Contemporary Black British Poetry (excerpt). : Dr Lauri Ramey
The following excerpts are taken from Black British Writing, eds. R. Victoria Arana & Lauri Ramey(Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 121-125. Reprinted by kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Joseph’s writing brings together the worlds of postcolonialism and post-Language Poetry experiments—in its allusions to Amiri Baraka, Wilson Harris, Viktor Shklovsky, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Kamau Brathwaite and Ted Joans. For Joseph, the present state in Britain is one of “conceptual colonialism.” Obviously, Joseph wills himself to depart from the shackles of linguistic repression, affirming that part of the role of poetry is to question and even attack the hierarchies of cultural and aesthetic control designed to keep out voices of diversity and dissension and maintain narrow hedgerows of propriety. While that aspiration is hardly a novel one in the twentieth century (where Joseph is in good company), his is not the mode of black British poetry that is commonly seen as exemplifying “the right kind” of its genre and producer. When the hegemony of language conflicts with our experience and stops making sense, there is a history to draw on of others who have employed countervailing tactics of subject and style; but those modes of experimentation are generally associated with white Euro-American modernism and postmodernism.
Joseph book's title, teragaton (suggesting an elision of terra and interrogation), conjures “a place” characterized in his Introduction by “departures from sense, syntax-logic, conscious focus, preset matrices into an explosion/implosion of raw word and solid thought matter – a bulk of chaos containing the pre-selective text.” Poems such as “Blackdadamasonsong (for Ted Joans),” “De Moko Jumbie,” and “Vervain With Kimono” demonstrate inventive use of fonts, typography, space, shape and page. Such techniques highlight senses of freedom and immediacy, reinforcing his comments from the Introduction. His poetry interrogates “preset matrices” and challenges the notion of “a pre-selective text,” where themes and ideas have been determined and the poem unfolds as planned. Joseph’s poetry aims instead to be the trace of its process of creation and offers an experience that cannot be had before or outside of the poem. His poetry uses quick-shifting mixtures of vernacular dictions where speakers often remain unidentified. He relies on aggressive and deliberately non-standard uses of punctuation to problematize the dynamics of reader-poet control. The result in teragaton is an exuberant and thoughtful series of experiments with form, drawn from literary and extra-literary contexts.
The “crisis of representation” experienced by Joseph conditions, to some extent, the creative lives of all poets working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but the context Joseph invokes (aesthetically postmodern) does not tally with what a number of contemporary British critics of black British literature perceive as an almost exclusively social realist tradition in the African diaspora, including black Britain. For similar reasons, British poets working on the margins of representational expression may still be marginalized and excluded even from collections designed to introduce readers to new poetry (hence the need for anthologies like Out of Everywhere —a fine collection of experimental poetry by women, though it contains no black writers—and Other). But the exclusionary impact of canon formation turns unacceptable and intolerable for a black British poet who is stereotyped with the expectation of being deeply invested in the performative (much of Joseph’s work, for instance, explicitly engages literary dimensions of presentation and, while some of it would perform well, other aspects would be impossible to reproduce orally); in class- and race-based social interventions (Joseph’s interest, for example, is not to represent such concerns directly, but rather to engender social and political impact by interrogating one’s identity as a user of language in a particular time and place and in relation to repressive forces standing in the way of meaningful communication); and conveyed in techniques and imagery demonstrating double voicing, conflictual identities and cultural collisions.
Joseph’s means and goals are entirely normative for a contemporary poet interested in de-centering and reconceptualizing identity, examining one’s personal and literary lineage across time and space, and interrogating language as a system of discourse—his poetry and thought would be right at home in In the American Tree or a critical study such as Peter Quartermain’s Disjunctive Poetics, which addresses such relevant topics as “Writing as Assemblage.” Joseph’s phrase “to talk text” gestures to the relocation of conceptions of written language into the body and prefigures Patience Agbabi’s sense of “word of mouth”. His poetry, although perhaps not exhibiting some of the conventional surface markers, also shows many features associated with other poetries of black Britain and the African diaspora—connections to deceased elders as spirit guides, the importance of family, heritage and what one inherits, dispossession and the effort to create a functional world of one’s own, and cultural and linguistic alienation. The focus here on the poetry of Joseph, an immigrant to and citizen of Britain, is meant to signify that such concerns belong rightfully to and are claimed by a black British poet.
A chapter on Anthony Joseph by Lauri Ramey will also appear in Dictionary of Literary Biography:Contemporary Black British Writers, ed. Arana (Bruccoli, Clark, Layman Publishers, forthcoming 2006).
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