An Exploration of the Ethics of Describing the Other The controversy a couple years ago about whether or not a particular

poem is racist and whether or not that makes it a bad poem has seemed to me to be complicated by a few different sets of expectations of what poems are and what makes a good poem. A few responses to the debate of whether or not a particular poem is racist were to defend the poem on those grounds. Another set was to argue that whether or not a poem is racist does not matter. This debate is an old onegoing back to the end of the 19th century when Literature Departments were being formed and justified by literatures inherent moral value. Simultaneously, the Aesthetic and Decadent movements were demanding art for arts sake, and rejecting the demands that literature be morally informed. It seems clear that if youre on the side of the poem as a moral enterprise, and you believe racism to be immoral, you would reject a poem that expressed or defended racist attitudes as immoral, and thus, as a bad poem. On those grounds, there doesnt seem to be much controversy about the worth of a racist poem, except whether or not it is racist. But what if you believe in art for arts sake? What, then, do you expect from a poem for you to judge it as a good poem? Christopher Beach, in his essay Poetic Positionings: Stephen Dobyns and Lyn Hejinian in Cultural Context, suggests that the majority of poetry being written today demands an epiphany. How can the aesthetic demand for epiphany be applied to the ethical treatment of Others by a poem? In his book of essays, The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young suggests that to write a poem is to explore the unknown capacities of the heart and mind; it is emotive, empathetic exercise. Muriel Rukeyser, in her collection of essays, The Life of Poetry, says that in poetry We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves. Both of these quotes seem to suggest to me that the demand for realization or discovery in a poem, when the poem involves an Other, demands that the poet be able to cross over from their position as a subject, either of privilege or privation, and use empathy or imagination to change the relationship between the self and the Othereither by moving the position of the Other, or the self. To leave the dialectic relationship the same throughout a poem seems like lazy writing at best and an inherent lack substance at worst. We find this demand for epiphany, even (or especially?) in the context of racism in one of the bloggers responding to the 2011 controversy: he's saying nothing new in a nation already flooded with views that sound similar on the surface. Id like to examine this idea of the poems position, and changing that position in relationship to the Other, through the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Time has made clear which of these two poems, In the Waiting Room, and Manuelzinho fulfill the desires and expectations of the poetry reading audience. Bishop is a poet whose body of work not only describes Others, but also describes the position of feeling like an Other being appropriated by vision and description, and also an anxiety with describing the Other. She is a thoughtful and talented poetand by

examining her success and her failure, we can see that the poem in which the narrator shifts her position after an encounter with the Other is one that fulfills the expectation for epiphany. The poem in which the narrator maintains her position throughout lacks epiphany, and without discovery in the poem, it seems like a piece of rather uninteresting and self-serving rhetoric. In the Waiting Room, is narrated by a child waiting in a dentists office while her aunt is being seen. She reads a National Geographic, where she is confronted by images of Others black, naked women with necks/ wound round and round with wire (28-29), and even the aunt is described as an Other, a foolish, timid woman (42). It is after these multiple confrontations with images of violence, eruption, and lack of bodily containment observed in others that the child speaker of the poem shifts her own position: What took me/ completely by surprise/ was that it was me: / my voice, in my mouth (44-47). The speaker identifies with her aunt, and then moves from this identification into the even more destabilizing identification with the Others in the National Geographic: Iwewere falling, falling, / our eyes glued to the cover/ of the National Geographic (50-52). The child speaker tries to move back from this disorienting movement out of herself, listing biographical details, her name and age, to try to reassert herself, to regain her original position. But she cannot: I scarcely dared to look/ to see what it was I was (65-66). Here comes the epiphany, those awful hanging breastsheld us all together/ or made us all just one? (8183). By the end of the poem, the speaker is back in the waiting room in Worcester, physically in her original position. But her identification, her act of imagination and empathy for the Other has led her to an epiphany about their relationship. The change of her position is hinted at in the last stanza by both her conflation of her self and the waiting room into the ambiguous referent it that she is back in (94), and by her movement to look Outside, / in Worcester, Massachusetts (95-96), a strong contrast to the repetitive language of in and inside of the speakers original subject position in the first long stanza. Manuelzinho, on the other hand, begins and ends its interaction with the Other from the same relationship position of privileged and reluctant, even resentful, benefactor. The speaker describes the arrangement between the two in the first stanza, that in order to live on her property rent-free, Manuelzinho is supposed to garden for her. Then she begins to describe Manuelzinho as a lazy and stupid failure who cannot garden or provide for his family: You starve/ your horse and yourself/ and your dogs and family. (33-35). The speaker describes giving Manuelzinho money for a funeral and medicine for a baby, describes how bad he is at math, compares his children to moles, and then apologizes for making fun of his

green painted hat, My visitors thought it was funny. / I apologize here and now (138-39). Immediately after, the poem ends: You helpless, foolish man, I love you all I can, I think. Or do I? I take off my hat, unpainted and figurative, to you. Again I promise to try. (140-45) The poem does not attempt to love Manuelzinho because of some realization of his worth, that he deserves love. He remains a helpless, foolish man. The stanza, with its three lines beginning with I, is focused on the speakers anxiety that she is not fulfilling the role she assigned to herself in the beginning of the poem: that of strained generosity. If there is any shift at all in the position of the speaker, it is that she comes to feel that she should treat Manuelzinho more generously with her language as well, apologizing for the Klorophyll Kid, comment, and resolving to try to love you all I can. This resolution does not designate a change in their relationshiphe is still the Other who ruins things and she is still the privileged self that feels responsible to help. The speaker has simply intensified this relationship by replacing pity or understanding (still seeing Manuelzinho as helpless, foolish,) with more dutythe duty to try to love him more. There is very little room here to argue for an epiphany little is discovered except that she has little empathy for his situation and continues to have little empathy for him. And in that distance of privilege, between noblesse oblige and empathy, the poem fails to discover anything significant. From these two poems of Elizabeth Bishop, we can see that the failure of empathy in a poem, motivated by adherance to racial stereotypes or class privilege, causes the poem to fail aesthetically for those who expect epiphany from their poetry. For those who dont expect epiphany or moralityperhaps a racist poem could be a fine poem. Im curious what standards they do hold good poems to, however.