The Other's Other: Against Identity Poetry

My title invokes a dual otherness. As a black person, as a gay person, I am other to the social norm of heterosexual whiteness. Poetry, a stereotypically exalted and also, or therefore, marginalized realm, is often seen as other to the debasement, social and psychic, that blackness and gayness too frequently represent in our society, a degradation all too often acted out on black and gay bodies. Poetry is also other to the utilitarian, means-end rationality of capitalist society. Poetry's otherness enacts an escape from or a transformation of racial and sexual otherness: it embodies an otherness of inclusion rather than exclusion, of possibility rather than constraint. Poetry presents the possibility of an otherness that is liberating rather than constricting: it offers the prospect of an alienation from alienation. The great German critical theorist Theodor Adorno proposed that poetry presents the alienation of language from its alienation in everyday use: by turning language away fro

My title invokes a dual otherness. As a black person, as a gay person, I am other to the social norm of heterosexual whiteness. Poetry, a stereotypically exalted and also, or therefore, marginalized realm, is often seen as other to the debasement, social and psychic, that blackness and gayness too frequently represent in our society, a degradation all too often acted out on black and gay bodies. Poetry is also other to the utilitarian, means-end rationality of capitalist society. Poetry's otherness enacts an escape from or a transformation of racial and sexual otherness: it embodies an otherne