Some folks who I believe are well-meaning are saying that the Michael Dickman poem in @poetrymagazine Poetry critiques whiteness. I strongly disagree, and I would like to tell you why via my only skill: close reading! In This Essay I Will; Or, God Help Me, It's Thread O'Clock
The poem first establishes the network of folks that the speaker feels fondness for, not only through endearments and affectionate titles for family, but also through the glowing light of lemon tree (left behind but commemorated), cigarette, pool, "honeybees" (cars)
These visual depictions accumulate on each other for a full thirteen pages before anything that could possibly be read as critical emerges (and even then I don't think it does, but we'll get to that in a minute). Generosity; sweaters; nightgowns; food: soups, steak, chicken, more
It's not IDYLLIC ("Sooner than later her teeth were looking up at us from a glass of tap water / not smiling really // And not not smiling") but those vulnerabilities try to invite the reader into the family the speaker is invested in understanding himself within.
Then the fourteenth page drops. I won't directly quote it since I do not have the right to say the words it uses, which should have been something that the poet considered. That's problem number one through infinity. Here are other problems:
The most (undeservingly, imho) generous reading could say that by establishing this "we" as a "regular" "white" "comfortable" "family," this page serves as an indictment of the racism "even" "in" "such" "spaces."
The problems with that really reparative reading, though, are: first, the poem moves the slur from quotations that signal a word, then into a quotation that represents the grandmother's speech, then OUT of quotes into the speaker's own language.
Second, while white space absolutely can function as spaces of critique, grappling, struggle, etc., it also has by definition an ambiguity that means that the syntactic signifiers have to do the work of communicating what the white space is doing. Here, as per my last tweet...
...the syntactic signifiers say that the speech hasn't just transpired and not been challenged, but has been ADOPTED.
Another overly reparative reading could also be that it's a critique of whiteness to use WHITE space in precisely this way. But depiction of a fact like "white spaces are often racist" isn't inherently critique.
If you believe that depictions of this fact are important things to spend thirty pages on, well, I don't know what to do about your opinion there and I don't agree with it in the least. But the one thing you still can't say is that it's critique simply to depict something.
On the next page, the speaker uses a related method to depict a scene in which the grandmother asks the mother to murder "Japanese businessmen." Here, the violent threat doesn't leave the grandmother's quotation--but instead, the poem simply continues, the statement unchallenged.
Again, the MOST GENEROUS reading could say that the poet uses the name "The City of Roses" (Portland) to ironize the kind of racism found in spaces that are deemed white havens of white liberal whitey whiteness.
Unfortunately, the reason that reading is generous is that once again, the syntactic signifiers provide absolutely no basis to make that claim. If you made this argument in an essay, you'd have no "why." You'd just have your own extension of the benefit of the doubt.
The poem moves on. More nostalgia ("The palm trees gone // The record player gone"); more kinship ("The voices of friends"); more beauty ("Folded into small cranes // Or flowers // Isn't that beautiful?")
The last half of the poem constructs a blazon of the dead grandmother. Again, it's not all idyllic, especially after the blazon ends and we see depicted prolonged, slow death, pain, self-medication, ending with the archetypical dip into the river (death in all its senses)
(*depicted THE prolonged, ugh)
But the poem is once again returning to the mode of inviting "the reader" to mourn along with the speaker. Formally, the poem is an affectionate Tootsie roll with a racism center.
But the poem is once again returning to the mode of inviting "the reader" to mourn along with the speaker. Formally, the poem is an affectionate Tootsie roll with a racism center.
As a result, several issues emerge. 1: The poem establishes whiteness as the "we" and non-whiteness as the "they." This in and of itself is not a critique of whiteness.
2. Once again, the poem is quite literally relying heavily on WHITE space, which isn't depicted as a space of internal struggle because there is no evidence that any struggle beyond mourning is happening.
3. Because white space also functions as silence, if we DO (again imo overly generously) read the white space as critique, we would then have to say the poem tacitly suggests that silence functions as critique in these kinds of conversations, which ...
4. There is a strategic reason for nestling the violently racist scenes in the middle of this very long poem. We COULD say that's the poet interrogating his speaker's own complicity. The problem is that the interrogation is once again absent.
5. And because of the "we"/"them" problem, for BIPOC readers, which I'm not sure this poem acknowledges is even a category of readers, that means that we spend THIRTEEN PAGES being gently seduced toward the violent confrontation and then have to wade through FIFTEEN MORE after.
I may think of more things later and as if so I'll add to this, but for now, the tl;dr version is: If you think this is what critique looks like, it is my belief that some big things are absent from your understanding of how to make an effective critique. And now,
