Craig Santos Perez: “Whitewashing American Hybrid Aesthetics”

Swenson’s “Legacy” is a white poetic legacy, a white reading of 20th century American Poetry (of all the anthologies she mentions, not a single one is an anthology of ethnic or native American poetry—which is surprising considering no one fetishizes anthologies more than poets of color). Thus it becomes clear that “American Hybrid” should have more accurately titled “White American Hybrid.”