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 from its use as a mere medium of exchange, poetry returns language to itself. Poetry's otherness to my own multiple socially defined othernesses is a space of freedom, where lack becomes pure potential.

For this reason, I have always intensely disliked what I call identity poetics, the use of poetry as a means to assert or claim social identity. That has always seemed to me a form of self-imprisonment, neglecting or even negating the possibilities poetry offers not just of being someone else, anyone and/or everyone else, but of being no one at all, of existing (if only for a moment) outside the shackles of identity and definition. Ideally, one writes poetry out of what one doesn't know, as an act of exploration. Too often today, though, writers want simply to "express" the selves they have decided that they are or have, and readers demand to see themselves (or what they imagine as themselves) reflected back to them. Identity poetics, frankly, is boring, giving back the already known in an endless and endlessly self-righteous confirmation of things as they are. It is also constraining, limiting the imaginative options of the very people it seeks to liberate or speak for. I have never looked to literature to mirror myself back to me, to confirm my identity to myself or to others. I already have a self, even if one often at odds with itself, and if anything I have felt burdened, even trapped, by that self and its demands, by the demands made upon it by the world. Many minority writers have spoken of feeling invisible: I have always felt entirely too visible, the object of scrutiny, labeling, categorization; literature offered a way out of being a social problem or statistic, a way not to be what everyone had decided I was, not to be subject to what that meant about me and for me. But even if one has a more sanguine relation to selfhood, Picasso's admonition should always be kept in mind: art is called art because it is not life. Otherwise, why would art exist? Life already is, and hardly needs confirmation of the fact.

I seek from literature an image of who or what I could be, of what the world itself could be, an image of the "as if" rather than of the "as is." The greatest literature has always engaged in the generation of new realities, not the reiteration of the same old given reality. I think most literary-minded people, if asked, would agree with such a statement: and yet black writers are held (and many hold themselves) to a different, double standard. "Write what you know" becomes a trap, as if there were a fixed terrain of what one can or should know, and as if the possibility of writing exactly what one does not know might not be the most exciting of all. As Stephen Owen writes, "We have been informed that we are radically 'of' our age, or culture, or gender, or class, [or race], and not of another; we can go elsewhere only as tourists, cultural voyeurs. If we believe such a story, we will accept our assigned places, submit to our limitations, and repress the hope that we can go back to where we were, or stay where we choose, or even change and become other, except as we are driven hopelessly forward by history's inertial machine."

The poems I love both seduce and baffle: their surfaces (aural, imagistic) invite one while refusing to be assimilated. They frustrate the will to master the poem and instead demand that one surrender to the poem as an experience in itself. Growing up in the tenements and housing projects of the Bronx, I looked not for a reflection of my life but for an alternative to it, an affirmation of the possibility of otherness, the freedom not to be shackled by my self or my surroundings. T. S. Eliot was the first poet I ever read: his work frustrated me while enthralling me, which can be taken as a definition of fascination in persons as well as in poems. I was drawn into his work because I needed to know the source of its power over me. I became a poet because I wanted to participate in that power. For me, literature has been not an agent of oppression (as so many simple-minded critics of art as a "bourgeois mystification" characterize it), but an escape from or transcendence of oppression: it held out the possibility that life could be otherwise, that I could be otherwise. A poem has never oppressed anyone, though I was once on a panel at a gay writers' conference with a black lesbian performance poet who implied that literacy was oppressive to black people, which certainly would have been news to the slave-owners who tried to keep their property from learning to read. There are certainly very real questions of access, but these are social questions of literacy and educational opportunity, not literary questions: there is nothing inherent in literature that excludes any person or group of persons.

I've never shared or supported the much-trumpeted desire to subvert or overthrow the "canon." Rather, I want to create a space of possibility within that language, those languages, a space to make me possible as a writer. In my work I wish to make Sappho and the South Bronx, the myth of Hyacinth and the homeless black men ubiquitous in the cities of the decaying American empire, AIDS and all the beautiful, dead cultures, speak to and acknowledge one another, in order to redeem the promise of happiness (in Adorno's phrase) that the lyric has embodied historically and in my own life. Of course, there is no such monolithic edifice as "the canon." Such a unitary monster is as fictional as Hamlet or Leopold Bloom. To the extent that it exists, the canon is various and self-contradictory: like matter and anti-matter, Milton the religious propagandist and Joyce the iconoclast cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

In my adolescence, the world that literature and that poetry in particular presented to me (poetry being much less bound by social circumstance than, say, the novel) was much more welcoming than the world around me in the Bronx of black kids throwing rocks at me, Puerto Rican kids slapping me in my tenement lobby, and Italian kids throwing vegetable crates on my head as I walked under their apartment windows. It was a realm in which ordinary pointless misery could be given shape and meaning, a world in which suffering could be alchemically transmuted into grief. (One of the things that appealed to me about Eliot's work was that it made misery shapely, suffering graceful.) But there wasn't a pre-made space for me in the world of literature, a space labeled "black gay poet who grew up in the projects but is obsessed with Greek mythology's engagements with power, beauty, and desire," let alone a space labeled "Reserved for Reginald Shepherd." I would have to make that space for myself, and that necessity made me a poet. That desire to write the language one needs to read is a common one among writers.

My experience has rarely provided me with the sense that I could make a space for myself in the quotidian world, that genuine agency was available to me. But the world that literature made available to me offered the possibility of making my own space in my own way, of naming myself in meaningful terms, terms beyond mere social categories. As poet and critic J. D. McClatchy puts it, "Poetry's work of knowledge and its access to power lie in the poet's instinct, as well as in the reader's capacity, to take poesis itself—its repertory of song, choice, play, pattern, logic, trope—and see it as a model of experience, and use it as the means to fathom those same sources of authority and transformation in our lives." In the act of writing the poem, the self is not affirmed or even "found", but rather it is created: the self is process, not thing.

There is, of course, no such pre-made, pre-labeled space reserved for anyone who wants to seriously engage language. If you're a straight white man who wants to write, you can perhaps say to yourself, "There's a space waiting for me in language, all I have to do is claim it." But language, which is simultaneously an intimate possession and a social imposition, is much more elusive and ambiguous than that for anyone. This is what deconstructionist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man emphasize, the way that literature foregrounds the contradictory, riven nature of writing and of language, of identity itself. (Here I should make clear the distinction between language as such, which is a neutral signifying system, and discourse, which is always socially and culturally situated. Social discourses operate through language as one of their several modes, but they are not identical with language, nor is language reducible to social discourse.)

Every writer is alienated from his or her own language: T. S. Eliot, one of the whitest of dead white men, wrote that the writer must always be suspicious of language, and on his deathbed the poet Jack Spicer said, "My language did this to me." Language, simultaneously interior and impersonal, belongs to no one, and writing is always a process of finding or constructing a place within this internally defined system of differences. Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out that language is based on negation, on "bat" not being "cat" and "b" not being "p" (between its elements, he wrote, is only difference, and that, I often think, applies to people as well). The French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan pointed out that the psyche itself is built on negation. The self is always other and always unattainable, an asymptote toward which one strives, at which one never arrives. Identity is the attempt toward identity. Sometime earlier than Lacan, the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had noted that "I" is always an other. But just as a straight white male social individual can more easily rest in the illusion of a fixed, stable identity, similarly a straight white male writer can have a more settled, though still illusory, sense that the language belongs to him. He can have a sense of security, however false, that I have never had: the problem of language is foregrounded for me in ways it need not be for him. Although that illusion of mastery, of possession, may be socially sanctioned, it's still an illusion. That sense of security can easily become a sense of complacency, and complacency is the enemy of art. In our society, the artistic productions of straight white men are more socially validated and affirmed than the productions of members of more marginalized social groups. But the assumed "universality" of straight white men's writing, and the policing and self-policing, the marginalization and self-marginalization, of othered groups' writings are two sides of the same racially and sexually delimited coin.

From a very early age, literature was a world to which I aspired, something preferable to the circumstances in which I grew up. I believed that language would save me from the housing projects and tenements of the Bronx, would save me from myself, even, if only I could get to it. There was a paradox in that I looked to this language both to make me exist in the world and at the same time to make me into something else, someone else. Insofar as I was a black person, insofar as I was a gay person, the language of literature (by which I mean predominantly High Modernism) didn't speak of me, and that was both an attraction (because the world that literature proposed and offered wasn't part of the trap in which I was living) and a problem. My own writing is one way of working through that problem, in which the process is itself the solution.


 
Pablo Neruda began a poem with the line "It so happens that I'm tired of being a man" (these words translation puts in his mouth), and I adopt his words here: It so happens that I'm tired of being a "black writer." A black writer in the Black Arts or even the Harlem Renaissance mode is expected to protest solemnly or antically, or (more contemporarily) to celebrate her or his nappy-headed, Afrodiziak, freaky deaky and very much other culture and self (and there is little distinction in this mode between culture and self). Above all, he or she is expected to make "blackness" the meaning, the alpha and omega, of his or her work. I exaggerate for effect, of course, but only a little bit. She or he is expected to open the eyes of the world to what it "means" to be black, to speak "for" or "as" a black person, as if that were a settled, stable, already known thing to be, as if any person were one single, given thing. Whatever the claims of pseudo-black nationalist cultural theory (which sometimes bears a remarkable resemblance to the assumptions of white racism—I have even heard "black nationalist" "educators" say that black people are no good at math because we don't think as abstractly as do white people), there is no essence of "blackness." Blackness is a social construct, just as whiteness is, but blackness is the marked construct, while whiteness is the default: it fades to a privileged invisibility.

I am the product of a nation defined by racial difference, and so, unsurprisingly, difference has always obsessed me, possessed me (the difference I possess possesses me). And that difference itself is not unitary; it incorporates many different differences: the multiple differences between myself and other people, both black and white, gay and straight, poor and better off, the myriad differences among my selves. How could I lay claim to any one self and say "This is mine," "This is me"? All my life I have been aware of what I was not, and of the lack that my not-being represented. This discontent is also, I think, a source of my work: a contented life would not, for me, require a supplement, would not demand that excess of the already-given that we call art. Social circumstance (let's call it the presence of history) has made the distance between self and imago, between the self one is given and the self to which one aspires and which one can never attain, an abyss by which we are all burdened (it is in and by means of that impossible aspiration that "self" is formed), inescapably conscious for me. At an early age I was struck by the distance between a word and its sense, the chasm between names and things, signs and their objects: the difference between being and meaning haunted me, taunted me. This incapacity of words to embody their meanings has possessed me ever since I became conscious of language. The connections between this experience of difference as lack and the more obviously social differences are clear, and clearly tangled.

My introduction to Saussurean semiology revealed the possibility that the space between word and sense, word and world, could be a productive, creative space, a space of potential, rather than only a site of loss and insufficiency, a post-lapsarian stigma forever preventing me or my language from touching the objects of my discourse and thus of my desire. Semiotics opened up the possibility that the arbitrary relation of signifier and signified, of sign and referent, was not merely a space of absence and inadequacy but a space of possibility and creative freedom. The difference between signifier and signified could be a space in which I could create those objects, in which things could be said that I had not previously imagined could be said or said into being. This concomitantly meant that the gap between who I was and who I could be or wished to be could also be something other than lack or failure, could become a space in which identity could be created and transformed rather than merely assumed or acquiesced to.

I don't believe that writing can be defined by extra-literary terms or demands, nor do I believe that such terms are a viable basis for a poetics. It's not, obviously, that poetry by gay men and lesbians does not and should not exist, that poetry by black men and women does not and should not exist, that the varied experiences of black people, of gay people, are not a legitimate topic for literature (though I have at times been accused of holding such a ridiculous position). If that were the case, much of my own poetry would not exist. But a writer's socially defined identity has no relation to his or her literary merits or demerits, nor can that identity account for or explain his or her writing. As Yeats put it, the man who sits down to breakfast is not the same man who writes a poem, and Proust, arguing against the biographical approach to literature, wrote that "a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices." Octavio Paz has pointed out that the poet is only a poet because of the poem: it creates him as much as he creates it. So "poet", like "self", is a process, not a thing. While my "blackness" and my "gayness" are certainly involved (in complex and over-determined ways) in my poetry, my poetry is not defined by these questions of identity. And they are exactly that, questions to be explored and investigated, not givens to be taken for granted or flags to be waved. Nor do these questions determine the worth or interest (as poetry, not as personal or social document) of my poetry.

Part of the expressive material given me to work through happens to be sociopolitical (my experience as a black gay man raised in poverty in a racist, homophobic, class society), but that in no way gives my work any kind of political efficacy or allows that work to make any special claims. It's just an aspect of my material, no different in kind from any other artist's expressive material, though different in specific content from many. Nor is my experience or understanding of these materials identical to that of someone else formed in ostensibly "the same" circumstances. I am not a black writer, I am not a gay writer, though I am a writer who is gay and who is black, and who is many other things besides. I am a writer, and since I am a human being, certain attributes attach themselves to me and produce me as an individual: I don't write in or out of a vacuum, any more than I live in one. An engine of my writing is my experience of blackness, my experience of gayness, of marginality and exclusion, but the writing arising from that experience isn't wholly determined by that experience, may engage that experience in only the most oblique terms, or not at all (disengagement is also a form of engagement). In Aristotelian terms, the circumstances of my "identity" comprise a necessary but not sufficient cause of my writing.

I often think that I would not be a writer had I not been born black in the circumstances in which I was born and raised, if I had not been or become gay, or if my mother had not died when I was just short of fifteen. If I had been born into the black middle class, I might be comfortably ensconced in a corporate career by now, perhaps doing some writing on the side as a hobby, like stamp collecting or rock climbing. (It's often forgotten that black people don't share the same or even similar backgrounds and experiences. I don't know what life is like for the black bourgeoisie, but I know that it's easier than mine has been.) I certainly don't believe that poetry would have become the necessity it has for me if some of these facts had been different, if I had been presented with a different donnée. If I'd been able to feel more of a sense of fit with my given circumstances, with the self I was offered and expected to become, I wouldn't have been impelled to seek out a secondary world in which I could recreate myself. In that sense constraint made possible a kind of freedom: it made me a poet, and impelled me toward a more self-conscious, self-questioning mode of poetry than most on offer during my formative years as a writer. But none of those constraints or determinants decided the kind of poet I would become, or has any relevance to the quality of my work. As Poe both asserts and demonstrates by example, poetic sentiment does not equal or entail poetic power. And the experience of outsiderhood or marginality, of not belonging, is hardly limited to racial or sexual minorities. If it were, much of the great literature of at least the past two hundred years wouldn't exist, since so much of this literature has been written from margins of all sorts. Certainly the American canon is composed of the proverbial and paradoxical band of outsiders; as McClatchy notes, "The best poets in our tradition have been outsiders, excluded by temperament or sex or fashion: Whitman, Dickinson, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens."

The identity card school of poetry is very popular in our current era, when rhetorical fantasies of democracy and equality in cultural life have become tin-pot substitutes for the real things in social, political, and economic life. But literature is one of the few areas of life in which I do not feel oppressed, in which I have experienced the possibility of freedom. In the literary realm one is not bound by social constructions of identity, or required to flash one's assigned identity card: one can be anyone, everyone, or no one at all. This is one of literature's most precious qualities, the access it allows us to otherness (including our otherness to ourselves), and it is one of the things that I cherish most about poetry. Unfortunately, black writers are too often expected to embody and deliver a predictable and familiarly packaged commodity of what used to be called Negritude. One is expected or even obligated to write in a certain mode or address a particular subject matter in order to be considered a legitimate writer, or even in order to be considered at all. If one writes about a range of subjects in a range of modes, one's work is reduced to that portion of it which is recognizably "black," and the rest is just ignored, if not actively disqualified. Even if, like me, you don't usually engage such subject matter, many readers both black and white will see only that part of one's work that fits into the box marked "black." I have written poems that directly address identifiably "black" subject matters, and it is disproportionately those poems that tend to be reprinted and to be discussed, those poems for which audiences perk up at readings. But I am just as much a black person when I write about spring snow or narcissus blooms as when I write about the South Bronx or the slave trade, and I am as much not. (Though the same black lesbian performance poet who implied that literacy was oppressive also asserted that poems about spring or snow had no relevance to black people or to poor people or HIV-positive people. Presumably in this view black people, poor people, HIV-positive people have no experiences other than being black, being poor, being HIV positive, are nothing but their social labels, and thus they don't experience spring or snow. I hardly need point out what a reductive and even dehumanizing perspective this represents.)

Whatever the topics of my work, my racial identity cannot be used to decide the worth of that work, or as the key to decoding its "true" meaning. Contrary to the beliefs of many current critics, literature is not a symptom of social position. It is exactly that racial mountain (in Langston Hughes's phrase), the reduction of all that one is to "blackness," which threatened to smother me as an individual, that poetry allowed me to get over and around. Gay writers are subject to similar expectations and constraints in the perception and reception of their work, and I am as much a gay writer when I write about the Chicago lakefront or red-tailed hawks in upstate New York as I am when writing about HIV or cruising gay nightclubs. The only way to avoid such pigeon-holing is never to engage such material at all, and that is simply another form of restriction, another way of being determined by the strictures and restrictions of identity politics. And anyway, then one simply becomes "the black writer who refuses to write about being black" or "the gay writer who refuses to write about being gay."


 
The Marxist critic Fredric Jameson values art instrumentally, as a critique of or counter-ideology to bourgeois ideology. For him, art is useful as a mode of oppositionality, social struggle conducted by other means. But art's critique is precisely the critique of usefulness, of means-end rationality. For Kant, freedom was the kingdom of ends, in which all entities, including people, existed for their own sakes and not as the means to some other end. Octavio Paz writes that "The poetic experience . . . does not teach us or tell us anything about freedom: it is freedom itself unfurling itself." The independent existence of art is the result of the rise of instrumental reason: if everything has to be good for something, then art is good for itself. Art's importance is that it has no place in our culture. As Paz acutely puts it, "poems have no value: they are not products susceptible to commercial exchange. . . . Commercial circulation is the most active and total form of exchange our society knows and the only one that produces value. As poetry is not a thing that can enter into the exchange of mercantile goods, it is not really a value. And if it is not a value, it has no real existence in our world."

Poetry is potentially liberating because its uselessness marks out a space not colonized by or valued by capital. Its "obsolescence" is also its resistance to being easily consumable; its loss of "relevance" is also a freedom to keep alive certain human possibilities. In this sense, the drive to make poetry "relevant" is a concession or a surrender to instrumental values, to the imperative of use and functionality: poetry had better be good for something. And poetry simply isn't politically efficacious; as Auden so perceptively noted, "Poetry makes nothing happen." The conflation of the existence of social, political, and economic elites with muddled notions of intellectual or aesthetic "elitism" is sheer obfuscation. The power elite in this country care nothing for art or culture; they care about money and power and the means to acquire and retain them. Art is not among those means. Those who wish to change society might better turn their energies toward society itself, to the real areas of oppression and suffering, economic, political, racial, and sexual. (Identity politics can be a useful organizing tool of social activism, though it can also lend itself to a kind of group solipsism that blinds people to structural, systemic issues.) To blame literature, or culture as a whole, for social, economic, and political woes (or even to see it as central to their perpetuation) is evasive at best, dishonest at worst, a kind of posing as politics, in social commentator Adolph Reed's trenchant phrase. But such posturing is much easier than doing the hard work of trying to change the world. "Cultural activism" is a poor substitute for real political activity.

Poetry's preservation of mystery is its preservation of a space not colonized by capitalism's totalizing impulse. This is also the preservation of a space not colonized by what Adorno calls instrumental reason. The poem embodies this space in its specificity as an event in language: a good poem is not simply a recounting or re-enactment of an extra-linguistic event, but an occasion of its own. The poem is a new thing in the world (or better: it is a new event), not simply a copy or account of an already existing thing: it cannot be reduced to its "meaning" or its "content." Part of what poetry does is remind us that things and events, including language, including ourselves, aren't as accessible or as apprehensible as we think they are. As Wallace Stevens wrote, the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

The encounter that poetry can provide with a realm of experience not defined by or limited to the social (however much it may engage and interrogate that realm) is the most valuable and liberatory thing poetry has to offer in our over-determined world. I wouldn't want to surrender that freedom to an agenda or a program, however well-intentioned.