Paisley Rekdal, _Appropriate: A Provocation_

 APPROPRIATE PRESENTS ITSELF as a series of letters to a student in one of Rekdal's writing workshops. The student (who, we learn in the book's postscript, is a fictional composite, not an actual student) has submitted a piece in which she writes both from the perspective of her grandmother and from that off her  grandmother's Black caretaker. The other students in the workshop had some hard things to say about the writer's presuming to write from the perspective of the Black character. The student turns to Rekdal for some answers as to what is okay and what is not okay in writing from or about identities the writer does not belong to. Rekdal's letters are a careful, detailed, and expansive (194 pages) answer to this question. 

Rekdal revisits many of the more familiar examples of appropriation of an identity not the artists's own: William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt, Dana Schulz's painting Open Casket, Anders Carlson-Wee's "How-To." These analyses go along familiar lines; Rekdal does have some fresh and interesting things to say, though, about the poems of "Araki Yasusada," the Hiroshima survivor whose poems were likely in fact the work of American poet Kent Johnson (1955-2022). 

She never says so in so many words, but the book seems mainly about staying out of trouble. The book's format immediately called to my mind Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, evoking a comparison that could hardly go in Rekdal's favor. Rilke's short book is a classic discussion of the rewards and hazards of a life devoted to artistic creativity. A quick taste:

You must think that something is happening with you, that life hs not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you really do not know what these states are working upon you?

Rekdal, by contrast, tends to fall into the soporific cadences of an MLA resolution:

If we've become attuned to how politicians and writers use metaphor as ways to promote policies that have substantial negative effects, we've also used metaphor to contradict them. Our rejections of their appropriations have compelled us, generation by generation, to reimagine more nuanced and realistic language around bodily difference.

I daresay this book will inspire many fewer people to commit themselves to making art than Rilke's did. Even though the book is subtitled "A Provocation," it;'s hard to imagine anyone really being provoked by it.