A NOTE ABOUT CLAUDIA RANKINE AND TONY HOAGLAND
At the recent AWP convention in Washington DC, Claudia Rankine, scheduled for an evening reading, delivered instead an attack on Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change,” from his 2003 book ”What Narcissism Means to Me.” First Nick Flynn read the poem, then Rankine delivered her critique, and finally she read Hoagland’s response. I did not particularly like what she did, nor was I convinced by her case that the poem was objectionable. A few days later I wrote Hoagland an email saying those things. Anyone entering the firestorm of responses on Hoagland’s side is fully aware of the names he or she will be called, but having done so in private, I would hate to think that I was afraid to do it in public.
A quick Google survey of responses did nothing to convince me that the entire event had produced anything useful or constructive. Predictably, the responses were overwhelmingly in Rankine’s favor. In the space defined by AWP, by the “poetry community,” this is, for whites, the safe response. It says, “I’m a right-thinking white person, so I’m on your side, I promise. I really mean it. I am.” It risks and costs nothing.
I learned from one blog response that Claudia Rankine had confronted Hoagland about the poem six years (!) earlier. It was an old story, an old quarrel. I would hate to think that Rankine simply seized the opportunity of this invitation, this highly privileged gig as an evening reader at AWP, to punish an old antagonist. Rankine did not mention this bit of context in her impassioned denunciation, creating the impression both by her words and her tone that the presentation was an outcry of fresh pain, as if she had discovered her (now former) colleague’s poem the day before yesterday.
I would remind readers that it was Claudia Rankine, not Tony Hoagland, who did something on that day; Hoagland wasn’t there, and he wrote the poem a decade ago. To me, this means that it is what Rankine, not Hoagland, did that is news. She indicted Hoagland in his absence, in an event that she stage managed, with a gesture of fairness in giving him a chance to respond (but only two days to craft the response). I'm not encouraged to discover how many people, even the few who spoke in his defense, assented unquestioningly to the proposition that Tony Hoagland was now on trial before the whole of poetry nation for the alleged crime of racism, because Claudia Rankine used her AWP gig to indict him. As I left the auditorium, I was judging Claudia Rankine and what she had just done. I found it solemn, self-important and self-dramatizing, unfair because Hoagland was absent, and a very bad precedent.
There are many forums, inside and out of AWP, for Rankine to air her six-year-old grievances. A much calmer and saner evaluation of Hoagland’s poem was made in APR four years ago by Major Jackson, who found fault with the poem but expressed gratitude for Hoagland’s willingness to take on the subject. On the question of whether the poem should have been written, Jackson is right and Rankine is wrong.
I don’t want AWP to be a space where poets favored with highly visible reading opportunities instead deliver political denunciations of absent former colleagues. This reminds someone my age of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I think that a certain amount of actual personal harm will be done to Tony Hoagland by Rankine’s act: impressionable people will raise objections to the selection of this ostensible notorious racist for readings, contest-judging gigs, etc. It will also discourage white poets, especially male ones, from taking those chances that Major Jackson expressed gratitude for in writing about race. It will suppress, rather than stimulate, the needed dialogue. Hoagland, I think, absolutely has to have the space to write that poem, and Claudia Rankine has to deal with it, that is, to critique it in any way she wants, but not to claim that she is a victim of it, and that therefore it ought not to exist and its author must stand trial. Short of hate speech, which Hoagland’s poem is not, it’s no good for one poet to plead sensitivity or vulnerability as an excuse to punish (rather than criticize) another. Yes, of course, Claudia Rankine took a chance too, but I think she showed poor judgment, and the net effect of what she’s done is, so far, decidedly negative.
On her website, Rankine offers a set of questions meant to invite further discussion of the larger issues. I found them too peremptory ("If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?") and jargon-laden ("How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the scene of instruction about race but create the linguistic material of racial speech / thought?") to encourage honest response from ordinary people. For me, the genuine space for discussion exists not in Rankine's questionaire, but at every point in the gap between her indictment and Tony Hoagland’s defiant response. Let’s talk, in plain English, in that space.
A quick Google survey of responses did nothing to convince me that the entire event had produced anything useful or constructive. Predictably, the responses were overwhelmingly in Rankine’s favor. In the space defined by AWP, by the “poetry community,” this is, for whites, the safe response. It says, “I’m a right-thinking white person, so I’m on your side, I promise. I really mean it. I am.” It risks and costs nothing.
I learned from one blog response that Claudia Rankine had confronted Hoagland about the poem six years (!) earlier. It was an old story, an old quarrel. I would hate to think that Rankine simply seized the opportunity of this invitation, this highly privileged gig as an evening reader at AWP, to punish an old antagonist. Rankine did not mention this bit of context in her impassioned denunciation, creating the impression both by her words and her tone that the presentation was an outcry of fresh pain, as if she had discovered her (now former) colleague’s poem the day before yesterday.
I would remind readers that it was Claudia Rankine, not Tony Hoagland, who did something on that day; Hoagland wasn’t there, and he wrote the poem a decade ago. To me, this means that it is what Rankine, not Hoagland, did that is news. She indicted Hoagland in his absence, in an event that she stage managed, with a gesture of fairness in giving him a chance to respond (but only two days to craft the response). I'm not encouraged to discover how many people, even the few who spoke in his defense, assented unquestioningly to the proposition that Tony Hoagland was now on trial before the whole of poetry nation for the alleged crime of racism, because Claudia Rankine used her AWP gig to indict him. As I left the auditorium, I was judging Claudia Rankine and what she had just done. I found it solemn, self-important and self-dramatizing, unfair because Hoagland was absent, and a very bad precedent.
There are many forums, inside and out of AWP, for Rankine to air her six-year-old grievances. A much calmer and saner evaluation of Hoagland’s poem was made in APR four years ago by Major Jackson, who found fault with the poem but expressed gratitude for Hoagland’s willingness to take on the subject. On the question of whether the poem should have been written, Jackson is right and Rankine is wrong.
I don’t want AWP to be a space where poets favored with highly visible reading opportunities instead deliver political denunciations of absent former colleagues. This reminds someone my age of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I think that a certain amount of actual personal harm will be done to Tony Hoagland by Rankine’s act: impressionable people will raise objections to the selection of this ostensible notorious racist for readings, contest-judging gigs, etc. It will also discourage white poets, especially male ones, from taking those chances that Major Jackson expressed gratitude for in writing about race. It will suppress, rather than stimulate, the needed dialogue. Hoagland, I think, absolutely has to have the space to write that poem, and Claudia Rankine has to deal with it, that is, to critique it in any way she wants, but not to claim that she is a victim of it, and that therefore it ought not to exist and its author must stand trial. Short of hate speech, which Hoagland’s poem is not, it’s no good for one poet to plead sensitivity or vulnerability as an excuse to punish (rather than criticize) another. Yes, of course, Claudia Rankine took a chance too, but I think she showed poor judgment, and the net effect of what she’s done is, so far, decidedly negative.
On her website, Rankine offers a set of questions meant to invite further discussion of the larger issues. I found them too peremptory ("If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?") and jargon-laden ("How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the scene of instruction about race but create the linguistic material of racial speech / thought?") to encourage honest response from ordinary people. For me, the genuine space for discussion exists not in Rankine's questionaire, but at every point in the gap between her indictment and Tony Hoagland’s defiant response. Let’s talk, in plain English, in that space.