Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

Baraka, which Eric cites, one needs to present a "fair" cross-section of his
work, and then argue out what is of value, and to whom. But the ethical
pressures are, in any case, immense, whether one includes or excludes such
material (and several students called me on the fact that I’d xeroxed her–
Trasks’s–"racist white woman" poem, but not her erotically charged
celebrations of the land). At such a point the instructor’s discomfort with
authority turns into a kind of nostalgia for it! And alternative authorities are
created in the classroom, some of them overt, and some of them subversive, no
matter how fair-minded you think you’re being.