From Printed Page to Live Hip Hop: American Poetry and Politics Into the 21St Century

FROM PRINTED PAGE TO LIVE HIP HOP: AMERICAN POETRY AND POLITICS INTO THE 21ST CENTURY Michael Dowdy A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: Linda Wagner-Martin Reader: Maria DeGuzmán Reader: Nick Halpern Reader: Trudier Harris Reader: John McGowan © 2005 Michael Dowdy ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT MICHAEL DOWDY: From Printed Page to Live Hip Hop: American Poetry and Politics into the 21st Century (Under the direction of Linda Wagner-Martin) This project identifies and explains the major rhetorical strategies American poets from Vietnam to the present use to create political poems. It argues that there are many different, though overlapping, approaches to making sociopolitically engaged poetry. Understanding political poetry as a collection of multiple rhetorical strategies moves away from identity- based and subject-based criticism. This project thus considers a number of representative poems from each strategy in order to illuminate each strategy’s intricacies. Further, the contention that hip hop has the most political potential of contemporary poetries suggests convergences with strategies for making printed poetry political. The framework for understanding both hip hop and printed poetry is derived from theories of agency that negotiate the individual’s ability to act according to her purposes in relation to the determining economic, political, and social forces that constrain action. The strategies considered thus emerge from various types of poetic agency: embodied agency, including both experiential and authoritative agency; equivocal agency, including comprehensive and particular varieties; migratory agency; and contestatory urban agency, which includes strategies indigenous to hip hop. Poems of embodied agency utilize the lived experiences of speaker-poets, experiences transformed through poetry but demonstrable through the body and memory. While poems of authoritative agency present individual and collective experience, they insist that they know iii the conditions of others and demand action from their readers. Poems of equivocal agency problematize notions of direct experience and are often nearly devoid of human presence, but replete with equivocation, irony, satire, and transpersonal experiences. The primary source of agency in poems of migratory agency is the fluid border between English- and Spanish- speaking cultures in the Americas. Their bilingual textures contest English’s role as the language for poetic, social, and political expression in the United States. The final chapter expands the scope for contemporary American political poetry, arguing that hip hop can achieve politically what printed poetry cannot. Live hip hop shows at small clubs can create interactive, community-based, democratic spaces, and hip hop’s internal debates about authenticity and agency vivify the culture, ensure its diversity, and work to uphold its endangered emphasis on collective identity and community strength. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank the professors and poets who helped me – whether they knew it or not – in the various stages of this project: John McGowan, Trudier Harris, Maria DeGuzmán, Nick Halpern, Jon Thompson, Elaine Orr, Marcia Douglas, John Balaban, and Barbara Baines. I especially want to thank Linda Wagner-Martin for her knowledge, dedication, and encouragement. I also want to extend my gratitude to my parents Janie and Dennis, my brother Ryan, my grandparents, and to Shelley and the entire Welton-Holliday-Kirkpatrick family. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the politically engaged poets – those who write and those who rap – who have made this project exciting and meaningful. v PREFACE While initially I feared that it would be difficult to articulate points of convergence for the three controlling imperatives of this book, I soon realized that those imperatives are bound together intimately. My dedication to contemporary American poetry, hip hop music, and international politics reaches a critical juncture under the broad designator “political poetry.” As Adrienne Rich once wrote, “Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history” (Your Native Land 33). Despite the opinions of some scholars, colleagues, and friends that contemporary poetry is obsolete except in a few isolated conclaves and that hip hop music is ephemeral and vacuous, I believe that poetry – both in printed form and in hip hop performance – is not only a ubiquitous and powerful cultural form in the United States, but that it is perhaps the best means for exploring contemporary American culture and the ways artists make their work political. In this book I explore the poetics of late twentieth and early twenty-first century poets, including those who perform on stage and on record, as well as on the printed page. Their strategies for confronting complex political, social, and global contexts in an era of globalization, war, human rights abuses, increasing economic inequality, and a prevailing uncertainty about the future help illuminate how artists negotiate between creative work and real-world constraints. I want to make a confession at the outset: I grew up listening to and thinking and talking about hip hop music and culture long before I became a serious poet or critic. I went to my first hip hop concert when I was thirteen years old, but did not read my first full-length volume of poetry until much later. If, therefore, I sound occasionally like an ardent fan or vi passionate defender of hip hop, my stance is a product of this history. I trust that my growth from fan to critic/fan does not prevent my analyzing hip hop music and culture in an illuminating way. Printed poetry, on the other hand, does not have “fans” in the same way that hip hop does. Hip hop is both a youth-dominated and performance-based culture, while the most exalted and celebrated poetic traditions in the United States have been passed along in printed form and are generally more intellectual and less accessible – so the story goes – than youth cultural forms. This dynamic has led many observers to view hip hop as an evanescent art form with little long term value. In hip hop culture, after all, fans often think of music made prior to 1994 as “old school.” In contrast, printed poetry, at least what critics and scholars have determined is the “best,” tends to mature and gain in cultural value over time. I have come to believe that these opposite trajectories are a key to understanding contemporary political poetry and the different political potentials of printed poetry and hip hop. Hip hop artists are capable of accomplishing what active contemporary poets often strive to create – a public space of collective agency, potential change, and community. They have a larger stage on which to interact with their audience, to create alternative images of justice, and to build potential political movements. Printed poetry, though, appreciates more slowly. Its impacts are often not immediate as they are in hip hop; thus, it is often difficult to see printed poetry as political. I have also come to believe that any extensive study of contemporary poetry, especially political poetry, is incomplete if it does not include the political work of hip hop. Such a study as this has never been published; consequently, critics have missed the opportunity to explore what hip hop can teach us about printed poetry and what printed poetry can tell us about the world’s most popular, dynamic, and confounding art form. vii Years of attending hip hop shows at night while reading, writing, and studying printed poetry during the day have compelled me to consider the shifting roles of both poets in society and of hip hop as a powerful form of political poetry. I have also been grappling with the apparent desire of many critics, readers, and poets to make lyric poetry – since the Romantic period associated with introspection and interpersonal emotions – political. Poetry, these observers hope, should be capable of making a difference in the world. Further, although I enjoy reading the poetry of previous generations, I am drawn more to contemporary poetry’s inextricability from current political and social contexts, partially, I believe, because of what Robert von Hallberg pointed out in 1987, a dictum which still applies nearly twenty years later: the need of humanities scholars to make the study of poetry “obviously important” (Politics and Poetic Value 2). Printed poetry can be “obviously important” in the classroom when it reverberates beyond the classroom to confront issues of social justice, war, and foreign policy – outside, between, and within the walls of the individual heart and mind. In my view, it is unnecessary to style hip hop as “obviously important”; Patrick Neate’s recent book Where You’re At: Notes from the Frontlines of a Hip-Hop Planet shows that hip hop music and culture are a fascinating combination of local and global forces, what he calls “glocal,” and have sociopolitical implications in places as dissimilar as Tokyo, Cape Town, New York, and Rio de Janiero. Throughout my years of graduate study, I wrestled, often inconclusively, with the same question from friends, family, and colleagues. After being asked about my scholarly interests and responding with “contemporary poetry, especially political poetry,” I often received blank stares, as if to say, I know what poetry is and I know what politics are, but what is political poetry and who writes it? The following, then, is my extended answer. As Michael viii Bérubé discusses in Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, there is a great need for a more accessible language and a better articulation of political positions in humanities scholarship so that it has greater potential to reach a broader audience (171). As such, I hope this book contributes to academic discussions of contemporary printed poetry, literature and politics, applied theoretical studies of agency, and discourses about hip hop music and culture.

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