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2 Poetry and Identity some poems i wrote over a decade ago are only now earning a few bucks (and i do mean a few) through their inclusion in anthologies of a frican a merican poets. Because of these recent nibbles (for which i am grateful), i have made an act of faith in the posterity of my work, legally naming my sister as my heir and executor of my literary estate. a nyone reading this knows that the living poet feels lucky to be paid in copies of the published work; but perhaps when i am dead, payments for future poetry permissions might help to sustain my sister, my nephews, or their children. My recent inclusion in these anthologies gives rise to this meditation on the various experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and marginality of a “formally innovative” black poet. it has been argued that if publication in anthologies from commercial presses, reviews and other coverage in mass media, space on bookstore shelves, adoption into course curricula, and library acquisitions are the measures of success, it would seem that representative “black” poets are currently more assimilable into the “mainstream” than “formally innovative” poets of any hue. a lthough both the “avant-garde poet” and the “minority poet” may be perceived as “others” in relation to the “mainstream” (regardless of the distance and the diἀerent concerns that might separate avant-garde and minority poets), it would seem that the mainstream has far more to gain by appropriating minority poets who work in recognizable and accessible forms and who can thus be marketed to the broadest possible audience of readers. Mt V notwithstanding, textbooks and anthologies—the most commercial and lucrative venues for poetry publication (profitable for the publishers if not for the poets)—continue to be the primary means of reaching the broadest audience of people who read poetry. poets are anthologized as representatives of their era, nationality, region, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and/or aesthetic affiliation; and anthologies are driven by realities of marketing, as 10 Chapter 2 well as by critical activity and curricular needs. in the anthology and textbook markets poets “of color,” given their automatic representational status, have a distinct advantage over “formally innovative” poets, who appeal to no large or easily identifiable demographic segment of the literary market. “a vant-garde” poets—to the extent that they can be gathered together and made comprehensible (given sufficient critical energy and academic acceptance ) as members of some distinctive and coherently articulated generation, school, or movement—can be packaged for mainly academic consumption in much the same manner that “poets of color” or “spoken word” practitioners have been labeled and gathered into anthologies aimed at both mainstream and academic audiences. it would seem, however, that the “avantgarde poet of color” threatens the cohesiveness of the narratives that allow the mainstream audience to recognize, comprehend, or imagine a collective identity, purpose, and aesthetics for a literary group or movement, whether it is a group “of color” or a movement defined by its commitment to “formal innovation.” “Formally innovative minority poets,” when visible at all, are not likely to be perceived either as typical of a racial/ethnic group or as representative of an aesthetic movement. Their unaccountable existence therefore strains the seams of the critical narratives necessary to make them (individually and collectively) comprehensible and thus teachable and marketable. in each generation the erasure of the anomalous black writer abets the construction of a continuous, internally consistent tradition, and it deprives the idiosyncratic minority artist of a history, compelling her to struggle even harder to construct a cultural context out of her own radical individuality. she is unanticipated and often unacknowledged because of the imposed obscurity of her aesthetic antecedents. Because my first book allowed me to be placed rather neatly within the category of “representative blackness” (as well as in the categories of “feminist ” and “regional” poet), whereas my second and third books are more frequently described as “formally innovative” poetry rather than as “black poetry,” i have had the sometimes unsettling experience of seeing my work divided into distinct taxonomies. Because i no longer write poems like the ones in Tree Tall Woman (energy e arth, 1981), some readers perhaps perceive my world as “less black. evidently, publishers of a frican a merican anthologies are entirely uninterested in my more recent work, from Trimmings on. o nly in the earlier poetry, represented by the work in Tree Tall Woman or similarly “speakerly ” poems, am i digestible as...

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