Poetry
Norman, OK
October 2010, four weeks
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish worked on her new poetry project while in residence. The project was conceived in part as a response to Major Jackson’s 2007 American Poetry Review essay calling for “white” poets to engage with issues of race. While Mish is undoubtedly visually “white,” her ancestry is mixed — Creek, Delaware, Lumbee, African-American, and Scots-Irish — and the project is seeded in and grows out of her family’s complex relationship with race and class. She was raised in a town founded by Freedmen and Creek and Seminole Indians, a place which was both joined and divided by race. Moreover, most of her ancestors migrated west from the Deep South to Texas, and points further West, intermarrying, obscuring, and “forgetting” their racial heritage along the way. The poetry will explore how her family became “white” and often racist, and what it means to remember and claim a mutiracial ethnicity as a “white” working class, and now middle-class woman.