Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition

Rhythm, rhyme, line breaks, figurative language, allusions, sounds: some of the key craft techniques I ask students to consider when reading and writing poems. However, a poem extends beyond this interaction between form and content, and also beyond the page or the screen. Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition draws attention to this larger context, pulling back the proverbial curtain to reveal infrastructures that affect not only what but how we read. White privilege and Western European traditions undergird academic, publishing, media, and prize-granting institutions, Laura Elizabeth Varna explains, affecting how texts are shepherded toward (or away from) visibility and prestige as well as the terms of their reception. Centering Black women poets from Rita Dove to Amanda Gorman, Varna argues that their access to institutional recognition and symbolic capital has been limited and inflected by their identitarian, social, and aesthetic positions. Throughout Pitfalls of Prestige Varna insists that Black women poets have, despite this discriminatory apparatus, produced a vibrant and diverse corpus of creative and critical work that needs to be engaged on its own terms.Varna’s interdisciplinary project draws from literary studies, the history of the book, and cultural studies to explicate the impact of institutional infrastructures on poets and their poetics. Methodologically innovative, Pitfalls of Prestige recognizes that aesthetics are not simply discursive meaning-making forces but manifest through both a text’s physical form and paths of production and circulation. In part 1 Varna highlights broader material structures—the award-granting system and higher education of the late twentieth century—to better understand their part in defining what counts as writerly success. She then grounds part 2 in a turn in Black women’s poetry toward performances, lyric poetry, and experimental poetry to make a case for their subversive and boundary-blurring potential.Varna’s nuanced analysis of cultural infrastructures shows how thoroughly and multifariously white privilege has shaped literary studies. Her ongoing references to PWIs—primarily white institutions—names whiteness in a way that could be extended to acronyms like PWA (primarily white award), PWP (primarily white publisher), even PWF (primarily white poetic form). Thus chapter 4, which focuses on Black women’s use of lyric forms, insists on the need to account for “whitewashing politics still delimiting the American lyric” and Walt Whitman as one archetype—which Claudia Rankine and Duriel Harris take up and challenge through their use of the form (136). Attending to such formal experimentations, Varna suggests, requires a reading practice that refuses the New Critical view of “the text in isolation, divorced from the body producing (and receiving) it” in order to understand that a poem can suture texts and bodies (126). She demands that readers reckon with the way their reading practices reflect assumptions about this relationship. Consequently, after reading Pitfalls of Prestige, I can’t help but wonder if white male poets are expected to write strong feelings, yet also keep them “within appropriate confines that will not upset readers” as Varna argues Natasha Tretheway is (48). To what extent do critics read Tretheway through the “angry Black woman” stereotype? Although this conjecture is more rhetorical than verifiable, the point is that these questions need asking.Such questions are not simply theoretical musings. They indirectly argue for expanding not just who is granted entrée into the world of poetry but also what Black women’s poetry is. Varna aims to more fully realize poetry’s capaciousness and—as much as possible—to read writers on their own terms. To do that, and keeping in mind the overrepresentation of white people and men in creative writing and academic spheres, Varna tracks the distortions of Black women’s poetry within “interpretive frames that forcibly tame it into strained lockstep with white Eurocentric preconceptions” (71). All five body chapters identify patterns in critical reception, including the expectation that Black poets write with and about a “so-called authentic ‘Blackness’” (34). Reviewers, scholars, poets, and award committee members (primarily white people) find, construct, and reward this “authenticity,” such as when manifested in stereotypes about Black life and in work that explores recognizably conventional Black history. Meanwhile, of writing that emphasizes anti-Black racism, Varna points out that reviewers tend to tame its violence. For example, interpreting Dove’s Thomas and Beluah through a narrative of political progress—the successes of the US Civil Rights Movement—glosses over her allusions to the continued pervasiveness of white domination, socially, economically, and politically (38–41). When texts can be steered through this kind of selective reading, institutions are more likely to open gates that lead toward success.In contrast, Varna argues, more explicitly critical and boundary-pushing writers—Harmony Holiday and Brenda Marie Osbey, for instance—do not fit easily or at all within existing labels (e.g., “lyric” or “poet”). Their work more openly transgresses. Holiday in Negro League Baseball reconceives contours of lyric poetry, from the givenness of its form, author-text relationship, and separation of the personal from the political. Adopting a “neo-slave (non)narrative and form” (162), Osbey in History and Other Poems eschews the “I” of the author in favor of a more collective point of view, breaks rules of punctuation and syntax, and takes a palimpsestic approach toward history rather than letting readers rest in that neat but inaccurate narrative of racial progress (178). Yet, as Varna observes, embracing disruptions and subversions closes many of the gates through which Dove and Trethewey have passed.With its focus both on and away from the text, Pitfalls of Prestige ambitiously maps the landscape of poetry, elucidating the often-invisible mechanisms that enable and sustain the books, journals, awards, and scholarship that bring texts to readers. It also queries how scholars interpret poetry, suggesting that close reading and sociopolitical context together can clarify how assessments of poetic merit and the intersections of racism and sexism shape reception. While this multipronged method occurs unevenly across Varna’s discussions, with the influence of para-poetic institutional apparatuses on a writer’s symbolic capital more pronounced in some cases than others, and while her focus on race, racialization, and racism at times leaves aside how Black women as poets experience racism and sexism simultaneously, Pitfalls of Prestige makes clear that readers can no longer shrug away the under- and misrepresentation of Black women and other minoritized artists and their creative work. Rather, we must confront and challenge these infrastructures that embed hierarchies of value in the worlds and words of poetry.