News at Eleven: On the other hand, if we allow certain traits,

like one's blackness or one's poverty, to act as empathetic footholds, we have to ask where to draw the line.

It's a difficult, if not impossible, question. "[T]hree-quarters of my poems wouldn't be written if I had to be there and actually go through it," [Patricia] Smith tells the Times. Indeed, any limit placed on empathetic ability is a limit on the human imagination. Furthermore, if we were to posit an empathetic inability on the part of an outsider writer, then that inability would apply to an outsider reader as well. Thus, even if a book on Katrina were written by one of its victims, the author would still have to find a way to relate their experience to someone we've posited as being incapable of understanding it. Victims don't have a special language; we are all limited to the same dictionary.

from Bookslut: The Right to Write About It: Hurricane Katrina in Poetry
also The Day: Patricia Smith And The Poetry Of Katrina

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