Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act".

Alden Lynn Nielsen, ed. Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act". Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. 232 pp. $18.95.

With the publication of Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act", Aldon Nielsen continues the investigation of American racial discourse, literature, and cultural production that he has been conducting for more than a decade. As the editor of this collection of essays Nielsen suggests that, for some readers, the volume might seem like "an invitation to journey through the hell of America's racial consciousness." However, he goes on to say that the collection is "offered as an opportunity and an area" in which "there may still remain reason to hope, of equal opportunity." As he does in Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (1997), Nielsen seeks to refresh the dialogue on race in the United States by complicating dominant readings of African American literary tradition. Along with the other writers who contribute to this volume, including C. K. Doreski, Kathryne V. Lindberg, Nathaniel Mackey, and Lorenzo Thomas, Nielsen investigates sites at which race, politics, and aesthetics conve rge to shape the contours of both African American poetry and the American poetic tradition at large.

The essays in Reading Race in American Poetry identify just a few of the ways in which poetic and racial discourses impact and define one another. The volume examines verse by a variety of twentieth-century American poets, from James Weldon Johnson to Gertrude Stein, from Robert Duncan to Harryette Mullen, while considering the trope of race through a number of critical lenses. Literary history, discourse analysis, and genre studies are all employed to assess how poetic language and form, as well as critical conversations about American poetry, process and reflect American race relations and race ritual. By employing this sort of open editorial approach, Nielsen gestures toward the broad range of critical possibilities generated by the project of "reading race in American poetry." The promise of this strategy is seen, for example, when Maria K. Mootry's close readings of sonnets depicting African American participation in the Second World War by Gwendolyn Brooks and Melvin B. Tolson are brought into dialogue with Rachel Blau DuPlessis's discussion of the "racialized cultural work" performed by a circle of prominent European American modernists, whom she claims construct whiteness as a monoracial "dialogue" while "fabricating a black semisilence." These essays complement each other by exploring two disparate, but equally significant, regions of Nielsen's area."

In this way, Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act" demonstrates that it is not bound by formula or program. This becomes clear through "In the Place of an Introduction: Eating Jim Crow," the collection's opening piece. Here Nielsen asserts that the volume does not seek to establish a single school of thought on either race or poetry. Recognizing the multiple "ways in which race signifies among the lines of American poems," Nielsen maintains that the collection "is intended as a tentative remapping of territories for further exploration." Along with the other contributors to this volume, he expresses a commitment to opening new ground and revealing horizons by investigating African American poetic forms and work by African American poets that extend the critical space typically allotted for acts of African American literature.

By doing so, the writers in Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act" seek to de-emphasize the social and political burdens that have traditionally been heaped on African American literature. Working toward this end, Nielsen argues for an expanded reading of African American verse in his second contribution to the volume, "Black Margins: African American Prose Poems." In this essay, he states that the "... critical emphasis on a politics of identity in the ethnic-literature classrooms at predominantly white universities...virtually precludes the study of writing that formally and thematically interrogates the presupposition of essentialist views of race and poetry." Similarly, Doreski and Lindberg probe the engagement between race and American verse with their respective essays on the poetry of Jay Wright and Bob Kaufman. In bringing critical attention to these two underexamined African American poets, their essays complicate conventional constructions of African American poetry by acknowledging its a biding connections to an avant-garde tradition. As Lindberg argues in "Bob Kaufman, Sir Real and His Revisionary Surreal Self-Presentation," Kaufman's poetry should be "prized" for its "obstinate refusal to fit into anthologies ordered around fixed categories of race and class and sexuality and region and (life) style."

The volume stands as a provisional first step in a process of reconfiguring the ways in which race and poetry are understood in terms of various dialogues on American culture and literature. The poets and critics who contribute to Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act" ultimately succeed in revealing aspects of the complex engagements that connect these categories and their impact on the construction of both American and African American identity. By doing so the collection presents a dynamic survey of this area while providing an opportunity to collapse the narrow parameters and prefabricated notions of race that obscure its vast dimensions. The pursuit of these projects directs Nielsen's editorial vision and assists in his efforts to bring the boundaries of this literary area into sharper focus.