Last year I was teaching at Kenyon College, and “Proof Casts a Shadow” was a dream being spun between Misha Rai, the Kenyon Review Fellow in Prose, and me. Now I find myself saying goodbye both to Kenyon as the Poetry Fellow, and giving some closing words on what has been an extraordinary anthology of work. Before those final words, however, I want to quickly thank the remarkable artists and the work they shared with us: Misha Rai (my good friend and co-conspirator), David Lynn and the staff of the Kenyon Review (who did so much work on this. So much!) and to my former students at Kenyon. Thank you all for seeing this, and me, through.
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I don’t believe in apolitical poetry. I mean that not in the sense that I don’t stand for it, as one might say “I don’t believe in stealing,” but literally. I don’t believe in the existence of apolitical poetry. Not anymore than I believe in monsters (monstrous people only). One need not speak about politicians, or headlines, or atrocities to be political, and though I believe there is great value in creating art that engages directly with the subjects that people live, die, and suffer from every day, I also believe as a black poet that writing about black joy, for instance, is a revolutionary act. Especially now, especially in America, in this culture, I strive to write those poems. That poem.
But the fact remains that there are poets whose writing avoids certain topics—a tremendous amount of these artists, in fact. And I believe that to make a career of avoidance in this way does not absolve one from making a career-long political statement, regardless of how allergic one believes oneself to be to politics. It is like convincing yourself that if you never think or speak about grammar you are not using it. Politics are infused in our thoughts and writing. So why, then, actively avoid it?
There are so many answers, and one of the most salient, especially as it pertains to many of the topics of the works collected here in “Proof Casts a Shadow,” is that it is ostensibly safer for an “unaffected” artist to say nothing. It is worth noting that for many of these writers, this is a safety from being disliked, or in securing or keeping a good job, or in reimagining one’s relationship to one’s community, relationship, or own body. And that for other artists, safety includes all this, as well as a material cost in the body, or a spiritual one in the perhaps permanent loss of citizenship, family, or community.
I want, however, to focus on an additional cost to those artists who put themselves at risk creating overtly political art. Art that is political becomes political art. Or put another way, artists who have invested in creating works that will be received as political have put in no less work than artists creating any other kind of work. They have often done more work and put more at risk. And what often happens is that their work is not considered art. Audience members at readings tell the artists they are brave (they are) or ask what they can do to help, and for many artists, this is the goal. The whole of it. But I wish sometimes that in addition to that, people spoke about how damn well these artists wrote, or painted, or sang, or spoke.
Misha and I want to thank every artist who contributed to this anthology and to say directly that we find their work beautiful.
Following, I want to briefly explain what I loved. That may include a kind of political discussion because, again, to me art is politics. But it is many other things as well.
I return to Grace Shuyi Liew’s poetry time and again for its investment in people through ideas and the lyrical way she invokes those ideas—the shift between idea and sound and imagery is seamless. In “The Use of Lyricism,” Liew approaches the problem of our suffering being the fuel of art that saves others, “how art can save lives even if it kills / its maker.” It’s a consideration I never made, not once, as a young artist and grapple with now every day. I love that this poem takes it on and makes me feel it, because like these poems, what is felt is inseparable from what is thought.
In Tsering Yangzom Lama’s “A Wire Fence,” I love how formally this piece does what only writing does for me, which is to freeze a moment in time and thought and (sometimes tragic) feeling. It truly is the way it feels in a moment, or just after, when that instant will live with us forever, seeming, as the wire fence does, to cut us in half.
Misha Rai has a deft touch, and it is difficult to read her work without hearing how the craft of it is woven even into her day-to-day speech, which is to say, in “We Don’t Need Your Little History,” she handles a story that moves for me like it is being spoken—and with tremendous sensitivity and beauty. And I cannot stop reading the line “salt tolerant wheat fields deepen exponentially.” I love it.
Gabrielle Bellot’s “By the Lamplight” does what I strive to do in my own work—express the impact of policies and the actions of, say, a TSA agent, as ordinary (in the sense that that happens constantly) yet tremendously important moments of our lives, like, as she puts it, “the deceptive heaviness of twilight.”
I love the rhythm and structure of Nay Saysourinho’s “Your Body Has Thirty-Two Kwan,” which has a sort of refrain of time rather than sound or rhyme (the way a song or poem often uses a refrain). It makes me feel as if I am living a spiritual movement, a bittersweet one (as it often is) since it is beautiful but also in honor of a wronged person: “Bodies can form a circle. / Circles can be broken.”
I think one of my favorite parts of Lars Horn’s “In Water Disjointed from Me” is how it reveals the meaning and impact of decisions artists make when it comes to the creation of their art. And, as well, the piece speaks deeply to artists directly. It is difficult for me as a poet to read: “After those months of illness, I realized I wanted to write physicality differently, that I wanted narrative to carry more materiality,” and not reevaluate not only what materiality means in my own art but the deeply embodied ways in which art operates in Horn’s piece but in others’ as well.
Xandria Phillips’s art brings to my mind the sense of the body as abstraction, how we are an amalgamation of shapes and colors and the tremendous meaning, somehow, in that. I am especially drawn to Minotaurian—I have dreamed of the Minotaur for much of my life as this sort of metaphor of biracialism and otherness, and the geometrical shapes and solid colors of this piece feel both in conflict and in connection and bring to my mind the way that the body can truly be a labyrinth.
One of the ways Phuong T. Vuong’s “Let Me Be Honest” sings for me is in its silences, and I love how this piece turns that silence on its head given the ways the world expects or demands silence of the speaker. For instance, the following short section does not feel to me like a self-silencing: “The therapist of color I prefer does not have time for an appointment until three weeks out. I cannot wait so long.” Instead, I feel resistance and intensity, the way speakers who drop their voices urge me to lean forward, to listen.
I am still impressed at the way Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s “My Summer of Miranda Lambert” deals with the complicated negotiations of doing “good” within a system that demands other from us. “She’d have new orders, new missions. Be trained to shoot at people whose names were like mine” is as heartbreaking as it is instructive. This doubleness drives this piece for me and has kept me returning over and again to particular lines.
It is impossible to write short poems, but Raquel Salas Rivera does it in “Selección De Antes Que Isla Es Volcán,” and part of how they do it is by invoking (and inverting) the towering space of Shakespeare. In “caliban to his friends,” the lines “don’t be afraid. / those aren’t noises, / they are songs” gives me goosebumps and magnifies the words of an enslaved figure above those of all the other players of the story. That is my kind of story.
—Keith Wilson, with support from Misha Rai
