Two things have really bothered me during the tiny fires of debate swept up by the Hoagland poem discussion. I mean losing a li ttle bit of sleep type of bothered me. The first is the standard reaction to the story by my white male friends--I mention their race here not to activate the Great Racial Myth or (God forbid we still have to say this) "play the race card" but because it is necessary for this discussion. So what they tend to say is something like "Well, yeah, but race is a myth, and we should move on, and this isn't a big deal" you get the picture. Now, look, I'm a white male, nearing 30. I like blues music and interesting sweaters. I'm not exactly a radical or an activist. I grew up in a minority, graduated high school with I think a half dozen other Caucasian people, so maybe I have a little more experience in (how do we say it? oh yes) "dealing" with race than people who grew up in predominantly white parts of the country. But this reaction, this insistence that race is a myth, this attempt at intellectual whitewash is more dangerous than the attitudes expressed in Hoagland's poem. In my opinion. It just seems too soon for white people to be saying: "Ha! You thought you could get away with having an opinion about race, but guess what? It doesn't exist. Moving right along . . ." The second thing that's stuck with me, really gotten into me you know, it's my own reaction to the questions posed about race relations and poetry. The one that really hit me was something like "If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?" Until this weekend, I'd never thought of people in my poems as even having a race or an ethnicity or, you know, a mortgage or a stubbed toe. I'm not exactly a narrative poet, so i t makes sense that I wouldn't have thought of people as being different races. These aren't real people usually from my actual life, and those people a bout whom I did and do write poems (my brother, my wife, my son, etc.) well thinking about their race is just natural. But now when I dig around in the well I'm imagining people with entire racial histories, experiences, cultural history. It's incredibly distracting. Characters in poems don't g o to the bathroom--not in my poems they don't. I think my reluctance to write about race has something to do with my reluctance to write about the mundane. I think we can find a middle ground between ignoring race on the one hand ( "It's a myth!") and avoiding it out of boredom or laziness on the other.

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Two things have really bothered me during the tiny fires of debate swept up by the Hoagland

poem discussion. I mean losing a little bit of sleep type of bothered me. The first is the standard

reaction to the story by my white male friends--I mention their race here not to activate the

Great Racial Myth or (God forbid we still have to say this) "play the race card" but because it is

necessary for this discussion. So what they tend to say is something like "Well, yeah, but race is

a myth, and we should move on, and this isn't a big deal" you get the picture.

Now, look, I'm a white male, nearing 30. I like blues music and interesting sweaters. I'm not

exactly a radical or an activist. I grew up in a minority, graduated high school with I think a half

dozen other Caucasian people, so maybe I have a little more experience in (how do we say it? oh

yes) "dealing" with race than people who grew up in predominantly white parts of the country.

But this reaction, this insistence that race is a myth, this attempt at intellectual whitewash is

more dangerous than the attitudes expressed in Hoagland's poem. In my opinion.

It just seems too soon for white people to be saying: "Ha! You thought you could get away with

having an opinion about race, but guess what? It doesn't exist. Moving right along . . ."

The second thing that's stuck with me, really gotten into me you know, it's my own reaction to

the questions posed about race relations and poetry. The one that really hit me was something

like "If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do

so?" Until this weekend, I'd never thought of people in my poems as even having a race or an

ethnicity or, you know, a mortgage or a stubbed toe. I'm not exactly a narrative poet, so it

makes sense that I wouldn't have thought of people as being different races. These aren't real

people usually from my actual life, and those people about whom I did and do write poems (my

brother, my wife, my son, etc.) well thinking about their race is just natural.

But now when I dig around in the well I'm imagining people with entire racial histories,

experiences, cultural history. It's incredibly distracting. Characters in poems don't go to thebathroom--not in my poems they don't. I think my reluctance to write about race has something

to do with my reluctance to write about the mundane. I think we can find a middle ground

between ignoring race on the one hand ("It's a myth!") and avoiding it out of boredom or

laziness on the other.