr minds people talking about his book, and he certainly wouldn’t have written extended torture scenes in a Caribbean patois if he didn’t want to get a rise out of somebody.
I would hope not and you would think so. But I do find it odd that—as I discovered after searching for something else in my trusty Custom Google Search up on the right there—this page has been unceremoniously disappeared from the Google search index. To my knowledge, this has only happened once before, when we were going on about Seth Abramson. In that case, the Googlebots eventually came to their senses; maybe they will this time as well.
Direct links to this page are gone at Yahoo, as well.
And…we’re back. God, that’s creepy. Maybe you want to weigh in on “Sailing to Byzantium” while you’re here, oh mighty Googlebot overlords?
I never understand exactly what you’re talking about when this happens. You could Google, say, “digital emunction” & “john barr” without this page showing up in the results? If that’s so, how does it happen? John Barr calls Google, or what? I don’t get how it works.
That’s exactly what I mean. Which is a little obnoxious on its own, but really only matters because we depend on Google for our site search. All the search engines let users flag pages that might be flagrantly offensive, or illegal, or browser-breaking. When you do that they get pulled from the index until an actual human can check it for herself. I don’t mean to suggest that Barr did it, only that someone did.
Huh. Well, I’m gonna start temporarily removing my enemies from Google.
I knew that was coming.
For one, I would hardly call the Poetry Foundation “the major poetry institution of America.” The one that hands out the most cash to the most people, I grant you. (Though from what I understand from the admittedly limited interaction I’ve had with the PoFo’s staff, they’re fairly embarrassed of JB, and he’s rarely if ever involved in their day-to-day operations.)
I read Grace when it came out, and I can’t say the dialect bothered me much (it did get old after a page or two) – I mean, there’s minstrel shows and then there’s Fred Astaire doing “Bojangles of Harlem.” The blackface doesn’t make the minstrel show racist, imho, the artlessness does. The same applies when comparing this to, say, the Dream Songs (which you mention earlier). It’s the sheer turgidity of Barr’s poetry that’s offensive, not the dialect.
Barr has, however, as you say, proven himself an able financier and smooth talker, and in that regard his businessman-playing-poet is useful, similar to Bloomberg’s businessman-playing-mayor.
Either that, or John Barr is one of the best trolls of all time.