Boston Review Hosts Forum: 'Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde'

At Boston Review, a forum about race and the poetic avant-garde features responses by Erica Hunt, Prageeta Sharma, Dorothy Wang, Lyn Hejinian--with an introduction by Stefania Heim. From BR:

Harryette Mullen wrote in 1996, “The assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative.’” Mullen’s own opus was being torn down the middle, with particular writings received as speaking for black female experience and others as examples of formal innovation. She concludes by articulating the stakes of such shallow and myopic divisions: “I hope that my work continues to challenge that deadly distinction between ‘blackness’ and ‘humanity’ – or ‘universality’ – that is still imposed on black human beings.”

In collaboration with scholar Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), Boston Review has convened a group of poets and scholars to consider the current status of Mullen’s decades-old description. We asked these writers—all publishing in or alongside various contemporary experimental traditions—whether there is now space for and openness to the exploration of aesthetics and race; we asked about tokenism and our allegedly “post-race” era; we asked them to compare public engagement with these ideas in so-called mainstream and avant-garde poetry circles. [...]

Read on at Boston Review.