Tag: poetry

Categories
Culture Other

Stereotyping, cultural appropriation and such

Alan Sullivan has posted a poem called Long Bay Jump, both to his blog and to Erato, which is in a West Indian voice. It starts:

Sun drop down with a flash of green.
Moon lift up, and the palm tree lean.

Jack fish bake in banana wrap.
Pi-dog snatch all the table scrap.

Ganja and rum, ganja and rum–
Long Bay jump ’til the morning come.

Not surprisingly, some people were uneasy with it. Or, as Alan put it:

I posted this reggae-style lyric at Eratosphere today and got a face full of PC, just as I expected.

Full disclosure: I haven’t read the whole thread at Erato because, well, other people’s pissing matches get dull fairly quickly. But I was somewhat struck with this comment:

Although I can see why someone might be offended by the association of a whole group of people with ‘ganja’ and a careless demeanor, the practice of friendly caricature is generally accepted. No one would bat an eye at a poem that portrayed a British man with a cup of tea in one hand, a cane in the other, and a ‘Jolly good day’. No one would be shocked at a poem about a racist Southerner who irresponsibly uses Biblical quotations to justify cruelty — a far more offensive caricature, in my opinion, because it is a negative and unsympathetic stereotype. No one would even blink at a poem about fat and boisterous Americans visiting foreign nations. So what’s wrong with a friendly caricature of a non-white group of non-European descent?

Nothing, in my opinion.

Now there are various cans of worms there which I think I’ll leave unopened, and just comment on the bit which jumped out at me. “No one would bat an eye at a poem that portrayed a British man with a cup of tea in one hand, a cane in the other, and a ‘Jolly good day’.” Umm, well actually, speaking as an Englishman, that would annoy the fuck out of me. It’s outdated, inaccurate and patronising. So I guess that’s one point – you may not be as good a judge as you think of whether a caricature comes across as ‘friendly’.

I’m not going to try to judge how Alan’s poem would come across to someone from the BVI . But actually it makes me uneasy without having an opinion about whether it’s inaccurate and/or insulting.

It’s not the fact that it’s ventriloquising a West Indian voice, although that’s certainly relevant. Nor is it related to post-colonialism or the legacy of slavery or any other specific political issue associated with the region, though those are also relevant. It’s that it’s a stereotype. Not just a stereotype, but the stereotype of the Caribbean – rum, ganja, palm trees and music. Alan says, in response to some of the comments:

I tried to avoid a POV in the poem. It bears witness. It does not judge. Every detail is true, and known to me at first hand.

I have no doubt that every detail is true. And yet somehow all they manage to add up to is the obvious stereotype. That’s the thing about stereotypes – they usually have some basis in truth. There really are effeminate gay man and Nigerian con artists. The reason stereotypes are insidious is precisely that they are somewhat true; that you can look at the person and just see the stereotype. It’s a short-circuiting of thought.

I think I’d have been happier if he had offered a POV, if he had judged. That would at least be an explicit attempt to engage with the culture. Attempting to neutrally portray a culture which is not your own strikes me as fraught with difficulty, not from any kind of cultural relativism but because the perspective of the visitor is so partial.

This is perhaps an over-analysis of a light poem that doesn’t seem to be attempting much more than local colour. I just wanted to try to articulate my sense of unease.

Categories
Culture

Yet another quick sonnet

I don’t know why I’m posting these really. Certainly not because I claim any merit for them. Still, as with NaPoWriMo, the exercise of writing to a time limit is quite interesting, I think. The need to get something written makes you work with material that, rightly or not, you would normally have rejected out of hand. And the poems have a habit of wriggling away from you in the process of being written.

Writing poetry is always a kind of negotiation – between what you intended to write about, what you can get to work as poetry, and what emerges in the process of writing. Speed-writing just exaggerates that process and leaves it undigested on the page.

It doesn’t help that I’m out of practice. I’m sure if wrote a quick sonnet every day for a fortnight they’d start getting a bit slicker. This one took me 25 minutes. I made a point of doing it in (almost entirely) proper IP this time.

Somewhere a man is lying on a bank
of grass, watching the swallows overhead.
All he can see is blue; the green and dank
entangled grass and thistles round his head
cannot impinge upon his dreams of flight.
He thinks of nothing, but simply follows
the swoop and flicker, finds himself as light
and dancing as the flightpaths of the swallows.

It tempts, that casual riding of the air,
it seems to hint at better ways of being;
we want to know that simple empty grace.
But still, remember if you stop and stare;
to see just one thing is to be unseeing.
We need to feel the thistles at our face.

Categories
Culture Me

Another quick sonnet

Down to 12 minutes, this time.

They sing of eels;
the fishmongers trill their local songs
and try to drown the spiels
of sellers of deceptive pongs.
The three-card trickers
hope to draw the punters from
the stall that sells the polyester knickers;
and little acned Tom
with his knock-off Louis Vuitton
hopes to get the cash
of those who know it is a con
but are willing to be fakely flash.
All of human life is here, and loud.
You should be proud.

Categories
Culture Me

Quick (ish) sonnet

This was my go at Rob’s quick sonnet challenge. In the event it took me about 26 minutes, which isn’t very good considering that the the classic challenge is 15 minutes.

The hiss of pebbles on a shingled beach,
the stranded bladderwrack, the grey
sea-holly, hard against the spray,
the oystercatchers calling each to each.

Where men are afterthoughts,
where cows have never grazed or hedges grown,
where gardens are driftwood and stone,
where ploughs would blunt against the quartz.

It is not cosy here.
It does not feel secure;
we feel some inkling of the ancient fear
in the waves on the shore.
In the grating of stones underfoot we can hear
an opening door.

I quite like the ploughs line and the final image, but the rest is pretty generic.

You’ll notice that it’s metrically a bit peculiar. I did at one point have the first eight lines in IP, but the sestet really wanted to be shorter lines and I just thought wotthehell. And once I’d stopped being metrically regular I went back to the octet and pruned out some bits.

On the occasions when I do sit down to try and write metrical poetry, I increasingly find myself drawn to shorter lines – trimeter, tetrameter – and to changing line lengths. Ballad meter and suchlike (of course even that doesn’t explain the outbreak of anapests at the end). The discursiveness and unmusicality of sustained IP just doesn’t appeal to me at the moment.

Not that IP is inevitably discursive or unmusical but, fairly or not, that’s how I feel about it at the moment.

Categories
Culture

Dada, modernism and suchlike

I seem to have gone a bit link-happy over the past 24 hours, producing a daily links post which is far too long. So I’ll single out one of them in case you miss it: Charles Simic on Dada.

I always think of continental Europe as being the natural home of modernism. The Great War, the Russian Revolution and the growth of fascism provided the context for art of real ferocity. There always seems to be a disconnect between that and the work of British and American modernists like Eliot and Woolf. That’s a terrible simplification, of course, but still, you get an odd perspective on modernism if you learn about it through the lens of English-language literature.

Anyway. Read the Simic.

Categories
Culture Other

9rules Writing Community

9rules strikes me as potentially a great idea. It’s basically a conglomeration of blogs, each of which has been approved as reaching a certain standard of quality.

The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

They have periodic application periods when they winnow out the sheep from the goats and accept the sheep. The approved blogs are then sorted by subject.

Since blogs are many and multiplying, any way of finding the good stuff has to be a good thing. But I decided to look at the blogs which have been accepted into the 9rules Writing Community. It hasn’t given me great faith in their quality control. One of the various principles they claim for themselves is that

A nicely-designed site might draw readers in, but it’s the content that keeps them coming back.

But given that at least two of the ten in their ‘writing community’ are blogs which are nicely designed but whose content is seriously poor (1, 2), I find myself unpersuaded. The most likely scenario is that the people who selected the blogs just weren’t very literary by inclination; my point really is that they aren’t doing their credibility any good.

In the interests of balance I’ll point out one more 9rules literary blog, PoetryReviews.Ca, where they review Canadian poetry books and seem to do a good job of it.

But generally the 1rule which is most important seems to be ‘style over content’. Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps the many good blogs that can be found among my long poetry blogroll just haven’t applied, so 9rules don’t know what they’re missing.