FROM PRINTED PAGE TO LIVE HIP HOP

366 Pages·2006·3.53 MB·English

FROM PRINTED PAGE TO LIVE HIP HOP:
ST
AMERICAN POETRY AND POLITICS INTO THE 21 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
st
into the 21 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. Further, I hope what follows will be capable of reaching a broader
audience, those who enjoy reading poetry and those who grew up with hip hop music, those
who follow global politics, and those who are interested in art’s engagement with
sociopolitical realities. Thus, I attempt to negotiate the constraints of scholarly literary
criticism and use a more approachable style.
Although I employ various theoretical terms, I trust that those terms will challenge and
engage rather than confuse readers. Also, my theoretical and stylistic approach to the
material is similar to hip hop artists’ approaches – eclectic and pragmatic. I do not hesitate to
borrow from a variety of academic disciplines and scholarly approaches. Like hip hop
sampling, I also sample a variety of approaches to poetry scholarship and cultural studies.
When Helen Vendler writes that poets who use more than one language or register employ a
“macaronic aesthetic” (“Poet of Two Worlds” 31), she derides them for their unsustainable
voices. However, I believe that these voices are dynamic and creative even if they
appropriate and reuse previous voices and traditions. I hope that this book’s “macaronic”
critical approach is the best one to elucidate the complex landscape of contemporary poetry
in the United States in both printed poems and hip hop song and performance.

ix
CONTENTS

Introduction: Navigating the Landscape of Politics and Poetry in the United States…………1

Poets, Political Poetry, and the American Public……………………………………..5

Political Poetry’s Historical-Cultural Contexts………………………………….........8
Political Poetry and Indirection……………………………………………………...11
Ways of Talking about Political Poetry……………………………………………...13
Political Poetry and Interiority………………………………………………….........18
Political Poetry and Poetic Form……………………………………………….........20
Varieties of and Strategies for Political Poetry………………………………………23
Agency: A Framework for Reading Political Poetry………………………………...27
Types of Agency in Political Poetry…………………………………………………30
Moving Forward……………………………………………………………………..41
Chapter One: Embodied Agency

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..43

Experiential Agency………………………………………………………………….51

Authoritative Agency………………………………………………………………...70

Synthesizing Experiential and Authoritative Agencies……………………………...91
Summary and Conclusions…………………………………………………………..99
Chapter Two: Equivocal Agency

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………101

Comprehensive Equivocal Agency…………………………………………………112

x