There are two reasons why my latest book is called Sonic White Poise. First, as a straight allusion to Paul Celans poem Espenbaum. (Aspen tree your leaves glance white into the dark, in Michael Hamburgers translation).
The underside of an aspen leaf is so pale compared to its other side that it appears white. The leaves of the aspen tree are reputedly louder than the leaves of other trees when rustled, thus Sonic White Poise, adjusted from a locution to be found in my poem concerning trees, The Discoveries of Thomas Fynch.
Espenbaum is totemic to me. I first read it 41 years ago as a schoolboy attending a workshop presented by John F Deane. Celans poem is a masterclass in the presentation of a real, actual event through the language and conventions of European Surrealism; a lesson in how Surrealism can be a vehicle for the real. While it is an affecting account of a sons loss after his mothers murder, its enduring appeal to me is on the level of its aesthetic achievement.
The other reason for my books title is to own up to my whiteness. Some people assert their whiteness as an expression of White Nationalism I have no time for such eejits. As a person whose 1970s childhood was overshadowed by the unremitting bloodshed in Northern Ireland I have a developed, deep-rooted revulsion for nationalisms of every ilk. I choose to identify as white in my book in order to acknowledge that white is not the default colour of humanity.
In the western literary tradition the only protagonists who have the colour of their skin described are those whose colour is different from the white authors who created them. White characters are presumed to be white. The question of white privilege and white saviour complex was never far from my mind in the composition of many of the poems included in this book.
To my knowledge, in 1970s Cork there was just one solitary Irish black child. One home-grown black child in the second largest city of our country. The nation, in all practicality, was homogeneously white. As late as the 1990s American observers were irate that a film like The Commitments, about black soul music, could be made in Ireland without any black person. A correspondent was dispatched to Dublin from New York who reported that he traveled right out to the projects and could find only white people.
The past is a different country. Ireland in the 2020s is quite a different place again and all the better for it. It behoves its artistic creators to acknowledge that. Raised in a different country from my children (who have a sibling of colour) I have had a suite of world views to adjust and reset. I am a refugee, fleeing the mindsets of the 20th century.
My father was a big Johnny Weissmuller fan and with him I, as a child, would have watched most of the Tarzan films with Irish actor Maureen OSullivan front of screen, while a troupe of African extras provided anonymous local colour in the background. Teilifs ireann also broadcast its fair share of British movies of the 30s and 40s, extolling the putative virtues of imperialism.
I began my re-education by coming across Edward Saids Orientalism at the turn of the century. Said helped relegate the English adjective oriental to the description of carpets and not persons. My poem The Isle of Langette recounts the narrative of an explorer who seeks out a lost world, when he gets there he describes the occupants in the language of occidentalist exoticism. The story does not end well for him.
In Prayer Service (first published in an early version in The Irish Times) I recount my experience of attending the funeral of Nuala N Dhomhnaill s husband. Dogan was a Turk and his funeral service took place in a Dublin mosque, attended by half the poets of Ireland. One issue for me was the experience of a lapsed theist attending a structured prayer service, but other concerns presented themselves where a white Irish person, raised in the Catholic tradition, enters an Irish mosque for the first time.
In my life I have been fortunate enough to have, among the women who have shown me love, women of colour. Several poems in the book address questions of privilege and occidentalism in the context of one relationship. My poem Dinka had as its starting point a particular portrait of a man by Leni Riefenstahl. Possibly, in portraying Dinka and Nubian people as paragons of beauty and physical perfection, Riefenstahl was compensating for her earlier association with the Hitler gangs moronic assertion of Nordic bermenschheit; probably not. Either way her Afrika portfolio is problematic for its white gaze. And those problems are referenced in my poem, ambivalently, ambiguously, along with other efforts to sidestep white privilege and saviour complexes.
I loathe explaining or justifying my poems. I would wish to live in an aesthetic utopia where a Joycean silence and cunning remained the order of the day. I was never one for shrouding myself in artistic intrigue and mystery but in my ideal world every poem is consumed by an omnisciently insightful reader immersed in literary convention and non-convention. In this world the poet belongs to a priestly class whose liturgy is never questioned or justified, merely liked or disliked. We do not live in such a world.
The late American poet Tony Hoagland discovered that fact to his grief. In his 2003 collection What Narcissism Means To Me he included a poem called The Change. The poem had previously been published in the journal Agni, so it is a text which has been knocking about for quite some time. As you can guess from the title of his book Hoagland was an ironist.
Another of the poems in the book is called Poem in Which I Make the Mistake of Comparing Billie Holiday to a Cosmic Washerwoman. The Change concerns a white American protagonist who is observing someone like Serena Williams playing tennis against a European blonde. The protagonist of the poem describes the Williams-like character with tropes most enlightened people would find offensive and goes on to say:
I couldnt help wanting
The white girl to come out on top,
Because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
With her pale eyes and thin lips
And because the black girl was so big
And so black,
In the context of the full collection and Hoaglands inclination for mischief I read the poem as a self-aware account of unself-aware racism. My interpretation was that Hoagland did not endorse the opinions of his protagonist and was implicitly condemning them by exposing their existence.
Years after it was first published, Claudia Rankine came across the poem. She considered the possibility of a reading such as mine but seemed to settle on the opinion that it was an unselfaware account of unapologetic racism. She called Hoagland to account. But Hoagland made the mistake of believing that, like a mid-20th-century Beckett or Joyce, he should make no account of himself and his poem.
He learnt for himself, and for all of us, that we are at the wrong transection point in history to cultivate a position of aesthetic elitism or poetic priesthood. The affair left him out in the cold, interpreted as patronising and dismissive. He was loved to his grave by luminaries such as Terrance Hayes, but life was never the same for him after reports of his inadequate response to Rankine went viral.
Poems need to be ambiguous, sometimes ambivalent, nuanced. An art works relationship to generally perceived truth needs to be complex and complicated because people are. We consume art to discover how particular individuals struggle with asserting their individuality amidst a society which demands crowd conformity.
There is no point in producing a poem which is completely in tune with perceived moral correctness. Such a text would be mere agitprop or an essay in political philosophy or, at the very least, a performative exercise in virtue signalling. But while acknowledging that a poem should be nuanced, concomitantly the poet cannot be nuanced, cannot be ambivalent, cannot be ambiguous.
Whatever might be needed to be said on the page to be artistically truthful, in these troubling times, ( the word troubles of course has a particular understated connotation in Irish discourse) the poet must be clear and resolute in their support for progressive society off the page.
Sonic White Poise, a collection of poems by Patrick Cotter, has just been published by the Dedalus Press, Dublin
Read the rest here:
White privilege: I am a refugee, fleeing the mindsets of the 20th century - The Irish Times
- Travel & Resources: DELHI / NEW DELHI - Utopia [Last Updated On: June 15th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 15th, 2016]
- Travel & Resources: DELHI / NEW DELHI - Utopia [Last Updated On: June 16th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 16th, 2016]
- Utopia - New World Encyclopedia [Last Updated On: June 16th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 16th, 2016]
- Utopia (book) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Last Updated On: June 17th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 17th, 2016]
- Chanel Mirage, Utopia, New Moon Illusion d'Ombre ... [Last Updated On: July 31st, 2016] [Originally Added On: July 31st, 2016]
- New Utopia Design Build - Los Angeles, CA, US 90012 [Last Updated On: August 14th, 2016] [Originally Added On: August 14th, 2016]
- THE NEW UTOPIA - Libertarian [Last Updated On: September 20th, 2016] [Originally Added On: September 20th, 2016]
- NEW TOWN UTOPIA by Christopher Ian Smith Kickstarter [Last Updated On: October 20th, 2016] [Originally Added On: October 20th, 2016]
- Travel & Resources: HONG KONG - Gay Asia and... - Utopia [Last Updated On: December 7th, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 7th, 2016]
- THE NEW CHAIN REACTION - Game Show Utopia [Last Updated On: December 7th, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 7th, 2016]
- DELHI / NEW DELHI: Massage and Spas - Utopia [Last Updated On: December 7th, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 7th, 2016]
- First Listen: Sinkane, 'Life & Livin' It' - NPR [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Who is authorized to bind your family business to contracts? - Lexology (registration) [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Meanwhile in Canada Things Are Just as Bad - New York Times [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Stellaris: Utopia expansion lets you craft megastructural ringworlds - PC Gamer [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- 'Stellaris' Utopia DLC Gets First Trailer; Will Introduce New Buildings And Perks - iDigitalTimes.com [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Utopia Pipeline project to bring 300 temporary jobs to New Philadelphia - New Philadelphia Times Reporter [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- With violin in hand, Mark Menzies finds hope for the future in the past - Los Angeles Times [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Revolution: Russian Art review from utopia to the gulag, via ... - The Guardian [Last Updated On: February 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 7th, 2017]
- Brooklyn's A/D/O Co-Working Space Is Building a Utopia for Creatives of All Kinds - Artsy [Last Updated On: February 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 7th, 2017]
- Austra encourages listeners to imagine new, bolder futures - San Francisco Chronicle [Last Updated On: February 9th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 9th, 2017]
- Michael Loong Proposes New, Sustainable Ideology to Achieve Utopia in China - Satellite PR News (press release) [Last Updated On: February 9th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 9th, 2017]
- French photographer builds supernatural Astana, calls it Utopia of the 21st Century - Astana Times [Last Updated On: February 9th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 9th, 2017]
- The village aiming to create a white utopia - BBC News [Last Updated On: February 9th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 9th, 2017]
- A notable show BAMPFA's 'Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for ... - Berkeleyside [Last Updated On: February 10th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 10th, 2017]
- British Airways Concorde 'Alpha Foxtrot' Arrives at New Bristol Home - AirlineGeeks.com (blog) [Last Updated On: February 11th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 11th, 2017]
- In praise of utopias, not dystopias: Salutin - Toronto Star [Last Updated On: February 11th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 11th, 2017]
- The Bannon-Trump Arc of History - American Spectator [Last Updated On: February 13th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 13th, 2017]
- Everybody's Pop-Up Shop Throws a Wild AntiFashion Week Party With Adwoa Aboah - Vogue.com [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- Plotting 'No-Place' in 'Utopia Neighborhood Club' - Seattle Weekly [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- Utopia releases its next version of master data governance solution ... - SDTimes.com [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- Bruno Ganz on New Film About Last Days of East Germany: 'This Is a Subject That Will Never Let Me Go' - Variety [Last Updated On: February 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 17th, 2017]
- New Barbarians: Inside Rolling Stones' Wild Seventies Spin-Off - RollingStone.com [Last Updated On: February 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 17th, 2017]
- Drought-crazed utopia flushes away common sense - NewHampshire.com [Last Updated On: February 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 17th, 2017]
- Lenkom Theater: From Soviet utopia to post-modern dystopia - Russia Beyond the Headlines [Last Updated On: February 18th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 18th, 2017]
- GHOST To Record "Darker" New Album This Summer, Tease Completely New Lineup - Metal Injection.net [Last Updated On: February 18th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 18th, 2017]
- Protest Cabaret: Ithaca's Resistance - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun [Last Updated On: February 18th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 18th, 2017]
- Fighting for Utopia in Tough Times - AlterNet [Last Updated On: February 22nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 22nd, 2017]
- Mardi Gras brings on the fun - Tullahoma News and Guardian [Last Updated On: February 22nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 22nd, 2017]
- Angela Henderson-Bentley: New take on Jack the Ripper an idea whose 'Time' has come - Huntington Herald Dispatch [Last Updated On: February 23rd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 23rd, 2017]
- Knowledge can fight ignorance: New speakers series will shed light on Yemen - Detroit Metro Times [Last Updated On: February 23rd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 23rd, 2017]
- Hygge Is Where the Heart Is - New York Times [Last Updated On: February 24th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 24th, 2017]
- Utopia is coming, with a basic income for all - The Times (subscription) [Last Updated On: February 26th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 26th, 2017]
- Government shakeups and political unrest are coming to Stellaris in its Utopia expansion - PCGamesN [Last Updated On: February 26th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 26th, 2017]
- Rutger Bregman: 'We could cut the working week by a third' - The Guardian [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- The board hoard: your guide to the best new board games - The Guardian [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- Tempted To Move Out Of The US? New Zealand Wants To Help You Escape - Forbes [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- THE SOUND OF MUSIC to Welcome New 'Georg von Trapp' on Tour in Hershey - Broadway World [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- Stellaris Utopia Gameplay Expansion Out In April - Attack of the Fanboy [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- At BAMPFA, 'Hippie Modernism' Proves the Fight for Utopia is Far from Over - KQED [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- Stellaris Utopia Set To Launch April 6th - One Angry Gamer (blog) [Last Updated On: March 1st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 1st, 2017]
- Railcar derailment in Utopia due to vandalism: Cando Rail Services - Simcoe.com [Last Updated On: March 1st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 1st, 2017]
- Stellaris: Utopia Path to Ascension release date trailer - Gameplanet [Last Updated On: March 1st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 1st, 2017]
- JUSTIN JOHNSON: It's a TRAP! - SCNow [Last Updated On: March 1st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 1st, 2017]
- Watch brutal Xenomorph attack in new 'Alien: Covenant' trailer - CNET [Last Updated On: March 1st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 1st, 2017]
- Dr. John to headline Utopia Fest in final year at Four Sisters Ranch - austin360 (blog) [Last Updated On: March 2nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 2nd, 2017]
- Want utopia? Start with universal basic income and a 15-hour work week - Wired.co.uk [Last Updated On: March 2nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 2nd, 2017]
- Extreme Channel 4 reality challenge Mutiny makes its sailors suffer - iNews [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- Utopia Frozen Yogurt and Coffee House | Ellensburg, WA [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- March 4, 2017 - EDP Foundation - Utopia/Dystopia / Hctor Zamora: Order and Progress - E-Flux [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- Utopia for Realists and How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman digested read - The Guardian [Last Updated On: March 5th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 5th, 2017]
- A taste of 'Utopia' - Otago Daily Times [Last Updated On: March 5th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 5th, 2017]
- Father John Misty references Taylor Swift in new song, 'Total Entertainment Forever' - EW.com [Last Updated On: March 5th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 5th, 2017]
- Time After Time May Be Your New Bad TV Obsession - Gizmodo [Last Updated On: March 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 6th, 2017]
- 'Time After Time' delivers Jack the Ripper to modern-day New York - Long Beach Press Telegram [Last Updated On: March 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 7th, 2017]
- Why everyone hates the GOP's new health plan - The Week Magazine [Last Updated On: March 8th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 8th, 2017]
- A modern utopia: Inside the UK's first women-only housing community - International Business Times UK [Last Updated On: March 8th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 8th, 2017]
- Utopia Now! - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies [Last Updated On: March 11th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 11th, 2017]
- Hello Cuba, Adios Utopia: Cuban Art in Texas - Observer [Last Updated On: March 11th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 11th, 2017]
- Whole of It: 'Free Cake at the Top' - Scottsbluff Star Herald [Last Updated On: March 12th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 12th, 2017]
- Utopia in the Time of Trump - lareviewofbooks [Last Updated On: March 12th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 12th, 2017]
- The Nature of Robots - Film School Rejects [Last Updated On: March 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 17th, 2017]
- Utopia Multimedia Festival brings artistic talents together in one place - Taranaki Daily News [Last Updated On: March 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 17th, 2017]
- The Electoral College is right for New Mexico - Albuquerque Journal [Last Updated On: March 19th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 19th, 2017]
- Equal writes and the best new women fiction: Book reviews - Express.co.uk [Last Updated On: March 19th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 19th, 2017]
- Liberal America Has A Sweden Fetish - GOOD Magazine [Last Updated On: March 21st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 21st, 2017]
- Utopia Creations travels to Florida - Journalism.co.uk [Last Updated On: March 21st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 21st, 2017]
- A Well-Ventilated Utopia - The New York Review of Books [Last Updated On: March 21st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 21st, 2017]
- 500 years after Sir Thomas More's Utopia, what have we learned? - The Sydney Morning Herald [Last Updated On: March 21st, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 21st, 2017]
- This Swiss Startup Is Bringing AI to the Music Label Business - Bloomberg [Last Updated On: March 23rd, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 23rd, 2017]