the shape of a poet

All semester long, when we talk about the differences between first generation and second generation poets, the idea of intersectionality keeps hanging around me. Intersectionality is, in simple terms, the idea that oppressions like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, classism are not independent of one another and in fact are deeply interrelated and cannot be pealed away from one another. The idea is use most widely in social movements led by women of color who refuse to work on single identity category issues, but instead approach movement building, resistance and cultural sustenance from a systemic and holistic outlook. 

I wouldn't say that all the folks that we have read of the second generation have intersectionality at the forefront of their writing, but many do. I'm thinking Chang, Cardenas, Coleman, Tolliver particularly. And in this week's reading both Dempster and Gonzalez really made me think about that. I'm even curious about what folks think of a 2.5 generation, or what a 3rd generation will carry (and when it begins) - poets of color who refuse to be simplified down to representative of the life of their community and instead to be taken as one of a multiplicity of experiences, lives, intersections.

During the first class we talked about the danger of the segregation of a class called poets of color, as if other classes weren't teaching those voices and as if that is all that the poets we have read are. Clearly neither idea is true (although I wish more classes weren't so dominated by white writers); many of these poets have broken the barriers put up around them while also holding onto themselves and their histories with a ferocity that I deeply admire. And this week we've come upon the direct question: it comes down to one, shaping a poet.

While Kevin Gonzalez's poems have more visible content that is shaped by race and history than Brian Komei Dempster, both poets write from a place of deep particularities and intersecting experiences. Each of their voices feels deeply located in the specificity of a self in a particular moment, and write in such a way that includes all the ways their lives have been shapes by past, present, systemic and domestic experiences.

Cultural Stakes: Or How to Learn English as a Second Language and The Burning feel deeply related to me, while dealing with such different topics. Cultural Stakes is an amazing, forceful look at what moving across boundaries actually feels like for one person - linguistic, cultural and parental dualities are indistinguishable from one another. Learning English is indeed about going to a bar as a young boy with a father who gambles and drink and smokes and learning English is about beginning to keep secrets from the mother. It begins with waiting on a corner, and is always located in a body that "is an office always on the verge/of quiet." The Burning is as much an account of abuse and tenderness and neglect as it is of escape and memory and regeneration in shared secret.  "Our bodies dissolving inside the black room."

I'm really interested in the ways that gender is showing up in these poems for these two men. Shame and secret-keeping is a major theme, as is a sense of observation that is not shared. All the other poets that we have read that have most embodied intersectionality, for me, have been women. And now these men write such layered and complex shapes of themselves on the page, but differently, too, than their women counterparts. I'm curious what folks think about this? Would we have read this poems differently not knowing the first names of these poets?

Looking forward to class on Tuesday,
t