Identity politics

A great post by Reginald Shepherd on identity politics.

[snip] The impulse to explain poetry as a symptom of its author's biography or its social context is pervasive these days, including among authors themselves. But that has always seemed to me a form of self-imprisonment, neglecting or even negating the possibilities poetry offers not just of being someone else, anyone and/or everyone else, but of being no one at all, of existing, however contingently, outside the shackles of identity and definition. Poetry is, among other things, a way of opening up worlds and possibilities of worlds. It offers a combination of otherness and brotherhood, the opportunity to find the otherness in the familiar, to find the familiar in the other. [/snip]

I agree that identity politics can be boring. That's when it's unambitious for language, and focused on grievance. (And I'm not denying that grievance can be well justified.) But don't you think that people can be included, rather than excluded, by work rooted in identity? Isn't it possible for me, a white hetero woman, to be more than simply a cultural tourist when reading Aime Cesaire, or John Agard, or Lemn Sissay? Or Marilyn Hacker, or Mark Doty, or Thom Gunn? Isn't it possible that the sheer explicitness of the identity can sometimes touch us at a more human level than simple groupthink? I'd be wary of a poetry that insisted one had to cut free of where the poet comes from, in order to achieve some sort of universal poetic sensibility. (And I'd be wary, not least, because of norms that may be taken for granted.) When the reader can trust the voice, through the use of language, s/he can imagine better what it's like to be (say) a Catholic farm boy in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland, and look at where he's pointing. And the humanity that's touched there is somehow all the deeper for starting in difference.

madness

It's been a mad week. I've judged a poetry competition, performed at a poetry festival, organised a magazine launch... Everything feels so public, exposed. Everything you do is something that someone else can take exception to. Any expression of opinion will offend those holding a different opinion, it seems - and where does it leave us? It is easy for the hegemonical to say: OK, say what you like, fearlessly. I feel exposed and vulnerable because my taste and judgment is open to scrutiny.

Uncomfortable though it may be for me (and it is), it's quite right. Flip the coin on its head, and I'm the one making judgments, and why on earth shouldn't I be challenged? I should be able to defend my choices of prizewinner, poem to read, poem to put in a magazine. Of course it's incredibly subjective. Our tastes are formed by so many things - what we read and like affects the person we become and what that person will read and like. Examples, please.