Local History by Erica Hunt

First published: 1993

Type of work: Poetry

The Poetry

In Local History, Erica Hunt engages the problem of gender and number in language by deploying the first person singular and plural in indeterminate linguistic contexts. The photograph on the book’s back cover, positioned right beneath blurbs from “language writing” poets Harryette Mullen, Charles Bernstein, and Ann Lauterbach, identifies Erica Hunt as a black woman. Still, given the multiple lineages of this work, it is difficult to find or surmise a referent for the “we” in the opening section entitled “Preface.” In fact, each permutation of the “we” appears to refer to different constituencies: a couple, friends, women, experimental writers, black people in general, and so on.

One might respond that, while such indeterminacy might hold for the multiple “we’s” in “Preface,” such is not the case for the “I” that opens the poem and the book: “I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what we say about what we feel.” Regardless of how one interprets this playful but serious commentary on the indicative and the subjunctive, on the relations between standard and colloquial expressions, the “I” appears normative in its self-referential function. In fact, it is normative, a function reinforced in the other syntactical contexts in which it appears in “Preface.” However, since this same grammatical function appears in the next two poems, “Voice I” and “Second Voice,” it may be that this “I” has merely a narrative or generic function that cannot be “reduced” to a human referent. That is Hunt’s point: Sometimes, the “I” may indeed refer to the human being named Erica Hunt; sometimes, it may not. So it is for all the other single-number pronouns in this book—she, you, and he: They may or may not refer to an “Erica Hunt.”

Thus, structure and form themselves take on political and cultural functions in Local History. In this respect, Hunt closely follows language writing procedures, although as critic Aldon Nielsen has said, form was inextricable from politics for the Beats as well as for the poets of the Black Arts movement. For Hunt, this relationship between the literary and the political also applies to the relationship between the private and public spheres of existence. Thus, Local History is divided into three sections titled “Local History,” “Correspondence,” and “Surplus,” and it is not unreasonable to see this division as analogous to the function of pronouns in Hunt’s work: Sometimes, the sections correspond to the author or known “others;” sometimes, they correspond to an unknown other or others.

The structure of the book might indicate that its pronouns are to be read as simultaneously corresponding to the author Erica Hunt and to unnamed others, except that simultaneity, a fixture of New Criticism, tends to occlude the temporality of reading. It is better, perhaps, to say that “I” corresponds first to the author and then to others, first to the local and then to what exceeds the local. Were one to begin reading in the middle, the “we” or “she” might first correspond to unnamed others before the “I” that might or might not correspond to the author. Indeed, one might say that Hunt’s three books, Local History, Arcade (1996), and Piece Logic (2002), operate according to the same logic in terms of poetic procedures.

Critical Context

Hunt’s use of indeterminate singular pronouns is not unique to her. The language writing movement used similar procedures to critique the notion of the integrity of the self, specifically its conflation with the first-person singular pronoun. A similar strategy can also be found in the work of Zora Neale Hurston; her particular mode of stream of consciousness, often called “free indirect discourse,” operates to meld what is often the delimited knowledge of third-person (singular or plural) narratees with the unlimited knowledge of a narrator posited as numberless. Hurston makes explicit what is already implicit in the general representation of omniscient, objective narrators: No such nominally objective representation can operate without implicitly, if not explicitly, taking a position, taking sides.

Hunt’s experimental poetry differentiates her from the more mainstream branch of African American poetic practice. Insofar as a great deal of contemporary mainstream African American poetry by women functions within the norms of a putative “black” cultural tradition, Hunt’s engagement with the experimental tradition of language writing can be read as pre-African American in relation to a relatively young generation of women poets such as Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey and as non-black in relation to an older generation of poets such as Lucille Clifton and Rita Dove. The work of these poets from two different generations deploys similar, normative poetic procedures in which Hunt does not participate. (The terms “black” and “African American” name both generations and modes of poetic production.) However, insofar as Hunt’s writing recalls and engages the “experimental” wing of the Black Arts movement (for example, the early work of Sonia Sanchez), it cannot be severed from a black literary tradition. Inasmuch as it engages, as well, the Symbolist and Surrealist predecessors of and tendencies within the language writing school, Hunt’s poetry also cannot be severed from an important sector of international post-romantic poetics.

Bibliography

Cummings, Alison. “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen.” Frontiers 26, no. 2 (2005): 3-36. Analyzes the trajectory of African American women poets’ writing, from the traditional narratives and lyrics of Brooks to the avant-garde strategies of Mullen. Sees Hunt as a link between the two, rendering her virtually invisible to critics. Also attributes this invisibility to the paucity of Hunt’s output and her mixture of “speculative” (abstract and innovative) and “liberatory” (political and linear) writing.

Hunt, Erica. “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics.” In The Politics of Poetic Form, edited by Charles Bernstein. New York: Roof Books, 1990. Hunt discusses the construction of what she calls “oppositional cultures” as defensive survival strategies in relation to predominant cultures. She then draws an analogy between this relationship and that which obtains between traditional and innovative writing practices, but she notes that the deployment of traditional narratives by marginalized cultures cannot be sacrificed in the name of the avant-garde alone, since it too participates, in part, in cultural dominance. She concludes the essay with two “test” cases: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Primo Levi’s Survival inAuschwitz.

Hunt, Erica. “The World Is Not Precisely Round: Piecing Commotion (on Writing and Motherhood).” In The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood, edited by Patricia Diensfrey and Brenda Hillman. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Hunt examines the multifaceted selves that comprise her identity, using motherhood and writing to refute the binary opposition often presumed between the domestic and public realms of experience.

Kinnahan, Linda A. “’Our Visible Selves’: Visual-Verbal Collaborations in Erica Hunt, Alison Saar, and M. Nourbese Phillip.” In Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Focusing largely on the art-book collaboration between artist Alison Saar and poet Erica Hunt, Kinnahan emphasizes the problematic centrality of the African American body in their prose, poems, and woodcuts. Kinnahan demonstrates how both Saar and Hunt work to displace received ideas concerning the “reading” or interpretation of the body in public and private realms, a theme that resonates with Hunt’s work in general.

Mullen, Harryette. “Books: Poetry Collections.” Antioch Review 56, no. 2 (Spring, 1998): 44-45. Includes a brief review of the Alison Saar-Erica Hunt collaboration. Mullen notes the importance of the body for both Saar and Hunt.