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The Racial Imaginary
We first learned the phrase “the racial imaginary” from an anthology of the same title, which emerged from articles and conversations generated by and for the Racial Imaginary Institute. You can dive deeper into these conversations by visiting the Racial Imaginary Institute or checking out the anthology, The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, starting with the introduction by Claudia Rankine and Beth Lofreda.
Docupoetic Histories of Racism
Frequently writers engaging with questions about race and racism document the harms and crimes white supremacist systems would try to erase or bury. If you are drawn to the work of Roger Reeves or Kiki Petorsino, who use poetry to engage with history, you may also like these poets:
Rick Barot, especially the poems in The Galleons.
Engaging with Intersectionality
Another area of vibrant intellectual and emotional exploration for poets has been the place where different power dynamics and privileges intersect as people with layered identities experience power from some parts of their identities and oppression from others.
Monica Youn talks in depth about how intersectional thinking informs her work in an interview on Between the Covers podcast.
Charif Shanahan talks about his perspectives on intersectional in his book Trace Evidence in an interview on Between the Covers podcast.
Language and the Construction of Race
Other poets engage with questions of race at the level of language – what words do we use or not use to create our identities or to impose stereotypes on others? How might changes in our language change our perceptions of and relationships with each other?
You may recognize the names on this list from a similar list in the supplementary materials to “The Poem in the Telephone Lines.” When you are exploring poetic lineages, paths often criss-cross along the way.
Writing Whiteness and White Supremacy
As we mentioned in the chapter, white poets are often under the misconception that they have no race or nothing to say about race from within their own lived experiences. On the contrary, poets can do profound work when using their art to try to understand how racism, white supremacy, eurocentrism, and other forms of prejudice are incubated in white communities. Some of the poets who model how this can be done well include:
