‘Whitely’: Race and Lyric Subjectivity in Clare Pollard’s Poetry

Abstract

This essay analyses three poems from the oeuvre of contemporary English poet Clare Pollard: ‘The Heavy-Petting Zoo’, ‘The Skulls of Dalston’ and ‘Thinking of England’. It argues that while Pollard's poetry presents jarring, discomfiting depictions of race and racial encounter, their direct exposure of racist ideas and discourses, and their methods of intertwining these with ideas of structured, gendered and nationalistic oppression, create space for critique of prevailing discourses that disempower both white female subjects and those racialised as non-white. Applying the writing of Major Jackson, Richard Dyer and Yusef Komunyakaa, the essay aims to show that the poet's refusal to soft-pedal the prejudice of her speakers shows the insecurities at the heart of structural whiteness; the insecurities that have been used historically to justify racial separatism as a matter arising from biological fact, related to the natural order of things.

Keywords::

• Clare Pollard
• contemporary poetry
• race
• racism
• whiteness

Notes

1 Here I must thank Sarah Howe whose phrasing I borrow from a conversation we had some while ago about the poem.

2 A phrase I put in quotes to illustrate my scepticism as to its meaningfulness.

3 See, for instance, Pollard’s Ovid’s Heroines and Incarnation.

4 See her essay ‘In Dark Times: Some Thoughts on Political Poetry’.

5 See her essays ‘Getting Poetry to Confess’ and ‘The Female Poet and the Male Muse’.