It turns out that Quincy T. Troupe, California’s first official
poet laureate, is not a college graduate. He resigned his historic
post last Friday after admitting that he had faked up his
résumé.
As scandals in the Gray Davis administration go, this one is
pretty minor. But let’s use it against Davis anyways.
We can generously concede that Davis didn’t know that Troupe had
failed to complete his studies at Grambling University. But didn’t
a few other red flags exist?
Perhaps not. To be fair, Davis was properly impressed by
Troupe’s magisterial poem, “Take It To The Hoop, Magic Johnson.”
And who could question the caliber of a poet who once wrote a
French rhyme about Michael Jordan?
Troupe, a professor of Caribbean liteature at UC San Diego, had
poet laureate written all over him. A quick glance at his
impressive body of work would have made the dreadlocked scholar of
Third World literature an obvious candidate. It includes, Giant
Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writing,, The Inside
Story of T.V.’s Roots and the forthcoming Little
Stevie, a children’s book chronicling the life and times of
Stevie Wonder. Who needs a degree from Grambling with a list of
work like this? As the Los Angeles Times declared
authoritatively, despite “his latest resume flap, no one has
questioned his literary chops.”
Moreover, could California taxpayers really object to something
as obviously worthy as a state-financed poetry reader? Troupe had
some innovative public works in mind, such as reciting poetry at
professional sporting events so that men wouldn’t consider poetry
an activity for “sissies.”
Troupe was only going to receive $10,000 a year for the required
six poetry readings. What’s ten grand in a deficit of $24
billion?
And so what if Troupe once said that the English language isn’t
worthy of much respect? It is not as if the educational level of
California’s children could drop. Troupe wouldn’t have taught them
the Queen’s English. But he would have been eager to teach them
“American.” As he told a journalist: “We are speaking the American
language. I know white people in the United States, especially the
English people, are connected to the navel. A lot of people are not
connected. The ones who came over from England are connected to the
navel of England, the Queen and all that. I’m not connected to
that.”
“I’m into what is going on over here,” he continued. “The
cross-fertilization of Asians and Latin-Americans and people from
the Middle East and everybody coming to this country, and the
Native Americans, cross-fertilizing this language with different
words and sound and cadences, ways of saying things, does not make
it the English language anymore. It makes it the American language.
Maybe in another twenty or fifty years, we’re going to need
translators when we go to England. And I don’t see anything wrong
with that.”
Troupe had plenty of other bracing insights. Taxpayers probably
would have appreciated this one: “Don’t tell me there aren’t
diabolic people in the United States because there are, this
government is full of them. Right wing zealots…I don’t want to be
riding the New York subway with my friends, my son or my wife or
anybody else and someone from the Middle East gets on, and I can
understand why he is angry, and he blows everyone to bits because
of our foreign policy. I can look down the road and see that kind
of thing happening. Because it is true that for the last eighty
years we having been doing a lot of things in our foreign policy we
shouldn’t have been doing. It seems to me that anybody with any
kind of sense can look at that and see it. And not only in the
Middle East. In Africa and all over the world.”
What a seer he would have been for benighted Californians. His
integrity has always been fierce: “I don’t want to be part of the
status quo because the status quo has brought us to this place
where we are at the brink of disaster. Anihilation. Closer to a
world religious war. We were not brought to this brink by people
like me or Tony Morrison, or the late Allen Ginsberg. The status
quo is made of small thinkers, the mediocre people who make
themselves into big persons. Then they get their poets, who are
mediocre, to represent the American ideal and they put them in the
Academy of Arts and Letters, stamping them on the head with a stamp
of approval. ‘You are ok, come and have dinner with us, have wine,
cheese.’ The status quo is boring. F—- it. Can you think outside
the box? That is what I tell my students. Can you think outside
the box? Can you improvise?”
But Davis’s male Maya Angelou is not to be. He has improvised
himself out of office. Davis’s hopes of being the most pro-poetry
governor in the union have been cruelly dashed.
And what a cruel reversal for Troupe. Asked a few months ago why
he thought Davis had given him the position, he replied, “I think
my résumé was pretty strong.”
