On the Genesis of “Poetry & the New Black Masculinity”

KEVIN SIMMONDS    POETRY & THE NEW BLACK MASCULINITY


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WHEN DO YOU EVER get to hear a group of black male poets openly and very specifically address race, sexuality, politics, and depictions of black masculinity in the media? Black men spanning three generations? Gay and straight? Apart from our panel “Poetry & the New Black Masculinity” at the 2014 Split This Rock Poetry Festival (STR)​, I’d never heard of it. And I wasn’t alone: there was a standing-room-flowing-out-into-the-hall crowd for our panel. After nearly two hours of conversation, readings, and questions, many in the audience urged us—publicly and privately—to propose Part Deux for AWP 2015 in Minneapolis.

     STR’s Director, Sarah Browning, originally conceived of the panel and asked me to lead it. It’s important to mention that for two reasons.

     First, Sarah is a white woman. She was very intentional and insistent about creating a space for that kind of conversation to occur during the conference, which, like all the organization’s programming, reflects their mission to “integrate poetry of provocation and witness into movements for social justice.” That’s noteworthy, especially considering the most recent public embarrassments of AWP, the organization that hosts the largest annual conference for writers in the U.S. and is bereft of imagination when it comes to being welcoming and inclusive of nonwhite writers.    

     The second reason is in the brief introduction I made at STR. It speaks to, among other things, why I was conflicted about the title of the panel:
     During a live interview a few years ago, the late poet Lucille Clifton commented that many people attributed the recent election of Barack Obama to a phenomenon of “how far black people had come.” Clifton, in her usual incisive and elemental way, held that it was white people, not black people, who had come far. Though she didn’t explicitly suggest that Obama was a run-of-the-mill candidate, I think she probably thought that, as brilliant as he is, he is but one politician in a long line of black politicians qualified and capable to run this country. And I would aver that six years ago and even now, Obama isn’t “new” in any existential way. He didn’t miraculously appear to herald the arrival of some newfangled and improved black man.
 
     And I begin with this story because over the last couple of days, when talking up this panel, I kept referring to it as the “black masculinity” panel, not the “new black masculinity panel." I kept forgetting the adjective that might make this panel alluring to some people. As esteemed as these four poets are, as I see it, they too are the progeny of uncountable and various expressions of black masculinity—interrelated, conflicting, and contradictory expressions of black masculinity—that have persisted since the first ships arrived heavy with enslaved Africans and have influenced the flowering of American poetry for arguably over the last 200 years.
 
     If anything is “new,” then, perhaps it’s a growing awareness of these multitudinous expressions of black masculinity that black people have always known. Due in large part to the Internet, the authority of the long-established cultural, social, and political monopoly to control and manipulate the images of black men in the public sphere is being challenged. And when I say monopoly, I’m talking about taste-makers and gatekeepers like reporters, editors, professors, publishers, film directors, casting agents, etc. Though it’s a loaded term, it’s the “democratization” of the authority and the ability to irritate, radicalize, upend, and entrench representations of black masculinity that facilitates their amplification and dissemination.

     But this cannot and does not suggest that all these exciting developments in messaging black masculinity are having no impact on black male poets. As we say in the description of this panel, “The work of contemporary black male poets—traditional and radical, genre-defiant, funny, sobering, and bracingly inclusive—reflects a fluid and multitudinous range that encompasses the assertions of mainstream reportage alongside their disruptions and departures.”
For AWP 2015, we retained the title because “new” is enticing. And, more than likely, it got people in the door who needed to hear about what’s old and has been around—even if unheralded—for a very long time. ​

     As far as I can tell, black people just do the damn thing: create and innovate, upend and speculate, experiment and share, witnessing one another.

     Convening panels to discuss it all is secondary and usually not for our own edification.







PORTRAIT BY AARON ALFORD

KEVIN SIMMONDS is a musician and writer originally from New Orleans. He studied music at Vanderbilt University and Middle Tennessee State University, and completed his PhD at the University of South Carolina. He founded Tono International Arts Association, an international arts presenter in northern Japan (Iwate Prefecture). He has published poems, essays, and reviews in The American Scholar, Bellevue Literary Review, FIELD, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, RHINO, and Salt Hill. His books include the poetry collections Bend to it and Mad for Meat, and two edited works, Ota Benga under My Mother's Roof, the final work of the late writer Carrie Allen McCray, and the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality.