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18 Incessant Elusives The o ppositional poetics of erica Hunt and Will a lexander With the long-awaited publication of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, teachers, readers, and writers now have access to a widely available text and easily accessible pedagogical tool that constitutes, for the moment, a scholarly consensus about a collection of works selected for what is virtually an officially institutionalized a frican a merican literary canon. a t the same time, critics including n athaniel Mackey in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing and a ldon n ielsen in Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism have challenged the criteria by which such a canon has been constituted, while pointing to many significant, interesting, imaginative, and challenging works that this recently constituted canon excludes. t wointellectuallyengagingandaestheticallyunconventionala fricana merican poets not included in the n orton a nthology, erica Hunt, of n ew york, and Will a lexander, of Los a ngeles, represent a post-canonical attitude toward the literary production of black writers in the United states. While Hunt is associated with the so-called “Language poets,” a loose network of avant-garde and politically conscious writers whose work is deeply engaged with critical theory, and a lexander’s work is obviously influenced by French, a fro-Caribbean, and a frican surrealists, in practice each writer might be regarded as what a lexander calls a “psychic maroon.” Both poets exist on the boundaries of mainstream aesthetics, black aesthetics, and the aesthetics of a restless avant-garde, and they both engage each of these aesthetic formations and their respective writing practices with what Hunt has called “oppositional poetics.” Hunt, born in 1955, has published two books of poetry: Local History (1993) and Arcade (1996). a lexander, born in 1948, has published six books, ranging from poetry and fiction to philosophical essays: 174 Chapter 18 Vertical Rainbow Climber (1987), Arcane Lavender Morals (1994), ἀ e Stratospheric Cantides (1995), Asia & Haiti (1995), Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (1998), and Above the Human Nerve Domain (1999). Hunt and a lexander are useful poets to examine in light of r on silliman ’s observation in his book ἀ e New Sentence of a tendency of readers and critics to separate poetry associated with “the codes of oppressed peoples” from what is regarded as “purely aesthetic” poetry (31). Whether one’s perspective is more aligned with the white-dominated mainstream of United states poetry or the white-dominated avant-garde, whose a merican members see themselves as part of a historically international aesthetic tendency, the work of black poets tends to be excluded or marginalized in relation to other practices of poetry that are regarded as more purely concerned with aesthetic matters. a lthough silliman himself shows this to be a false opposition , it is a remarkably persistent idea that continues to aἀect the critical reception of black poetry. in the imposed dichotomy that pits “codes of oppressed peoples” against “purely aesthetic” schools of poetry, a frican a merican poets are normally presumed to be allied with the former as poets for whom the poetic function of language must be subordinated to a felt obligation to represent the racial, socioeconomic, cultural, and linguistic difference of black individuals and communities. a number of other assumptions are implicated in this assumption, including the assumption that the poetics of an a frican a merican writer diἀers significantly from that of any other writer, and that the aesthetic value of the work is at least partly determined by subject matter. These assumptions may skew the reception of any poet’s work to the extent that social identity often overdetermines the critical response to the work of black and other minority writers, at the same time that it may be an under-acknowledged aspect of poets whose work is celebrated for the supposed purity of its aesthetic preoccupation. similarly, the aesthetic principles intrinsic to the “oppositional poetics” of minority writers may be lost on readers who assume that a socially engaged and ideologically conscious poetic discourse is incompatible with the highest values of aesthetic practice. The work of erica Hunt and Will a lexander seems specifically designed to render inoperative such assumptions. Their work challenges conventional or reductive descriptions of “black poetry” and “black identity,” while confronting head-on the conventional splitting of identity politics and black literary production from aesthetic practices, innovations, and influences of literary avant-garde movements typically identified with europe. While they certainly diἀer from each other in style, ideological...

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