Reply #3: wow, this is awesome. [View All]

[idgiehkt]

That is so cool you saw Lucille Clifton, I love her. It sounds like a great day. I loved your journal entry that you linked as well, sorry you had such a hard time with your family with the coming out stuff. I guess I am a geek too because I love poetry but I don't go to readings or do much stuff like that. I need to get out there and hear some fresh stuff, Chrystos is my favorite poet and I just stick with her and a few others mostly. I need to expand my horizons but I find it hard to find people who write about stuff I feel is really pertinent. Chrystos has an interview online where she makes some pretty strong statements about poetry being written today that would probably piss alot of people off but I have to say I agree with alot of what she says. If you're interested it's here: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3693/is_200309/ai_n9281944 (from 2003)

here's one of her controversial statements:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3693/is_200309/ai_n9281944/pg_3

"I do scan the N Y Times Review of Books and I look at the poetry books that are being reviewed. There's a woman here on Bainbridge Island who last year won a Macarthur Foundation for some $90,000 and I went into the bookstore and skimmed through her book and you know I didn't get it. I mean there's a lot of poetry being written which is very, um, I don't know if I should say this or not but I will, I feel like there's this nostalgic racism going on in the literary world at the moment. In nostalgic racism you have books like the Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. You have Fannie Flagg. You have a whole bunch of really popular writers who are essentially writing about all white worlds in which there is no recognition that they ARE that white world.

So I call that nostalgic racism or nostalgic white supremacy. It's a way of recreating a world which actually doesn't exist anymore. Most of the literature that is considered "important literature" in the United States is white supremacist literature. By that I mean there are almost no people of color in it and if there are, they're literally the maid mentioned in passing. John Cheever's like that. John Updike is like that. Norman Mailer is like that. All of those people that I call the dead white men have this nostalgic white supremacy going on in their work. And the publishing industry itself has a sort of quota system happening where there can be four Asian women writers, there can be four Black women writers and two Indian women writers. So I look upon the publishing industry as a white supremacist organization and a lot of people flinch when I say things like that because they think I'm over reacting or I'm not being nice.


You know, the world is not an all-white place. And anyone who doesn't want to acknowledge that has an investment in white supremacy. I got into a big time argument with somebody about that Ellen show. (I don't care if it's about someone who's gay), there's no brown people in her shop and it's in Los Angeles! Are they trying to say that no brown people in the world read? You know, I'm not going for that stuff anymore. I've gotten quite crabby as I've aged."


And it just gets better fromthere, lol.