At Entropy: Jen Hofer Comments on Marjorie Perloff's Recent Public Remarks

In a piece titled "If You Hear Something Say Something, Or If You’re Not At The Table You’re On The Menu," at Entropy: Jen Hofer presents some transcribed remarks made by Marjorie Perloff at the end of a question-and answer-period during a recent festival in Denmark. As Hofer reports, in an attempt to defend Kenny Goldsmith's recent reading of Michael Brown's autopsy at Brown, Perloff said:

“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. That’s what they do. Many of the pictures you saw, he looks like a little kid, he was a 300-pound huge man. Scary. He was scary, I’m just saying, that way. So that things then turn out to be much more complicated. And so I don’t know what’s happened to poetry, or to poetic discourse, I shouldn’t say to poetry, but to poetic discourse, when we have all over Facebook these sentimental things about the poor sweet child and his poor family. Michael Brown himself had said ‘I wish I had a family.’ He didn’t even—he hadn’t seen his father in years, his mother was on crack, he didn’t have much of a family or much of a life.”

Hofer transcribed a three-minute section of the Q&A at the bottom of the piece. Importantly, she contextualizes it amid the complexity of her political and ethical responsibility, and with a familiar admission that she "[a]ll too often [doesn't] quite know how to speak." "I know that there was probably no one in that room ... who did not recognize Perloff’s comments as hideously racist. I know that few if any people in that room needed me to point out how deeply anti-Black her remarks were, how vile they were in their implication that perhaps Michael Brown deserved to die, or at the very least deserved to be objectified by Kenneth Goldsmith after his death." More:

I didn’t and don’t want this to be about me—or even, really, about Marjorie Perloff. I’m more interested in thinking about how structures of power and disempowerment function, and ways to resist those structures alongside kindred spirits and across difference. I know that no single instance of being outspoken in response to racism will end racism. I know it’s a lifelong process that takes place in all contexts, at all levels of volume, in a variety of ways. I know that no person should be defined by their worst moments or their most egregious missteps. I know that speaking out immediately when I heard Perloff’s hateful, fearful, predictable, unexamined, easy racism would not have been the last (nor the first) time I will be called to speak in that way. I know all this, and I know there are many reasons we are able or unable to speak in particular instances. And yet I feel that I should have said something in the moment. And that I cannot not say something now.

But I’m not writing this text to unburden myself (as if unburdening were possible). I’m writing it because I believe that public speech should be owned publicly.* If Perloff is going to fly halfway across the globe to articulate her defense of Kenneth Goldsmith’s “genius,” and is going to expose the racist underpinnings of her work in the process, I believe she needs to own those articulations and exposures wherever she goes. And I believe I need to own my articulations and my failures to articulate—hence this brief essay.

Read all of it at Entropy. And if you're not following Mongrel Coalition on Twitter, that will also be informative.

 

[Correction: We originally wrote Hofer presented a transcription of the entire Perloff talk. Hofer, in fact, transcribed only three minutes worth of the Q&A period. We've corrected our copy above to reflect this fact.]