ABSTRACT
When the reality of racial violence in the United States becomes the explicit focus of avant-garde anxiety (of the kind demonstrated by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck in An Army of Lovers) or sacred justice (such as Kaia Sand reveals in Remember to Wave), the stakes of the debate change. Not only can an avant-garde poetics not primarily concerned with justice (now imbued with mystical authority) appear as a form of heresy to avant-gardists whose poetics are so focused, but the real-world horrors and tragedies of the world place great pressure on the importance and practical usefulness of art and formal preoccupations. To see such an effect, we need look no farther back than the spring of 2015 when Kenneth Goldsmith performed a piece called “The Body of Michael Brown,” which was based on the autopsy report of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man who was shot six times by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. In such moments, the varied emotional responses, political consciousness, and aesthetic beliefs of poets, artists, and critics become subject to greater scrutiny. In the wake of Goldsmith’s performance, and alongside the increased visibility of state violence against black Americans, many poets and critics began to feel that their love of the world had to become more concrete—visible, recognizable, shared, and even effective. This intensification is understandable; the need to respond to environmental disaster and neoliberalism, however real, can’t help but seem more abstract in comparison to the dead or injured bodies that appear on screens across the United States, or on its streets and in its homes. The unavoidable physical fact that U.S. cultural and state power kills, detains, harasses, and impoverishes racialized bodies calls for our anger, sadness, and action.
