I’m pleased with how the level of poetic engagement has been increasing in depth and breadth this semester. I think the challenge is how to engage students who are at different places experientially and academically with (1) reading and discussing poetry, (2) discussing cultural, linguistic, social, political, and historical issues for people of color in/with the USA, (3) synthesizing these two into (relatively) seamless and coherent, relevant discussion. And really, even within #2, there’s a wide spectrum of critical engagement and knowledge. Still, my students are doing a very good job with the juggling.
If last week’s discussion of Arab American poetries really upped the stakes on poetic projects of/by poets of color, then this (and next) week, in reading Native American and Pacific Islander poets, and with Craig Santos Perez‘s very much appreciated class visit yesterday evening, we’ve had to add yet another layer of complexity, thinking about “native” or “indigenous” ways of writing, based upon orality, its structures, the intense and intimate relationship with the land/natural world, mythologies, genealogies as communicated in subject/theme-specific tones and narrative structures. Even our ongoing conversations about hybridity (of language, race/ethnicity, traditional and avant-garde poetic form, genre and media) seem to take on an additional layer of intensity and significance here when considering the heavy militarization of the islands, the tourism industry, colonial histories, the ubiquitous neo-colonialism and insidious Christian Mission Work which have systematically erased the natives’ knowledge of and access to their own languages and work/traditional economies, hence social structures, hence, a people’s individual and collective psyches.