Thematic Analysis of  the poetry foundation poem and poet.  Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Res

Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s
Response-Poems and the African

American Lyric ‘We’

Christopher Spaide

THE STERNEST EXPERIMENT BY THE AFRICAN AMERICAN POET Terrance

Hayes (b. 1971) bears an unassuming yet subversive title: ‘Sonnet’. Rigidly

traditional in its dimensions, ‘Sonnet’, from Hip Logic (2002), provokes,

with its enigmatic subject matter, defiance of genre conventions, and

refusal to turn:

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

– and so on, for another eleven lines of immaculate iambic pentameter,

stacked into a golden rectangle.
1

How might we decipher this inflexibly

repeating line, as it refuses to deliver the forward momentum and drastic

voltas of changing heart and swerving thought that we expect to find in

any lyric poem, especially a sonnet?

From one angle, ‘Sonnet’ is a satire of received ideas and received forms,

a protest poured into concrete-poem solidity, relying on loaded words but

refusing to articulate their racist connotations: dehumanising stereotypes

This essay is part of a symposium on the pronoun ‘we’ in poetry, entitled ‘Poetry’s We’, which
appears in the present issue of The Cambridge Quarterly. The four essays evolved as a group
and have many shared concerns.

The author is grateful to Stephanie Burt, Bonnie Costello, Eliza Holmes, Eileen
Sperry, Helen Vendler, Andrew Warren, and an anonymous reader at The Cambridge
Quarterly for giving helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.

1
Terrance Hayes, Hip Logic (New York 2002) p. 13.

doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfz019

VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly.

All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

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about African Americans and ‘watermelon’, caricatures warping black

bodies into exaggerated ‘smiles’, the insinuation of violence in those ‘sliced’

knives. Mechanically repeated, decisively end-stopped, typographically

(if in no other way) justified, Hayes’s unvarying line plays out the historical

persistence of those racist formulations, along with that other Western

hand-me-down, the sonnet. Viewed from another angle, ‘Sonnet’ takes to

an extreme the exact repetitions of the blues stanza, a verse-form ideal for

enacting emotional deadlocks and insinuating double meanings. Singing

this extended blues is not a lonesome I but a collective We who parry the

biases of an unmentioned Them, maintaining a controlled ‘slice’ audible in

Hayes’s alliterative sweeps of w and s. Together, ‘We’ reclaim the water-

melon, reworking a racist gaze into a self-fashioned mask that hides intern-

al quarrels behind deceptive ‘smiles’.

From still another angle, ‘Sonnet’, like many of Hayes’s poems, strikes

on originality by responding to past literary and musical traditions. Besides

his sidelong glance at the iconography of minstrelsy and perhaps the min-

strel song ‘Watermelon on the Vine’ (‘Dat watermillion, smilin’ on de

vine’),
2

Hayes looks back on a long line of African American poems that

emblematise black identity as a mask, from Langston Hughes’s ‘The Jester’

(1925) (‘In one hand j I hold tragedy j And in the other j Comedy, – j
Masks for the soul’)

3
to Robert Hayden’s ‘El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’

(1967) (‘O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son’).
4

In only six words

and a pair of assonant is, ‘Sonnet’ echoes one poem in particular, a founda-

tional lyric of the African American ‘we’: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ‘We

Wear the Mask’ (1896).

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,

– This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.
5

Borrowing ‘we’ and ‘smile’, Hayes domesticates Dunbar’s ‘torn and bleed-

ing hearts’ into ‘sliced’ fruit and scatters Dunbar’s ‘lies’, letter by letter,

2
For an early twentieth-century transcription of ‘Watermelon on the Vine’, see

Thomas W. Talley, Thomas W. Talley’s Negro Folk Rhymes, new expanded edn., ed.
Charles K. Wolfe (Knoxville 1991) p. 94.

3
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

(New York 1995) p. 56.
4

Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York 2013) p. 86.
5

The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville
1993) p. 71.

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into ‘sliced’ and ‘smiles’. Both poems project double consciousness onto

the outside and inside of the mask, which Henry Louis Gates Jr. considers

a central figure for the ‘spiritual consolidation’ of black people; smiling to

outsiders, these collective speakers safeguard ‘a coded, secret, hermetic

world, a world discovered only by the initiate’.
6

Through masks of self-

conscious artifice, of traditional forms turned on their heads (Dunbar’s

adroit rondeau, Hayes’s stubborn sonnet), both speak for a ‘We’ that

resounds throughout African American poetry: a chorus challenging racist

distortions with ‘myriad subtleties’, unifying into one double-meaning

voice.

Though ‘Sonnet’ is an odd introduction to the typically lyric Hayes, it

intertwines this essay’s two subjects into one line, one pronoun. First,

‘Sonnet’ meets the expectation that poets of colour – not to mention acti-

vists, artists, athletes, politicians, and figures both private and public –

‘speak for their race’. Widely acknowledged outside poetry scholarship,

rarely mentioned within it, that expectation varies in force and proven-

ance. A matter of personal duty for some poets, it is a critical imposition

for others; for some it meets the needs of a general (or white) readership,

while for others it answers the call of African American audiences and

peers. To rise to that expectation, ‘Sonnet’ forgoes the familiar lyric ‘I’ and

adopts the plural pronoun, a marked ‘we’. In African American culture,

perhaps more than in any other expanse of American culture, the differ-

ence between speaking as an individual ‘I’ and speaking for a racially

marked collective ‘we’ has proved especially consequential, to such an

extent that Kevin Young’s literary-musical history The Grey Album (2012)

can chart the course of African American culture as one centuries-long os-

cillation between two poles, ‘I’ and ‘we’.
7

Represented visually, that oscilla-

tion might look like Give Us a Poem, Glenn Ligon’s 2007 neon sculpture (see

Figure 1). After his 1975 speech to Harvard’s graduating seniors,

Muhammad Ali was asked by an anonymous student to ‘give us a poem!’

Ali’s response, touted by Ali and others as the shortest poem in the lan-

guage, might be transcribed: ‘Me? / We!’ Light flits between the upper

and lower halves of Give Us a Poem, a visual palindrome. Blackness never

rests, shifting up and down, now in ME, now in WE.

6
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the ‘Racial’ Self (Oxford

1987) pp. 166–7.
7

Recognising the ‘specific African American “we”’ in Dunbar, Young later
deems the blues ‘the invention of a black “I” in American culture – versus the power-
ful “we” of the Negro spirituals’; bebop and Hughes’s long poems (to take one further
example) afford ‘a mix of soloist and group, negotiating the community to make an
“I” into “we”’. Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis
2012) pp. 119–20, 154–5, 202.

TERRANCE HAYES’S RESPONSE-POEMS 233

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Figure 1. Glenn Ligon, Give Us a Poem, 2007, neon and Sintra PVC, 75.63 �
74.25 inches (192.1 � 188.6 cm); Collection of Studio Museum in Harlem,
Photographer Credit: Farzad Owrang VC Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist,
Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane
Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris

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In lyric poetry, this particular choice of pronoun divides expressions of

difference, dissent, and unease with categorisation from pronouncements

of solidarity, black nationalism, or the sense, to quote the title of a 1974

Lucille Clifton poem, that ‘All of Us Are All of Us’.
8

Historically, it distin-

guishes Rita Dove and Carl Phillips from Amiri Baraka and Nikki

Giovanni, or the dignifying portraiture of the early Gwendolyn Brooks

from the riotous rallies of the late Brooks, galvanised by the avowedly col-

lective Black Arts Movement (BAM). Setting aside some renowned excep-

tions – the representative ‘I’, transhistorical and transcontinental, of

Hughes’s ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, or Robert Hayden’s unmarked

‘we’ of human (or Bahá’ı́) unity – we could follow Young and group the

many unforgettable speakers of African American literature into two broad

contingents. We would find, drawn towards the pole of ‘I’, the freedman or

-woman of the slave narrative, the solitary soul singing the blues, the

Baldwinian witness, the Invisible Man, and the self-aggrandising MC;

drawn towards ‘we’, the singers of work and protest songs, choruses, con-

gregations, testifiers to a shared black experience, or activists uniting to

proclaim ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘Yes We Can’, or ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Second, ‘Sonnet’ demonstrates Hayes’s ingenuity for foregrounding the

African American poet’s choice between ‘I’ and ‘we’, or (put more exactly)

for giving second opinions on past choices, responding to earlier poets, to

their pronouns, and to the poetics and politics that drive them.
9

To some

extent, Hayes’s ambivalence, his variegated influences (from Dunbar to

Run-DMC), and his irreverent tours through the tradition do not belong

to him alone but characterise his entire generation of African American

poets. Labelled Generation X or the hip-hop generation, that generation is

best understood as the first born since the Civil Rights Movement, unique-

ly unburdened by the schools, divides, and the literary scuffles of previous

decades: BAM, the classical alternative offered by Hayden, the radicalisation

of Brooks. Riffing on the lingo of standardised tests, the poet-scholar Evie

Shockley argues that post-Civil Rights generation poets enjoy the freedom

of ‘multiple choice’. If earlier African American poets were subjected to

what Shockley calls ‘the poetics litmus test’, ‘administered by critics, editors,

audiences, and other poets’ – certifying poets either ‘authentically black’

8
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, ed. Kevin Young and Michael S.

Glaser (Rochester 2012) p. 130.
9

In an alternative reading, Anthony Reed frames ‘Sonnet’ as concrete poetry,
anti-lyric and resisting its own referentiality; though our approaches diverge, I agree
with Reed’s ‘central claim’ that black experimental writing ‘often entails repurposing,
reinterpreting, and redefining older techniques, themselves made legible through
multiple traditions’. See Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black
Experimental Writing (Baltimore 2014) p. 33.

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or broadly ‘American’, ‘black’ or ‘avant-garde’ but never both – then the

post-Civil Rights generation can choose freely among schools and influen-

ces, verse-forms and pronouns. They can even choose ‘all of the above’.
10

Shockley’s model suits not only Hayes, not only Shockley herself, but

many of their most celebrated contemporaries. Elizabeth Alexander is best

known for convening one of American poetry’s most sincere and sonorous

‘we’s. In both ‘Rally’ (2008), her ode to then-nominee Barack Obama

(‘human beings ever tilt toward we’), and her 2009 inaugural poem ‘Praise

Song for the Day’, Alexander listens in to Obama’s democratic, anti-

essentialist ‘we’, a pronoun instilled with activist fervour and the cadences

of the black church.
11

But she just as readily troubles her pronouns, as in

her kaleidoscopic ars poetica. ‘“I” equals “we”’, she proposes in ‘Ars Poetica

#88: Sublime’, while ‘Ars Poetica #100: I Believe’ undercuts its own pon-

derous lecturing: ‘Poetry k is where we are ourselves j (though Sterling
Brown said k ‘Every “I” is a dramatic “I”’)’.12 Equally self-assured with her
multiple choice is former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In

Wade in the Water (2018) she collects forthright autobiographical lyric, verse

epistle, and ‘Declaration’, an erasure of the Declaration of Independence

which leaves behind a skeletal sketch of collective brutalisation: ‘He has

plundered our – k ravaged our – k destroyed the lives of our – k taking away our – k
abolishing our most valuable – ’.

13
Smith arrests every attempt at collective pos-

session, at wishful ‘our’-ness, with a dash and a breathtaking stanza break

– cutting short the Declaration’s claims of self-possession and independ-

ence for all. When asked on a New Yorker podcast about this very ‘our’,

Smith answered far more generally: ‘I think every poem is an invitation to

forge a “we” with the speaker’. Kevin Young, the magazine’s poetry editor,

agreed: ‘I can’t think of a better definition of the lyric’.
14

10
Evie Shockley, ‘All of the Above: Multiple Choice and African American

Poetry’, in Keith Tuma (ed.), Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry
(Oxford 2003) pp. 2, 8. Shockley develops these arguments further in Renegade Poetics:
Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City 2011).

11
The rhetorical brilliance of Obama’s ‘we’ has not escaped the notice of critics

and biographers (such as Zadie Smith and David Remnick) or Obama himself: ‘the
single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” . . . That word is
owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.’ Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President
at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches’, 7 Mar. 2015,
<https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/07/remarks-presi
dent-50th-anniversary-selma-montgomery-marches>, accessed 27 June 2019.

12
Elizabeth Alexander, Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010

(Minneapolis 2010) pp. 246, 186, 185.
13

Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water: Poems (Minneapolis 2018) p. 19.
14

Kevin Young, ‘Tracy K. Smith Reads Matthew Dickman’, New Yorker, Poetry
Podcast episode, 15 Nov. 2017, <https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry/
tracy-k-smith-reads-matthew-dickman>, accessed 27 June 2019. While my essay

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Of all the poets of the post-Civil Rights generation, Hayes has exercised

multiple choice to its most flamboyant extremes. His six protean books

imply that he aspires to be all kinds and no one kind of poet: black and un-

marked, formalist and experimentalist, Southern and American and global

and extraterrestrial, a voice of the masses and a murmur of private confes-

sion. ‘Sorry for the pun, but I’m not really like a black-and-white person’,

Hayes explains in an interview. ‘I’m kind of a gray-area, between-area

person’.
15

A poet of grey- and between-areas, of ‘not really’ and ‘like’ and

‘kind of’, Hayes gratefully extends his constitutional ambivalence to his

sense of literary history and a pluralist black poetic tradition. Introducing

The Best American Poetry 2014, he declared: ‘I am a proud mutt of poetic

influences, having been reared by seventy-five parents’.
16

Recombining

past poetic DNA, Hayes responds not only to the styles of his influences

but also to their formative contexts, their personalities and politics, and

their engagement with the dilemmas historically gripping African

American poets. And chief among those dilemmas, for this post-Civil

Rights generation poet, is the fraught choice between two lyric pronouns,

‘I’ and ‘we’.
17

This essay explores the African American lyric ‘we’, past and present,

through the bifocal lenses of Hayes’s response-poems, his irreverent

answers to such anthology pieces as Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’,

Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’, and Baraka’s ‘Black Art’, and to poets as diver-

gent in mission and style as Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde. Taken

together, Hayes’s six books survey nearly all the varieties of the collective

centres on lyrics, an African American ‘we’ pervades extrapoetic and paratextual
speech-acts as well. Take a collection’s dedication page: post-Civil Rights generation
poets have written recent books ‘for the ones like us’ (Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
(2015)), ‘For us and them and them and us’ (Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies
(2016)), ‘For all of us’ (Marcus Wicker, Silencer (2017)), and ‘For Natasha and Rik j who
aren’t named j but are part of every j “we” and “us” in these poems’ (Adrian
Matejka, Map to the Stars (2017)).

15
Terrance Hayes, ‘Fifteen Questions, Fifteen Responses’, Terrance Hayes per-

sonal website, <http://terrancehayes.com/about/#interview>, accessed 27 June
2019.

16
Terrance Hayes, ‘Introduction’, in Terrance Hayes and David Lehman (eds.),

The Best American Poetry 2014 (New York 2014) p. xxiii.
17

Though many studies of African American and African diasporic poetry
(including Gates’s) presume the centrality of a communal voice or spokesperson, the
racially marked ‘we’ has received critical attention only recently. See Benjamin
Friedlander, ‘Robert Hayden’s Epic of Community’, MELUS, 23/3 (Fall 1998) pp.
129–43; Eric A. Weil, ‘Personal and Public: Three First-Person Voices in African
American Poetry’, in Joanne V. Gabbin (ed.), The Furious Flowering of African American
Poetry (Charlottesville 1999) pp. 223–38; Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays
(St Paul 2004); and Bonnie Costello, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and
Others (Princeton 2017) ch. 5.

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‘we’ – from narrowest to widest scope, racially marked and not, traditional

or innovative – available to contemporary American poets.
18

Yet Hayes,

committedly uncommitted, is a perfect foil for drawing the choice between

‘I’ and ‘we’ into the foreground, flipping between the two, and drawing

counterfactual paths. (Indeed, as my first examples suggest, nothing could

be more Hayesian than commanding a shy, withheld ‘I’ to report for

‘Negro Duty’, or goading a militant ‘we’ to dissect its own ‘floundering

interiors’.) Drawing my chief examples from three collections, I examine

three forms of response to the tradition: confrontational ‘talking back’ in

Hip Logic (2002), ‘Blue’ ventriloquism in Wind in a Box (2006), and collabor-

ation with the dead in Lighthead (2010). To conclude, I show how Hayes’s

elastic, proudly inauthentic sense of voice resolves or simply dissolves cur-

rent debates on influence, the lyric, and the reception of poets of colour.

Hayes’s most distinctive subjects are not race or the black experience per se

but questions several orders removed: what we gain or lose with the totalis-

ing phrase ‘the black experience’, how variously race can be performed or

written down, what resonates in the space between speaking for oneself

and for one’s people. His response-poems deserve attention for their own

inventions, for their revelations about a still-developing generation, and –

as they reverberate with ‘I’s and ‘we’s of modes and poets past – for manip-

ulating the acoustics of the entire African American poetic canon.

Hip Logic: ‘Talking Back’ to Robert Hayden

‘In all of my books’, Hayes confirmed in 2007, ‘there are poems written for

and about and in the styles of artists that interest me.’ True of the three

books published before 2007, true of all the books since. By his debut

Muscular Music (1999), Hayes was already conceiving of poetic growth in

terms of responding to artistic forebears, but by his own admission his ear-

liest efforts were ‘imitations’: they replicate styles with and without attribu-

tion, transcribe famous lines, and revisit established genres.
19

Muscular

Music’s most ambitious work, the eight-movement Yummy Suite, adapts

the polyphony of Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) for a late-

twentieth-century tale of Chicago gang violence. As in Montage, nearly all

the movements are scored for particular voices (‘Blues for Shavon’, ‘Local

Grocer’, ‘Little Ron’), while the first, ‘Blues’, sings to Hughes’s tune, amid

the wreckage of the exploded dreams of the elder poet’s ‘Harlem’: ‘What

happens when a dream explodes? k Does it hush?’20 When Hayes catches his
18

See the appendix below.
19

Megan Simpson, ‘“I believe all the stories of who I was”: An Interview with
Terrance Hayes’, Obsidian, 8/1 (Spring/Summer 2007) pp. 130, 136.

20
Terrance Hayes, Muscular Music (Chicago 1999) p. 37.

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divided self in the act of composition, his own chattier sensibility and truer

metapoetic subjects enter focus: ‘I knew later I’d be writing these lines, j
caught in that space between personal & public’, between ‘I’ and ‘we’.

21
In

his second book, Hip Logic, the mature drive to experiment – with the

African American canon, within adventuresome forms, without a fixed

sense of voice – emerges in the dedicatory poem ‘Lorde’, a cento ‘made

up of whole and partial lines in the index (under W) of The Collected Poems

of AUDRE LORDE’.
22

Buttressed, not obstructed, by its demanding

Oulipian constraints, ‘Lorde’ borrows from its namesake a poetics of

questioning (‘What’, ‘When’, ‘Who’) and of solidarity clenched within an

anaphoric ‘We’: ‘We entered silence k We have no passions left to love j We were
born in a poor time’. Like his Hughesian ‘Blues’, Hip Logic begins where past

poets leave off (indeed, with the last two pages of Lorde’s posthumous

Collected Poems), but now Hayes scrambles his precedents’ words and

slants their aims. That less imitative, more confrontational approach,

finding one’s voice by ‘talking back’ to predecessors, leads to ‘For Robert

Hayden’, Hayes’s first poem to take African American poetic history as

its explicit subject.

In most accounts of that history, Robert Hayden represents several ex-

treme stances, seemingly irreconcilable: the shy memoirist haunted by his

childhood in Detroit, Michigan (‘Elegies for Paradise Valley’); the chronic-

ler of centuries of violence towards Africans and African Americans

(‘Middle Passage’; ‘Night, Death, Mississippi’); and the classicist penning

odes (‘Frederick Douglass’), elegies (‘Mourning Poem for the Queen of

Sunday’), and satires (‘Witch Doctor’) from an impersonal vantage, omit-

ting any lyric ‘I’. Uniting these stances is Hayden’s refusal to speak for a ra-

cially marked collective, a black ‘we’. ‘I’m not a joiner’, he avowed in

a 1976 interview. ‘I cherish my individuality and don’t want to be a con-

formist except (paradoxically) on my own terms. But I care about people,

respond to whatever is human.’ Small wonder that Hayden’s poems could

cherish an autobiographical ‘I’ as well as a generically human ‘we’, or that

in his history-haunted poems of racial violence, he grants a narrower col-

lective voice only to the aberrantly inhumane, ‘we’ victimisers defined

against a violated ‘them’, such as the slavers of ‘Middle Passage’ and the

lynchers of ‘Night, Death, Mississippi’.
23

And Hayden’s embrace of

21
Ibid., p. 74.

22
Hayes, Hip Logic, pp. 1, 91.

23
See the prayer in the former – ‘We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord, j safe

passage to our vessels bringing j heathen souls unto Thy chastening’ – or the
recounted violence in the latter, perpetrated by an eerily ambiguous ‘we’: ‘Then we
beat them, he said, j beat them till our arms was tired’. Hayden, Collected Poems,
pp. 48, 16.

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indiscriminate ‘people’ clarifies his reluctance to speak for black

people alone: ‘Races are not important’, he continued, ‘but people are.’
24

Amply aware of Hayden’s prismatic range and idiosyncratic politics,

Hayes, in his ill-tempered tribute ‘For Robert Hayden’, reduces his fore-

father to only two aspects. One is Hayden’s repudiation of the young poets

of BAM, their racially marked ‘we’, and all it represented; famously, that

repudiation reached its contentious heights at the First Fisk Black Writers’

Conference in 1966.
25

The other is the autobiographical ‘I’ of Hayden’s

‘Those Winter Sundays’ (1962), which ruefully recounts a childhood

trapped within frigid domestic routines. Even on days of rest (‘Sundays

too’) Hayden’s foster-father, a manual labourer ‘with cracked hands that

ached j from labor in the weekday weather’, ‘got up early j and put his
clothes on in the blueblack cold’ to warm the house for his family.

Hayden’s pseudo-sonnet – mostly unrhymed though crackling with ks and

ds, separated into irregular stanzas of five, four, and five lines – confesses a

retrospective love for the heroic father-figure, ‘who had driven out the

cold’ but went unappreciated in life: …

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of
Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

AAR Presidential Address

2019 AAR Presidential Address:
“And Are We Not of Interest to
Each Other?” A Blueprint for the
Public Study of Religion
Laurie L. Patton*

WHAT IS A GUILD of scholars in 2020? According to common know-
ledge sources, guilds started as artisanal, focused on common work and
craft and on local realities—the cities where artisans lived and worked.
They were “confraternities of tradesmen,” less often women, normally
“operating in a single city and covering a single trade.” They had char-
acteristics of “the professional association, a trade union, a cartel, and a
secret society.” They had royal patrons who would guarantee the flow of
business to their members, and they retained “exclusive ownership of the
tools and supply of materials.” The privilege for guild members was that
“they alone had the right to practice or sell within the city”; their controls
on prices, hours, apprenticeships, and methods insured a quality of work.
Such a structure also “made it impossible for women, immigrants, and
non-Christians” to enter the guild in any formal way (see Wikipedia 2020;

*Laurie L.  Patton, Office of the President, Middlebury, 9 Old Chapel Road, Middlebury, VT
05753, USA. Email: [email protected] During 2018–2019, the AAR board provided extraor-
dinary grounding for writing this talk: Alice Hunt, Leela Prasad, Zayn Kassam, Amir Hussein, Jose
Cabezon, Kerry Danner, Kathy Downey, Rachel Toombs, Marla Frederick, Randall Styers, Kathryn
McClymond, and Kimberly Rae Connor. Without them, I could not have created the connections be-
tween policy and poetry that seemed appropriate for this moment. I am grateful that they understood
and supported the connections and made so many inspirational ones of their own.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2020, Vol. 88, No. 3, pp. 639–663
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa044
Advance Access publication on August 19, 2020

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Epstein 1991; Grafe and Gederblom 2010). Many craft guilds were them-
selves modeled on the students’ guilds at the University of Bologna, and
the masters, or professors’ guilds, at the University of Paris. The scholarly
guild is bound up with the formation of the university itself.

How close and yet how far the American Academy of Religion today
is from that encyclopedia definition. We think often of our work as arti-
sanal—craft like, individual, yet using specific tools that we have learned
through apprenticeship, tools that we alone control. The PhD is an inherit-
ance of the medieval guild, not late capitalism. We often think of ourselves
as workers, yet we are also exclusive and privileged; we find it difficult
when others use our tools if they have not been accredited through the
guild. We frequently write that we would like ownership of tools and
supply of materials. Yet we are not local. The city of the artisanal guild
has been replaced by the continent of North America in the American
Academy of Religion, with a more and more international bent and popu-
lation and, important for the present discussion, multiple patrons—uni-
versities, foundations, governments, and businesses.

We look like a more complex and contemporary guild. And we have
recently added something new. As we explain in our mission statement,1
we are now committed to the public understanding of religion. But this
new commitment is also traditional. The medieval guild also had an ob-
ligation to the public. If you charged too much or cheated on materials in
your interactions with the public, you could no longer be part of the guild.
Exclusive and secretive as guilds may have been, they still depended upon
their relationship with the public. Reflection about, even regulation of,
our connection to the public is as old as the idea of the guild itself.

WHAT IS A PUBLIC?
So we also might ask, “What is a public?” One of our major intellectual

forbearers on the question of the public sphere is Jürgen Habermas (1989;
2006). He wrote that a public sphere is a web of social developments in
eighteenth-century Europe, linked to the growth of urban culture, with
new architectures, such as theaters and operas; new media, such as print
culture; and new organizations, such as lending libraries.

Public culture found its primary symbol in a coffee house. The con-
versations of little café circles branched out into affairs of state, adminis-
tration, and politics. For Habermas, coffee houses disregarded status and
trusted in discursive reason. Anyone with access to cultural technology

1This mission statement has done what we all hope mission statements should do: force us to re-
define ourselves as we struggle to live up to it (https://www.aarweb.org/About).

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Patton: AAR Presidential Address 641

like novels and journals had the potential to take the debate public.
Habermas thought this sphere was self-regulating, at least by the bour-
geois men who participated; however exclusive the café might be, those
who had access to mainstream cultural vehicles and objects under discus-
sion could always participate.

In the spirit of intellectual generosity that I hope could characterize us
as a twenty-first-century guild, I want to say first that Habermas was not
wrong. Encounters in coffee shops still startle us. We overhear conversa-
tions. We start revolutions. We are lonely. We know our own limitations,
and we are braver than we would ever be at home. The café still is a dance
of associations, rich in meetings both chance and intentional, voluntary
and involuntary.

Yet. Yet. The eighteenth-century coffee shop of Europe assumed that
people who entered them had access to the market, to education. The
eighteenth-century coffee shop spaces were palatial to create a gesture of
welcome and dignity, but only for some. Some did not even dare come in
to the inviting democratic space. Some came in but stayed in the back.
Many cafés were run by Jewish women who had no voice in the discus-
sions out front. Habermas did not acknowledge the dialogical cultures of
Asia, Africa, and the Americas (see Weyrauch, 1999; Calhoun et al. 2011).

Twenty-first-century critics of Habermas argue things that might
sound familiar to us. Nancy Fraser (1990; 2003; 2008) argues Habermas
left out several elements essential to building a more just and open public
square. First, differences in social equality might exist among the partici-
pants and must be named. Second, there may not be a single, liberal public
sphere; other “competing” public spheres can also have significant influ-
ence in public discourse. Fraser calls these subaltern spheres “counter-
publics.” Third, such citizens may determine differently what counts as
public and what counts as private. Members of subaltern counter-publics
might determine that their own private interests and private matters
should be counted in the public sphere.

Taking all these factors into account, the public sphere is a fragile thing
indeed. Those of us who study things associated with the English word re-
ligion know deeply of the instability of the public sphere. We intuitively
know the ways in which Habermas idealized the café. We know it because
we have lived with the instability of the word religion, and the study of re-
ligion, for a century. Far from being an encrusted space, we have always
interrupted, or been interrupted by, the public sphere. Let me go even
further: the study of religion has constantly lived in a space of controversy
and scandal. And that is an opportunity for what Chantal Mouffe (2013)
calls an agonistic democracy.

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We can barely articulate a different public sphere, yet I think we must
begin to articulate it now. Today I want to offer a blueprint for that work. It
revolves around four simple questions: First: “Who is around us?” Second,
“Who are we talking to?” Third, “Who is seen and heard?” And fourth,
“What work matters?”

I will call upon theory in the study of religion, philosophy of the public
sphere, and poetry to draw the blueprint. As a gesture to another kind
of collective that moves beyond the “magisterial voice of the leader,” this
will involve poetry spoken by AAR voices other than my own. I  believe
we need nothing less than a poetics of a new public sphere, the space that
we cross every day. We need poetry because we can barely begin to de-
scribe that emerging, and emergent, public space. I will also be sharing the
policy work that we did in 2018 and 2019—important progress that I do
not want to relegate to business meetings attended by only the intensely
faithful and the bureaucratically curious. I  end with an exhortation to a
newly energetic and different kind of curiosity as fundamental to our new
commitment to the public understanding of religion.

Let me begin then with a more specific description of what an ideal-
ized Habermasian public sphere has looked like for the scholar of religion.
Our public space has traditionally been idealized as a place where univer-
sities ply their analytical trades and religious communities ply theirs. Both
religious and secular languages are spoken, but the two languages are sep-
arate. They did not clash because they did not meet. And if they did meet,
the ground rules were clearly on one side or the other.

But what of those moments when the languages may not be mutu-
ally comprehensible? In the early twenty-first century, Habermas became
interested in this idea, motivated by the resurgence of extremism and the
clear historical connection scholars were making between religious and
secular ideas. These interests led him to posit what he has called a “wild
sphere” (Habermas 2006) in which members of religious communities
could not enter the public sphere without becoming unintelligible, and it
became necessary to translate religious reasons into secular ones in order
to participate fully in the democratic sphere. As scholars of religion, we
will have a variety of opinions as to whether that in itself is a reasonable
claim. The characterization of “wild” itself could indeed reinforce a “civil-
ized/wild” dichotomy, which seems to impose on the religious subject the
burden to become “reasonable.” This is the reason I choose to call these
moments of argumentation “eruptive public spaces” rather than “wild
spheres.”

But then a key question emerges: If such translation is required,
then how does participation in the public sphere occur for religious

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communities? The twenty-first-century critiques of Habermas by Nancy
Fraser (1990; 2003; 2008), María Herrera Lima (2013), Thomas McCarthy
(2013), and James Bohman (2010), among others, raise questions of who
belongs, who is marginalized, and whose histories are accepted in the de-
lineation of the public sphere. They also propose a stronger role for histor-
ical studies in the reading of the public square “to understand the changed
historical and social conditions for religious beliefs and practices in our
secular age” (Herrera Lima, 2013, 51). They are versions of our four ques-
tions mentioned above.

As I have recently noted, the controversies I have been living in and
studying over the past decade and a half occur in the midst of these differ-
ences in status, class, position, ethnicity, gender, race, sexuality, and phys-
ical ability. Participants in these controversies are not necessarily able to
find the public reason that can reconcile these differences. What is more,
religious communities are shifting publics. They constitute, on the one
hand, a set of doctrines and practices that should be protected by public
reason’s “freedom of liberty and conscience,” yet, at the same time, they
emerge as communities of readers constituted by race and ethnicity—
and even as communities of protest to particular scholarly conversations.
They may not always have these identities, or even take on such identities
as “core,” but insofar as they participate in a controversy, they use these
identities to achieve their ends in the public debate. In this sense, what-
ever “intersections” of multiple identities might be present, one primarily
religious identity is strategically used in the public debates and represen-
tative rivalry (Patton 2019, 52).

Let me be very clear: These eruptive public spaces constitute our daily
life in the twenty-first century. From the six case studies, I gathered add-
itional numbers. No fewer than forty controversies around the study of
religion have emerged in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century.
Some of them have been transnational; some have been local in nature.
But they are no longer exceptions. They are a norm.

The historical study of controversies erupting between communi-
ties and scholars demonstrate that Habermas could benefit from what
Thomas McCarthy (2013, 116)  calls “a still sharper descent from the
heights of transcendental philosophy,” where modern discourse is open
at multiple points to contestation. Moreover, they join Charles Taylor in
emphasizing the fact that in its contemporary forms, religion is one factor
among others in choice of identity. Thus, religious thought and practice
cannot be a sole remedy, nor a sole cause, for the fracturing of the public
sphere, given that it is appealed to as one cultural form of identity among
many. These points of fracture in the public sphere are endless and in my
view worthy of study in their own right. These controversies represent the

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failure of liberal culture to find “a third way between old antagonisms”
(Herrera Lima 2013, 61).

What is more, as I have also recently written (Patton 2019, 59), these
controversies show that the Habermasian understanding of “post-secular”
society, discussed above, assumes a false equality—one whereby the “epi-
stemic and attitudinal burdens” on citizens are more or less equal between
religious and secular groups as they participate in the deliberative ex-
change. In this overly optimistic view, a post-secular world is one where
religious and secular groups can engage, religious groups can translate
themselves and thereby become comprehensible in largely secular terms
of public reason, and a modus vivendi might be found.

But these controversies show that neither scholars nor community
members can freely engage. The idea of the post-secular dialogue is not
rich enough to take up the challenges of pluralism. A post-secular delib-
erative dialogue across religious and secular lines may help create com-
municative understanding but does not necessarily help engender what
James Bohman calls communicative power—that is, creating groups with
genuine standing who can and will effectively persuade other groups. As
Bohman argues, post-secularity should be less a condition of public delib-
eration in democratic states and more “a critical standard for living with
the permanent fact of increasing diversity of forms of life at all levels of
international society” (Calhoun et al. 2013, 16).

Such diversity of forms of life mean that we will also be constantly
occupying eruptive public spaces in contestations of cultural power. We as
scholars are actors in those contestations. It is therefore important to ex-
plore the role of cultural recognition in these eruptive public spaces and,
relatedly, insider/outsider statuses in different religions as forms of cul-
tural power. Is religion a public cultural identity or a private set of prac-
tices and beliefs? Religion has frequently operated most effectively as a
cultural identity or as a cultural resource for claiming power. Yet religion
as a cultural resource is not just a matter of rearranging personally mean-
ingful symbols. As a cultural resource, it still lays claim to the privacy
of a protected sphere at the same time as it is understood as a cultural
good to be shared. Even when religion is understood as a public cultural
resource, the understanding of religion moves across definitional bound-
aries (Patton 2019, 68).

WHO IS AROUND US?
So, in this context of eruptive public spaces, let me begin with the first

simple question: Who is around us? This question is a form of ethical

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Patton: AAR Presidential Address 645

reflection about our scholarly contexts. What is the nature of the public
sphere constituted by the academy itself ? Here is one idea of the scholar
that still haunts us. In 1919, William Butler Yeats published this observa-
tion of us in his collection The Wild Swans at Coole.

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despair

To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;

Wear out the carpet with their shoes

Earning respect; have no strange friend;

If they have sinned nobody knows.

Lord, what would they say

Did their Catullus walk that way? (Yeats, 1919)

Yeats published this around a decade after the AAR was forming,
when schools of religion were still attached to schools of theology, and
when the profession was overwhelmingly, exclusively male. There are few
eruptive public spaces in this poem and the scholarly world it represents.
Our intellectual ancestors were not aware of the collective and individual
fissures in the public sphere that we acknowledge today—and whatever
wrongdoings they were aware of were usually, as Yeats also suggests, for-
gotten or hidden. Nobody knew of them. They understood ourselves as
learned and respectable, editing and annotating lines, coughing in the ink,
outgoing and brotherly—they had no strange friend.

Such an idea of a scholarly context is something we still carry with us.
An assumed stability. Of activity, of patronage, of collegiality, of friend-
ship. That assumed a stability of patronage that, I would argue, we have
never truly had in the study of religion. Asking “Who is around us?”
means understanding first and foremost the instability of our scholarly
contexts. We have always been interrupters—whether it was Robert Smith
in the basement of the library understanding the connections between the
Gilgamesh epic and the Biblical flood story, fifty years before Yeats was

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writing, or the most recent interruptions of the early twenty-first century,
multiplying his experience fortyfold.

I further want to propose that since the late twentieth century, asking
who is around us is and will always be a controversial, perhaps even scan-
dalous, question. And I  want to answer it the following way: The people
around us in the study of religion are people whose authority will always
be unstable, always be questioned. We know that the hope of the mid-
twentieth century—that we could carve out an unquestioned secular
sphere of reason-based inquiry into the study of religion—was never fully
realized. We have departments, yes. We have fewer colleagues questioning
the validity of our choice of topic. But the fact is that departments of reli-
gion are still among the first to go when budgets are cut. We cannot ignore
this part of our public sphere.

And the situation is even more complicated when it comes to other
forms of authority. Religious communities have no agency in endowing
scholars with the right to interpret; they can only endow members of their
own community with such a right and take it away if necessary. They can,
and often do, bestow upon scholars, after the fact, a “good list” and “bad
list” status (Patton 2019 34, 41).

What is more, scholars of religion are not able to take on fully the art-
istic authority of the writer or the painter or sculptor either. There is no
social contract between religious communities and university communi-
ties about an agreed-upon artistic construction as there is between artists
and their audiences. There is no common understanding of artifice.

Thus, the area between universities and communities is especially
fraught; it has no commonly understood norms, no agreed-upon standard
as to who has the “right” to interpret, and several radically different com-
mitments to the constitution of reality. Topical authority is questioned by
the academy. Religious authority is questioned by the community. Artistic
authority is not granted by anyone (Patton 2019, 41).

Indeed, the offense of the controversies that I  have been studying
emerges because either (1) the scholar should have had another kind of au-
thority (i.e., religious) but did not; or (2) the scholar is offensively treating
the religion as an artist might, as a kind of fictive or simulated material
that in the scholar’s mind, should not be taken as truth. In either case, the
scholar is a theologian manqué or an artist manqué and ultimately un-
satisfying in the cultural contracts that society is accustomed to making
(Patton 2019, 42).

And now, we are people whose authority is questioned because we are
new to the academy. We are no longer the men who are nodding, with
no strange friend. Rather, we are people of color. Trans people. Queer

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Patton: AAR Presidential Address 647

people. Disabled people. People from countries whose agency has only
recently been acknowledged. People who used to be “studied” and are
now claiming a voice as scholars, long overdue to be heard. Disciplined
and ethical reflection on our scholarly contexts involves being aware of
long-term patterns within the academy that need to change, of giving
voice and credit to those who have been denigrated, dismissed, and si-
lenced. As Yeats said, we had forgotten and did not reflect on that wrong-
doing—we did not even know we were doing so.

And so we turn to policy. As part of our commitment to this ques-
tion “Who is around us?” and in the spirit of taking academic contexts
seriously, this year we have completely revised our procedures for harass-
ment and discrimination, including sexual harassment.2 In recent years,
there has been a sea change in the way that our society and the univer-
sity and other workplaces view discrimination. Those who have experi-
enced discrimination and their allies have been speaking out against all
forms of workplace harassment and unprofessional conduct. Behavior
that was once tolerated is no longer tolerated but instead actively named.
Perpetrators are being held accountable. Representatives of the AAR gen-
erally believe that this change reflects a large-scale, long-overdue, and
welcome cultural shift. Many organizations, including academic institu-
tions, non-profit organizations, and scholarly societies, are working on
improving their conduct procedures to create a fair, open, and compas-
sionate process that encourages reporting and provides support for all
those involved.

The American Academy of Religion is no exception. These new pro-
cedures reflect best practices adopted by voluntary organizations across
the country, including investigators trained in current questions of dis-
crimination and in work with vulnerable populations and familiar with
new contexts of discrimination previously not named. Additionally, our
new procedures go a step further in providing alternatives for dispute
resolution, an elected ombudsperson to facilitate and support the process,
and an ethics committee. We think this promotes a deeper culture of re-
spect and inclusion and invite you to work with us as we constantly seek
to improve it.

Asking “Who is around us?” is an embrace of Thomas McCarthy’s
2013 request of Habermas to descend from the transcendental heights

2This work represented long months of painstaking research and work from a number of commit-
tees and the board itself. In addition to the leading work of Alice Hunt in developing this document, the
status committees were particularly helpful in getting us to a fair yet rigorous set of procedures (https://
www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/AARMBR/About-AAR-/Board-of-Directors-/Board-Resolutions-/
Professional-Conduct-Procedures.aspx).

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of philosophy and into the space of modern discourse of multiple, even
endless, points of contestation. Asking for all the voices in the café, and
listening for the silences, and the hushed arguments—even, and perhaps
especially, at a seemingly democratic table.

WHO ARE WE TALKING TO?
I turn now to asking “Who are we talking to?” We might describe

this question as ethical reflection on the nature of our scholarly publics.
I begin with a conversation I had with a colleague many years ago about
the nature of public scholarship. She was afraid that a turn to public schol-
arship would mean the death knell of specialized research. When I argued
with her, she said, “Next time you are spending your Friday nights in a
church basement talking about the basics, let me know if you want to live
that hell.” I responded, “I just spent my Thursday night in that very base-
ment, explaining the basics of Indian tradition. I  just lived the hell you
described. And it wasn’t hell. It was inspiring. And I’m still a specialist.”

By ethical reflection on the nature of our scholarly publics, I  mean
simply asking who we are talking to and whether it matters. My answer to
that question is that we have only barely begun to acknowledge our multiple
publics. We need to be specific and descriptive of our publics in a way that
we have never been before. If we do not, we will be lonely. We will isolate
the academy, and the study of religion, even further. We will all come to a
different conclusion in our answers to that scholarly question, but we will
be connected in asking a common question, and reflecting about it.

In “Found Poem” (1987), the poet Howard Nemerov speaks the words
of a completely uniform public and the cost of such a conception:

Found Poem

After information received in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 v 86

The population center of the USA

Has shifted to Potosi, in Missouri.

The calculation employed by authorities

In arriving at this dislocation assumes

That the country is a geometric plane,

Perfectly flat, and that every citizen,

Including those in Alaska and Hawaii

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Patton: AAR Presidential Address 649

And the District of Columbia, weighs the same;

So that, given these simple presuppositions,

The entire bulk and spread of all the people

Should theoretically balance on the point

Of a needle under Potosi in Missouri

Where no one is residing nowadays

But the watchman over an abandoned mine

Whence the company got the lead out and left.

“It gets pretty lonely here,” he says, “at night.” …