So there is poetry as language of inquiry, of speculation, of exploration, of decentering, ...
And then there is poetry as tourism.
Yes, I do dislike tourists.
And then there is poetry as tourism.
Yes, I do dislike tourists.
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Ha! This actually ties into my argument with Camille on your book and Natasha Trethewey's. I basically argued that Trethewey's use of forms tethered her book too much to this southern tradition and prevented it from completely undermining the discourse of Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. Basically, you can't undermine something by attacking/imitating its more superficial manifestations.
Then I was told that I was limiting my writing by disregarding this (limited) part of the writing spectrum. Cf. an earlier remark on this blog.
But I did just go to the big retrospective of Kara Walker's work (She's one of my favorite artists), which suggests a fascinating way of dealing with this dilemma of racist cultural inheritance.
As for tourism, I think it can be interesting, but as you know I see it as a problem in contemporary American poetry, and I blame Wallace Stevens for that. In Stevens, the "other", the foreigner etc is either threatening chaos (like the sea!) that has to be ordered/tamed, ridiculous figures of inarticulateness - moslems or Swedes (who reappear in many poets up until today!) babbling nonsensically - or exotic tourist trinkets. I think these tropes remain prevalent in contemporary American poetry.
But there's also - in the case of Carolyn Forche and the heaps of poets she has influenced - another option: Europe as an elegy to history (and such people tend to be drawn to Walter Benjamin). That seems equally touristic.
I think what's coming up here that's more significant than whether or not you are limiting your poetic options, is this thing about the poet's ethnic/cultural, social and socio-political position in the world? I feel like, for example, the type of "tourism" Johannes reads in Forche may not be read as such in, say, Linh Dinh's work.
Anyway, I also think, f*ck those who tell you that you are limiting your poetic options by choosing to "ignore" a certain part of the poetic spectrum. I know I politicize everything, but I see this as your making an informed choice not to participate in particular poetic traditions which you find do not forward or promote what it is you mean for your poetry to do. (Gads, i think I am having flashbacks of grad school ickiness here....)
We've already touched Walter Benjamin before, you and I.
As for Wallace Stevens, I find him irritating too, especially in his remarks about Surrealism. (I also find it irritating when I am compared to Wallace Stevens, but that is an aside)
BJR: I haven't read enough of Linh Dinh's work to say anything. But I wouldn't put him in the same basket as Forché (which you are not doing either). In a way, Johannes does touch upon the poet's sociocultural status in his remark about Walter Benjamin. He and I have both written at length about our tiredness of Benjamin in the work of some other poets with whom we are acquainted, and how they see Europe (either from a in-between wars perspective, or something that would look like an Anselm Kiefer painting, but only on the surface).
Now that I have written this, I think the problem of poetic tourism has a lot to do with surface.