Goon poets of the black Atlantic: Linton Kwesi Johnson's imagined canon

Abstract

What is T.S. Eliot's relationship to the black Atlantic? This is a question posednot by Paul Gilroy but implicitly by Jamaican-born, London-based dub poet LintonKwesi Johnson. The addition of his Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (2002)to the Penguin Classics canon is an occasion for Johnson's own interrogationof the canon through art in ""If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet''.This poem is a sly exploration of Johnson's interstitial position betweenmusician and poet, between "high' art and popular culture, betweenpolitics and aesthetics. It evinces a self-consciousness about the manner in whichliterary history is written, challenged and inscribed within poetry itself. It alsoexplores poetry's potential to be a mode of self-definition for Johnson throughself-positioning within and against a poetical context. Johnson both appropriatesand rejects the form's exclusionary tendencies; his own litany of alternativecanon figures is self-aware and playful, as he imagines himself as a ""goon poet'' in contrast with conservative transatlantic figures like Eliot.A black Atlantic migrant himself, Johnson configures within the poem his own dis-placement and mobile existence: as the suppositional title of the poem indicates, thepoet's ontology can hardly be grounded, given the radical contingencies anddynamism of the canon itself, which appears as an imagined formation, subject toconjecture and reordering. Johnson rejects it for another imagined community,following the politics of Nelson Mandela and the global unity engendered by thefight against apartheid in South Africa. Johnson suggests that diasporic connectionsemerge through shared political goals rather than through ethno-geographical unityor the hierarchical strategies of literary canonization.