“Poof”: Now You See You, Now He Don’t

I'd like to consider here how Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change”, is written in second person. The poem is, in fact, a poem of address.

The “you” seems to be a companion, a buddy. And on first meeting, this companion is subsumed into the identity of the speaker:

We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won

At first instance, the “you” implied in this first person plural could be specifically (and is likely) just the speaker’s companion, but there is some room to imagine “you” the reader. It may even mean “you” America. Perhaps the poem defines the “you” here:

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe

So those of us who, in effect, will take the side of the black tennis player in the poem, might identify with the “you”. Whoever the "you" is, it is not the "I", that is, the one who wants "the white girl to come out on top."

I’ll return to some reflection on the implications of the identity of the “you” later, but I want to point out how peculiar this passage is to me—that a speaker should have to remind the “you” what they did together and of what they saw, that the match was between a white player and a black player. The speaker (for some reason) has to remind the companion of all of this. Why doesn’t the “you” remember what was on TV? This is not just a reminder but an imposition of memory : “This is what you don’t remember; this is what we did.”

Even more strange is that the speaker should tell his companion: “you loved her complicated hair”, as if to say, "This is what you don’t remember; this is what we did; and this what you love.” Should we take the speaker’s word for it? (Let’s not forget that the “you, throughout the poem, is speechless. How does the you feel about being told what he/she loves?) At what point does this become an egregious exercise of power?

Then the “you” reappears in a digression. The poem shifts from the speaker's narrative description to a discursive mode:

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank

While the poem, by now, has clearly established that it is an address, for argument’s sake, let’s say the “you” in this passage momentarily becomes something else, a general rhetorical “you”, a “you” removed or expanded from the companion to include something collective. The question is Why? Why deflect and/or abstract? Why shouldn’t history pass the speaker with the same proximity as it does a nation, or even just his companion? Is this another confession of ignorance by the speaker, that he simply doesn’t have the same relationship to history as “you”, whether "you companion" or "you collective/abstract" or "you (approximately) specifically who love her complicated hair"? If so, what’s the speaker's human responsibility to establish a proximity and distance to history? Why doesn’t he get down into it?

If the speaker means to include himself in this rhetorical, collective “you”, if he meant to implicate himself, why couldn’t the speaker just do so: “There are moments when history/passes me so close…” he might say. Why, instead, is history distanced, pushed away? Why does the subject of the poem suddenly switch from “I” to “you” at this moment in the text? What happens here to the first person, the agent of thought (but, ostensibly, not of action; that is the tennis players’ agency—action; they are bodies; they are objects and their action is not meant to do much; it is meant to be watched), what happens to the speaker, the I, when this grand proclamation about history is being made? Who is the speaker to make the proclamation for his companion or anyone else? Just then, where do his eyes go?

By the end of the poem, some fusion has happened, though, as readers, we’re not witness to it. The “you” and “I” become, again, a “We”.

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

If there is an offense to this poem (and there are several), it’s that we—as readers and as a culture—are corralled into the speaker’s racist epiphany. It is a union—but it’s a union made without consent. (I've seen on a number of blogs some comments who thank Tony Hoagland, for we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for him; and another commenter who claimed that black people don't know what racist white people say when they feel their guard is down. It's hilarious and ironic that white people think that people of color don't know the offenses made against them in private, that to say those offenses publicly should be news to us. And as far as I know, we talk about race all the time. White people do too, even when they don't think they are.)

In the end, the “we’ is ambiguous and coercive. Is it the speaker and his companion (and is his companion me? or you? or all of us? is it white people who admire complicated hair)? Who, by god, is the speaker? Is he pure thought, for his body hardly appears in the poem. His companion’s hand appears in the poem (it’s how he touches history’s flank). Their eyes, the speaker’s and his companion’s, appear early on (“Right before our eyes “), but only as joined vision—“our eyes”.

And if the speaker seems to imply what’s at stake in this poem by placing before us, in language, exactly what’s at stake, then it’s clear, the speaker’s body is somewhere outside the poem (his eyes, his tools for sight, safely abstracted into some first person plural). For all that is exalted, ironized, and placed in jeopardy here, for all that is risked in this poem, it is not the body of the speaker. Its location, we might presume, is in safety, comfort, out of range or risk of being transformed or ever changed.

Free Poetry Workshop, Madison, NJ

Aracelis Girmay and I are giving a free workshop through the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies at Drew University. We both serve on the MFA faculty there. Here is a news release. For more information or to reserve a seat, please call the Office of Graduate Admissions at 973/408-3110.

Pacquiao-Clottey Fight

Manny Pacquiao dominated Joshua Clottey in a unanimous decision to retain his welterweight title last night at Cowboy Stadium.

The fight’s sequence of action was almost an exact reverse of Pacquiao’s fight last November against Miguel Cotto, when the Filipino stopped the bigger fighter in the twelfth round. That fight saw the boxers engage early on, only to have Cotto shift to defensive mode for the rest of the fight. Clottey started last night’s bout in defensive mode and only opened up in minor bursts in the last three rounds, fizzling by the last bell.

Pacquiao did to Clottey what he has done to his previous four opponents—made them gun shy (though, to be more accurate, Ricky Hatton had little time to get his finger on the trigger).

The Ghanaian boxer is known for his impenetrable peek-a-boo defense and fantastic counterpunching. The Filipino, however, found jabs up the middle and, more effectively, hooked around Clottey’s elbows into his ribs.

Clottey blocked about four out of five of Pacquiao's punches, but the champ's onslaught, some 1200 punches throughout the fight, was enough to make the challenger cover up for almost the entire twelve rounds. Clottey gave himself no opportunity to win the bout. Lenny Dejesus, who was promoted to trainer from cutman when Clottey's first choice was denied a visa to enter the United States from Ghana, urged his fighter to take a risk. Clottey's attempts were few, earnest, and in the end insufficient.

In the tenth round, Clottey attempted to break out of his defense, successfully placing his lead foot outside of Pacquiao’s right foot, important positioning for an orthodox fighter to beat a southpaw. But the strategy only gave Pacquiao an opportunity to showcase his ability to deliver punches even when he’s out of position.

If Clottey had some idea that Pacquiao would punch himself out late in the fight, that idea was proved wrong in the eleventh round. Clottey put together a few effective combinations, but Pacquiao, as he did against Cotto, responded each time with a more ferocious barrage, some combinations of six and seven punches in a row.

The first round, like the subsequent rounds, were won by Pacquiao commanding the ring with his movement and punch volume. Clottey did come out with a double right hook and showed a couple instances where he cut the Pac-Man off along the ropes. The true welterweight did not return to these tactics though. For the rest of the fight, Clottey's attacks were limited mostly to one and two-punch combinations spaced so far apart, it became clear very quickly that he was settling for survival mode.

In a post-fight interview, Pacquiao revealed the team’s plan to jab as a way of breaking down Clottey’s defense. Pacquiao was suppose to hook over Clottey’s jab. The champion tried everything from feints to standing still and he could not draw many of those jabs from the challenger. Two judges had Pacquiao taking eleven rounds to Clottey's one. The third judge had Pacquiao winning all twelve rounds.

With this victory, Pacquiao displayed not only the benefits of his now famous four-hour training sessions, but his mental toughness, psychological preparation, and style adaptability.

Fans wait to see the outcome of Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s match-up against top veteran Shane Mosley on May 1. The winner of that fight is likely to face Pacquiao. In the meantime, the champion will be gearing up for his bid for a national congressional seat in the Philippines.

Haiti Benefit, LIU, Brooklyn

New Poems

I've got a few poems over at The Collagist.

Clifton

By now, many people know Lucille Clifton has died. I got the news by text. I'm sure it fired across facebook and twitter too. Strange elegy, that kind of electricity. I passed the message along to a couple poet friends too, who hadn't yet heard.

If you can get, as William Carlos Williams said, news from poems, then Clifton's kind of news is celebration, good news -- gospel, one might say. It is the kind of work that people turn to for wisdom and charity. I certainly have.

I come from a family of workers, my parents both professionals, both my brothers artists who hold down demanding jobs, one at a design firm, the other a shop owner, all of whom have worked agonizing hours. My cousins and aunts and uncles are farmers and teachers. They've done this their whole working lives. Steady. They are big laughers, tricksters, storytellers, comedians. In this way, Clifton feels, literally, familiar. The steadiness of her work—joyful, full of trouble and laughter. A sort of cure to backroom snickers and headline gossip.

There is no poet who speaks with Clifton's directness and simplicity. And you can't mistake that directness and simplicity for efficiency. Her speech is a common elegance. Elsewhere, concision and bad irony, it seems, have become the rococo of our age. I don't mean to speak of her style or technique, her "craft" as its emphasized in professional writing programs. It's her spirit. A natural delight in spite of cleverness. There is no mistake that Clifton bled. It's in the very rhythms of the poems. It's the blood singing.

I imagine her work will continue to embolden generations to begin with questions, speak simply, tell the truth. I'll miss her terribly.

AAWW Open Mic

Open Mic at the Asian American Writers Workshop Tonight