Distraction: Bob Hicok’s Essay as Poetry’s MAGA Moment
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” — Toni Morrison
This response will be quick, for I will not allow racism to keep me from my work. However, I will call racism out. My people, the ones I call friends in real life, and the ones I fuck with on social media don’t need to have racism explained to them, neither do I. We know. Nor do we need to justify our abundance, our talents, our stories, our blessups, or our work. We know. This response is about not allowing people to get away with shit. Periodt.
Hicok’s rhetoric is a restatement of “Make America Great Again,” but this time for heterosexual male poets who believe they are white. I’m supposed to say, “whether he intended to or not,” but I won’t. I’m tired of presuming that the white people who write racist essays or are racist might simultaneously be innocent. Not today, Bob. Now, let’s go to the videotape and look at the low-lights:
· I write this because I’m dying as a poet. My books don’t sell as well or get reviewed as much as they used to.
· In American poetry right now, straight white guys are the least important cultural voices, as was inevitable, given how long we’ve made it difficult for others to have their say.
· …the books that come up least often are by straight white men of any age. The faces of poetry have changed.
· At the same time, the public space for straight white men is growing complicated in unprecedented ways.
· While these narratives [“minority narratives” whatever that means] have always been there, they’ve never been mainstream, but as minorities become a collective majority, as women move from the background to the foreground, stories of oppression and exclusion become axiomatic and politically necessary if we’re to have an engaged citizenry.
· They’re telling these stories and it no longer matters if straight white guys are listening.
· I offer this view into American poetry because I believe America is at a tipping point. The changes going on in poetry, and more slowly in the country, are irreversible and growing.
· Born in 1960, I’m an MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Vietnam, CSNY (four dead in O-hi-o) kid. By temperament and teaching, I was drawn to the peace and love side of that era, and moved by “The Dream” speech most of all. [He really did bring Martin and the speech into this].
· But I’m also torn between my pleasure at seeing part of American culture take significant strides toward equality and my sorrow due to the diminishment of interest in my work. [The same people who didn’t like your work then don’t like it now].
· Yet when I focus on my sense of loss, I’m guilty, not just of hypocrisy, but a softer version of what I’ve seen the majority of white politicians do my whole life. [This is not soft].
· Though emotionally I’m crushed that I’m disappearing as a poet, ethically I find it necessary and don’t know how to put the two together.
· …and of course forever weird to know that I have to do both, have to be cleared out to make room for the young, and that I and people like me deserve to be cleared out to make room for those unfairly denied. Weird to both love and hate this state of affairs.
As I reread Hicok’s essay, I can’t help but hear a more polished and articulate Trump. Hicok is telling this generation of male heterosexual poets who believe they are white to be wary, that minorities are replacing them. And not just on the page, at poetry readings and bookshelves, but in America as well, as a demographic. Yeah, he tries to use his white liberal ideology as a counter-weight to his racism but no. It doesn’t work. It’s old hat.
Other voices I hear lurking within the passive-aggressive lines of his essay are those of the Charlottesville racists, “You will not replace us.” It echoes Fox News’s rhetoric about the shrinking white majority [cue horror movie scream]. In their New York Times article, “White ‘Power’ and the Fear of Replacement,” Abigail Levin and Lisa Guenther explain what “you will not replace us” means. They argue that the phrase becomes “another way of reasserting the supremacy of whiteness and its irreplaceable, but precarious, value in a fundamentally confused zero-sum game where one group’s gain must equal another group’s loss.” Hicok is stating that he is dying as a poet because we, black, Latinx, POC, LGBTQ+, Muslim, Indigenous, and Othered writers are flourishing. I recall a quote attributed to Richard Nixon and Southern Strategy politics, “…you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.”
Hicok’s dog whistles could embolden gatekeepers to reduce the already small percentages of Us they welcome through their doors. Despite his sobs for the diminished and dying white poet, publishing overall is 79% white, and that depends on whom you ask. Some organizations record a higher number. In 2015, Jennifer Baker reported in Forbes that “Lee & Low Books released the results of the first Diversity Baseline Survey confirming the lack of representatives from marginalized cultures throughout the industry as well as within various levels including executive, editorial, sales, marketing and publicity, and book reviews.” They are currently soliciting data for a 2019 survey.
And those reviewers Bob is lusting after:
Whiteness centers itself as the victim in issues where whiteness is the perpetrator of harm. This self-centering is whiteness’s chief super-power; it is hellbent on establishing its innocence. Perhaps this is why Hicok keeps lathering on the sappy “I’m a liberal” rhetoric between his recurring racism. He’s trying to prove his innocence, but by the end, it’s an incoherent ramble. I can almost hear Dean Armitage gleefully dropping “My man” before every small dose of racism. Or one of my favorites, “I would have voted for Obama a third time. Best president ever. Hands down” when he brings Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into the essay. This essay could be a character in a Jordan Peele horror movie.
People who believe they are white cannot resist this power. Whiteness is narcissistic, it is morbid, and it is addictive. In short, it’s a helluva drug. Hicok does what white people often do: he reduces people of color and Othered people to stereotypes about their identities. He then credits their stereotyped identities for any success they might have achieved. But there is something else. Hicok is trying and failing at creating a conflicted white identity. He is trying to mirror the very writing he claims is killing him as a poet, and duplicate our multi-faceted complexity. However, Hicok cannot read our work outside of his privileged, racial power dynamic. Instead of being compelling, what he’s published is a desire to be the victim at our expense. In his article, “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show,” Ken Chen writes, “It is not enough for the colonizer to own the world — the only thing missing, the only thing escaping his grasp, is to own the trauma that he himself authored.”
Hicok has a lot of nerve to cry scarcity with a resume that is so long and so lucrative. His tenth collection of poetry is out and about. Maybe he’s charging his base. Hicok is urging the 21–40 year-old heterosexual males who believe they are white to hey, buy white, review white, and publish white. Oh, you so edgy Bob and racist, and not innocent, at all. You know what you did with your essay. Poet Jenny Zhang writes, “The long con of white mediocrity may never be exposed…” At least not exposed by other white people. My folks and I have a saying: If he or she had a friend, then dot dot dot. If Hicok had a friend, they wouldn’t have allowed him to publish that essay. However, it is more likely that he does have a friend(s), and he or they agree with him.
Okay, I’m going back to work now.
About the Author:
Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is a self-described “sancocho […] of provisions from the Harlem Renaissance, the Spanish Poets of 1929, the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican School, and the Modernists.” Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, conveying “nakedness of emotion, intent, and experience,” and he writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. His second poetry collection, black / Maybe: An Afro Lyric, is available from Willow Books. Roberto’s first collection, Melancolía, is available from Červená Barva Press.
His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol 3, The Root, Those People, Rigorous, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Gawker, Barrelhouse, The Acentos Review, Lunch Ticket, and many others.
He is founder of the cooperative press Get Fresh Books, LLC.
A native New Yorker, Roberto holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
