Multiple Black Aesthetics & Experimental Poetry

Hi, folks. The other day (when we were outdoors) I talked to you a bit about experimental poetry and the notion of "a" black aesthetic; I mentioned a guy named Ron Silliman and wished I had my dissertation chapter with me so I could read a couple quotes to you from it. I mentioned that Ron Silliman (a white experimental poet) had--in trying to come to grips, perhaps, with why he found more "traditional" poetry more interesting when it was written by black poets than when by white ones--possibly overly monolithized African-American poetic traditions. Here's the quote I wished I could read to you:

"Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history--many white male heterosexuals, for example--are apt to challenge all that is supposedly “natural” about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of this spectrum are poets who do not identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they have been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers--women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the 'marginal'--have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to whom is the subject of those conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience."
--Ron Silliman, “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject” 63

In the introduction to his book Discrepant Engagement, Nathaniel Mackey counters, “There are, however, writers from socially marginalized groups who do both--tell their stories while calling such conventions into question, tell their stories by calling such conventions into question. The distinction between a formally experimental center and a formally conventional periphery distorts and grossly oversimplifies matters” (19). We have read and are about to read lots of poets whose work illustrates Mackey's point: Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Traci Morris, and Harryette Mullen, for just a few examples. Harryette Mullen sympathetically cites an account similar to Silliman’s--“You know, there was a joke that circulated among minority (and some women) graduate students: ‘It’s that white male subjectivity that needs to be put on hold . . . the rest of us . . . need our subjectivity’”--but she also questions it:

"Ron Silliman, in The New Sentence, talks about . . . I think the essay’s called 'The Political Economy of Poetry,' and he ends it by talking about this perceived division between what are called the 'Aesthetic Schools of writing' and the 'codes of oppressed peoples.' He says, of course, the aesthetic schools are not without their politics or their ideological stance, they just express it through aesthetic means and procedures. And I would want to add that--I don’t think he does but I would want to add--the codes of oppressed peoples also have their aesthetic basis." Mullen joins Mackey’s category of “writers . . . who do both” by asking herself, “Well, in what ways would I want to problematize my black female subjectivity,” acknowledging and rethinking the assumptions that underlie “the tradition of the ‘authentic voice’” (interview with Farah Griffin).

I hope you'll find some of this helpful and/or interesting!
Cheers,
Theo