Introduction: Political Poetry in the United States 1
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Notes Introduction: Political Poetry in the United States 1. I use “rap” and “hip-hop” interchangeably in this book. I usually prefer the term “hip-hop” because I see it as more inclusive and encompassing. Most critics use the terms interchangeably, as do most in the culture. Some artists, though, see rap as a style of music, hip-hop as the larger culture of which rap is a part. KRS-One, for instance, draws a distinc- tion between rap “as something you do” and hip-hop as “something you live,” in other words a culture. Hip-hop culture includes four basic elements—rapping, dj’ing, graffiti writing, and breakdancing. See the liner notes to KRS-One: A Retrospective. I also use the terms “rapper,” “MC,” and “hip-hop artist” interchangeably. 2. It should be noted that Walt Whitman’s understanding of the poet’s pub- lic role as people’s representative influenced many of these Latin American poets, even if indirectly. In “Song of Myself,” he writes, “It is you talking just as much myself ...I act as the tongue of you, / It was tied in your mouth . in mine it begins to be loosened” (lines 1244–1245). For an analysis of Whitman’s debatable influence on Latin American poets, see Enrico Mario Santí’s “The Accidental Tourist: Walt Whitman in Latin America” in Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, ed. Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1990), 156–176. 3. See Stephen Burt’s “Portability; or, The Traveling Uses of a Poetic Idea” in Modern Philology 100.1 (2002): 24–49, for an in-depth dis- cussion about this issue. He asks, “How far can we take a poem—and a person—before they cease to be what they were?” (28). 4. See Terry Eagleton’s overview of Gadamer’s Hermeneutics in Literary Theory (New York: Oxford UP, 1984). 5. See Don L. Lee, “From a Black Perspective,” Don’t Cry, Scream (Detroit: Broadside P, 1969). 6. Zinn cites these particularly powerful lines from the poem: “Rise like lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number! / Shake your chains to earth, like dew / Which in sleep had fallen on you— / Ye are many, they are few!” 7. However, as contemporary U.S. politics show, political discourse may appear to be clear, but much is smoke and mirrors and deception. Giddens, for example, believes ideology is primarily rhetorical. It is the form argument takes in the public sphere. In other words, the speeches given to the public usually appeal to universal needs or welfare. There is 202 NOTES thus a striking contrast between the “front” and the “back” where the “front” is the appeal to general welfare (for instance, “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country”) and the “back” is the underlying, unspoken intent (to siphon off wealth to the rich at the expense of local communities and workers). 8. Adrienne Rich’s now famous proclamation appeared in its inchoate form in 1971 in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” cited here in the Norton Critical Edition of Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 166–177: “I think I began at this point to feel that politics was not something ‘out there’ but something ‘in here’ and of the essence of my condition.” 9. See McGann’s The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985). 10. Dove’s “Parsley,” which explores the brutal actions of Rafael Trujillo, former dictator of the Dominican Republic, has two sections. The first is a nonrhyming villanelle, the second a sestina. See Selected Poems (133–135). 11. See Helen Vendler’s The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham (Boston: Harvard UP, 1995) for a discussion of why and how these three poets changed their style from poem to poem as well as over their careers. 12. See Levertov “On the Edge of Darkness: What is Political Poetry?,” von Hallberg’s Introduction to Politics and Poetic Value, and Ostriker’s “Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Some Notes on Politics and Poetry,” in von Hallberg’s Politics and Poetic Value. 13. See Gibbons’s discussion of Burke (280–281). 14. See Barthes’s Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). Also see Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as de- facement” in Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 171–174. The controversy in Winter 2006 about the veracity of James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces pop- ularized debates about truth, experience, memoir, and autobiography. 15. In the last decade there has been a shift in mainstream hip-hop into rural places, especially in the South. Groups such as Nappy Roots show that hip-hop can be thoroughly rural. In fact, traditions such as playing the dozens and signifying, which have contributed greatly to core hip-hop values, have rural roots. 16. Clear Channel owns over 1,200 radio stations and controls 70% of major live music venues in the United States. See Damien Cave’s “Clear Channel: Inside Music’s Superpower” in Rolling Stone, September 2, 2004, 53–56, for background on the corporate influence on recorded and live music. Chapter 1 Embodied Agency 1. Poetry and testimonio are very different traditions. See Silvia N. Rosman’s essay on Neruda for an example of how they have been studied together. NOTES 203 For background on testimonio, see Beverley’s Against Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989); the Gugelberger edited The Real Thing; and two special issues of Latin American Perspectives titled Voices of the Voiceless in Testimonial Literature (18.3 (Summer 1991): 1–120 and 18.4 (Autumn 1991): 1–120) edited by Gugelberger and Michael Kearney. The premier example of testimonio is Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia as told to Elisabeth Burgos by Guatemalan Indian activist and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Rigoberta Menchú (Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara, S.A., 1983). 2. See Jonathan Levin’s The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, & American Literary Modernism (New Americanists Series. Ed. Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999), which draws on Emerson, Dewey, James, and Santayana, for further discussion of Wallace Stevens’s understanding of the dynamic between resistance and evasion, especially in relationship to imagination. See pages 87–89. Levin writes, “Imagination responds to material conditions— natural, social, and cultural—and has no possible existence apart from them” (88). 3. Was Komunyakaa familiar with Forché’s poem when he wrote “We Never Know”? Given that Forché’s book is well known, I assume that Komunyakaa was aware of “The Colonel.” Whether or not he consciously imitated her line is uncertain. This argument on Komunyakaa draws on my article “Working in the Space of Disaster: Yusef Komunyakaa’s Dialogues with America,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters 28.3 (2005): 812–823. 4. Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” (The Things They Carried) deals with how collective guilt overwhelms even soldiers who did not kill a Vietnamese soldier personally, only saw one killed. 5. In this book I use the term “stanza” for simplicity and convenience. Though some critics would insist that a “stanza” is part of a formal, metered poem, and that a “stanza” in a free verse poem should be called a “verse paragraph,” I find the semantic difference unnecessary. If it looks like a stanza, I call it a stanza. For instance, I would call the first six free verse lines of Merwin’s “For a Coming Extinction” (The Lice 1967) a “stanza” because it is a self-contained unit of lines separated from the next “stanza” by a blank line: Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness 6. This object position is important in that it reflects the African American male’s historical position as an object to be used and ultimately rejected by the dominant culture; it also suggests the African American subject’s historically compromised agency in American society. 204 NOTES 7. The best creative work on the “official story” occurs in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990). See “How to Tell a True War Story” for perspective on objectivity in the context of war. 8. Gibbons explains that exteriorism was developed by Cardenal in response to the abstractions, romanticism, and symbolism of Latin American poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. Cardenal’s poetics have “a diction that is concrete and detailed with proper names and the names of things in preference to the accepted poetic language, which was more abstract, general, and vaguely symbolic” (“Political” 278). 9. Altieri’s conception of this visionary leap in 1980s poetry is strikingly similar to von Hallberg’s understanding of much Vietnam-era poetry. 10. Collins’s poem (76–77) has eerie reverberations with Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi’s story “El prócer,” which is about the life, geopo- litical ramifications, and malleability of a war memorial statue in an unnamed Latin American plaza. 11. See “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch” for the humiliations of giving concessions to white people and “staying in your place.” See also “Fire and Cloud” for the tension between active resistance and protest and the need to “wait” and be patient, both in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938; New York: Perennial, 1993). See also The Best of Nina Simone (New York: Polygram Records, Inc. 1969). 12. In “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics” David L. Smith suggests that “Black Arts writing directly addressed a black audience.” As such, it “demands of its reader (or listener) a sympathy and famil- iarity with black culture and black idioms” (102).