Displacement

My first book came out in 2012. Over the past six years, I’ve been lucky enough to give readings at universities, cultural centers, neon-loud bars, gardens, community colleges, and public squares. I’ve read to undergraduate students, the soused, the general public, high school students, the sober, the willing, the not-so-willing, and MFA students. No matter the venue, no matter the audience, there’s one question I always get asked: “I don’t read Spanish, so how am I supposed to relate to your code-switching poems?” The question is rooted in displacement. Some monolingual readers are dislocated because they can’t access the unknown. The Spanish in my code-switching poems becomes an obstacle; it derails the seamless reading experience. I never get angry when I get asked the question—I know it’s coming. Foreknowledge douses my anger. What still bothers me is the intellectual energy used to formulate and to pose the question: instead of engaging deeply with the work, some readers choose the easy way out. They discard the poem and seek an answer directly from the poet. As a reader and as a poet, I find the short-circuiting of the reading experience troubling.

Displacement is a common part of the reading experience. It happens every time we stumble upon an allusion or reference outside of our body of knowledge. It happens when we encounter language that’s new to us. It happens when a writer upends our expectations for a certain genre or a literary tradition or a well-known aesthetic approach. Displacement squeezes us out; it does derail the reading experience. For some readers, it can be frustrating to be jettisoned from a stanza or a paragraph because of contact with the unknown. Displacement doesn’t frustrate me as a reader. Yes, I’m dislocated when I encounter the unknown in a text. But I find displacement enjoyable because it gives me an opportunity to work my way back into the text. I like looking up unknown words or allusions. I enjoy rereading the text to see if I missed something. Instead of walking away from the text, I seek to understand what’s unfamiliar or bewildering. As I’m working to reenter the text, I’m also enlarging my understanding of the world and enriching my self-awareness. Displacement is one of the pleasures of reading. It sharpens the mind and refreshes our sense of wonder. Displacement is subjective. What displaces one reader, won’t displace another. Most of the poems I selected for the summer issue of The Puritan displaced me as a reader. Sometimes the displacement was brief. Sometimes the displacement was sustained, intense. Some of the displacement was visual, like in “Acknowledgements” by Sachiko Murakami. The typographical arrangement of the arresting language both scatters and pulls in the gaze. In “cain & abel” by Patrick Kinding, a familiar Biblical narrative is displaced by a new transgressive retelling, which both delights and startles. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s “Mister Snuffleupagus” is a mesmerizing persona poem, which reconfigures the sweetness and passivity associated with the title character into something darker, disturbing. In her poem, innocence is displaced by the spine-chilling personality defects found in fables and myths. It was an honour and a joy to read through the poems submitted for the summer issue of The Puritan. Many thanks to all the writers who sent in work. And many thanks to the editors of magazine for the invitation to be a guest editor. Onward!