Race, Poetics

& the University—

A Conversation

the canon, the funding, & racial identity in classrooms and poetics

“…the question isn’t about quantity or quality; the answer is social equality.”

—Geoffrey Jacques

*

I am probably the one member of this discussion panel with the least secure institutional attachment. I’ve been essentially an adjunct for twenty years—all through graduate school, of course, then after getting my doctorate, and then after publishing my revised dissertation. When asked to participate on this panel, a couple of things ran through my mind in a series of flashbacks. One of these is about what happened ten years ago. It was the week that Manning Marable died. Marable, who had been a friend, was a leading figure in the African American intellectual community, a professor of African American Studies at Columbia University who had just published his magisterial biography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Penguin 2011), a book that won him

“Federal City’s ungranted
Land housed our
Unmitigated band
We were the unruled unruly”

—A.L. Nielsen

All The Places We’ve Been
—A Prayer for Gil Scott-Heron

Take Me to the Pilot
Played on the radio
But we didn’t know 
You in our first class

Gloves out at fingertips
Braids beneath leather cap
Busied yourself then
Busied us

Busy as you were
The Fender Rhodes Scholar
Of Bluesology was to be
Our pilot who the cap fit

That first minute
Of that winter day
When nobody knew
What to say

We were to be
Writers on the storm
Time was right
Up on us

Time was tight 
The now that was more than
Ever was what brought us
Together

Federal City’s ungranted
Land housed our
Unmitigated band
We were the unruled unruly

We thought we’d call it morning
That storm music
No small talk
At Second and E

Did you hear what they said
Back home
A toast to the people
Ain’t no new thing

From South Africa to South
Carolina we wrote
And writing rose
Within our souls

We couldn’t know
watching
Your hands spider across the keys
How you were to end

How drift away was to be
The closing number

Precious Lord
Take his hand

“…we contend with the challenge of scarcity and austerity models that pinch, wring, and squeeze every ounce of energy from the community.”

—Duriel E. Harris

*

When I agreed to speak at the colloquium, “Poetics & the University in Crisis,” I was on a bit of a high. I was feeling really good about having completed an NEA grant and an application and some other deadlines—so I thought “Oh yes, I think I can do this.” And then, of course, reality reared its little ugly head and came back and said, “Oh! Let’s help you feel more at home with the politics of things at the university.”

So, I want to talk about resources, or the lack thereof, at our fine US public institutions, in particular, and the impact on BIPOC—and specifically Black and Indigenous—publications such as Obsidian. I’d also like to offer a little bit of thought on creativity and the imagination. There’s long been conversation about the crisis we have in the humanities in US higher education, and particularly US public universities like Illinois State University, where Obsidian is housed. And this crisis being now compounded by the COVID-19 global pandemic, its mismanagement on the US national stage, and the pressure that we have now to return to normal. I think it is important to note that the “normal”

Dialogue & Debate

A Recorded Discussion with Five Professors of African American Literary Studies—

Harris, Jacques, Nielsen, Scheyer & Williams

This conversation took place on March 5, 2021, as part of the “Poetics & the University in Crisis” colloquium, sponsored by Chant de la Sirene.

In a Class with Baraka

In the end then to a room
Half hangs outside
The hall trashed overheated
Pupils smart
Ashes add up under chairs
Motes streaming
Cling to blinking lids
An odor of investment accrues
To this room

English beats against the glass
Shadowing through the panes
Upon the table obstructing
Paths of passing planes the capital’s
Accumulation of images in the mute
Wavering grain is something we dissect
Practicing between ourselves the
Removal of harmful forms

Head at the window
Scarring the glass
Meaning glazes over
The watching White House
Beating back American
Artist in residence in the new
Department
Of corrections
Planes the blades
Of our speech
Asks examples

Mine is of a piece
With a room at an end
That hangs outside
In essential
Popular air

Mine is of a flight that exclaims

Fingers against the glass
I check my watch
Prepare to give examples

“Race doesn’t arise as an issue when we’re discussing white poets, but it’s a topic of eclipsing concern when we read poets of color.”

—Lauri Scheyer

*

I teach creative writing and literature courses, and most often, I teach the genre of poetry in both contexts. Only one of my academic appointments has been at a majority white institution, so I’ve typically taught poetry writing and the academic study of poetry to an extremely racially diverse student population. I want to be clear that I’m not generalizing but speaking today from personal experience only. 

I’d like to bookend my brief comments with two stories that I think illustrate how the academic framework of poetics differs based on the perspective of either the generative production of creative writing or the receptive analysis of literary studies. Of course there is

 “I became a Black poet-professor in another predominantly white university.”

—Tyrone Williams

*

I was hired at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH, in 1983, and my job description was to teach first-year composition and African American literature courses. The teaching load I was offered was a “4/4”—or, four courses taught two semesters each year. I was still an ABD, and so was hired at the instructor level. The fact that I wrote poetry and had focused on literary theory and twentieth-century American literature in graduate school was thus largely irrelevant. I was replacing the only African American professor in the English Department, Billie Johnson, who was returning home (Chicago, I think) to take care of her parents. 

In other words, I, perhaps as Johnson had been, was a “diversity hiring.” By accepting this position, I became a Black poet-professor in another predominantly white university. After three years of that grueling 4/4 teaching load at Xavier, I realized I could not finish the dissertation. So in 1986, I took a one-year leave of absence, and returned to my hometown of Detroit. I must admit that I was not sure I was going to return to Xavier and Cincinnati at that time. Truth to tell, I applied for several journalism and teaching jobs in Detroit but nothing happened with any of that. 

However, my first major poetry publication was released in early 1987, a chapbook with M.L. Liebler’s Ridgeway Press. And that year back in Detroit was instructive. I realized that Detroit offered nothing to me, career-wise; furthermore, most of my Detroit friends had moved on with their lives. 

So I returned to Cincinnati in August 1987, this time with the title assistant professor, although I still hadn’t completed my dissertation. I finally submitted it to my