Abrasion: Aesthetic Challenges in African American Poetry

In studies of poetics, and in theoretical discourses on reader response which are not informed by being done by International Association of Empirical Aesthetics,1 it is unlikely that subject of abrasion (scraping as well as smoothing) or abrasive qualities of works would be addressed. The reason is not far to seek. Imprisoned in history of Western aesthetics, orthodox scholars and heirs of New Criticism have generally been reluctant to admit, until quite recently, that cognitive processes which occur in transactions are identical in kind but different in degree with which obtain in ordinary communication. They continue to resist logical implications of J. L. Austin's theory of language and speech acts. To be sure, I. A. Richards' claim in Practical Criticism (1929) that the history of criticism...is a history of dogmatism and argumentation rather than a history of research (7) still has currency.2 It is within and extra-literary contexts of such history that aesthetic challenges of contemporary poetry, especially of racially-marked African American poetry, need to be reconsidered. For as poet Charles Simic remarked in a recent blog, some kinds of poetry get little notice because poems produce discomfort for those who prefer to know nothing about what goes on in world. The disruptive gestures of Black Arts Movement of 1960s and 1970s brought just such discomfort to foreground; in early years of 21st century, abrasive qualities of American poetry, politics, and aesthetic responses again demand attention. This essay is a subjective prelude for a new season of objective research.My brief remarks about idea of abrasion, about African American poetry and readers/listeners, and about responding and remembering are deliberately argumentative, exploratory, and provisional. They are informed by rich theoretical discussions in seminal anthologies Black Fire (1968), The Black Aesthetic (1971), Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980) as well as by Mikel Dufrenne's The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1973), Stephen E. Henderson's Understanding New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (1972) and dozens of articles concerning instability of we read literature and we speak about our reading that have retreated into recesses of memory.We read to intensify our thinking about concepts and daily events and to account for our views of human life get shaped. We read literature to discover where our feelings of aesthetic pleasure (perceptions that may produce a sense of balance and order) or our feelings of aesthetic anxiety (perceptions that shock us and initiate pain) might come from. Our reading of poetry as a special kind of speech act may have consequences that critics hesitate to call literary, if by literary critics mean activities which should be segregated and made remote from our ordinary uses of language to accomplish something. Formalists, for example, urge readers to believe that attention to form and language of a poem is sufficient. Habits of close reading may lend credibility to that view, as does a strict construction of E. D. Hirsch's discrimination between meaning and significance in Validity in Interpretation (1967). These positions have intellectual merit. Nevertheless, they severely limit consideration of social character of language. Following some basic ideas about how to do things with words proposed by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words (1962) promotes a more complex negotiation with poems as works that can bring attention to reassuring or traumatic aspects of everyday life.African American poetry has no monopoly on abrasion or innate properties of abrasive, nor throughout its long history have black poets always chosen to be combative or oppositional. …