Kevin Young sums it up

The poetry of Kevin Young is very recent which makes it interesting to read, but also challenging to know how to interpret. His poetry seems to have a visual and an oral feel, and like others, seems to integrate and address both aspects of poetry. He also uses interesting wordplay in DEFACEMENT and other poems that challenge the reader to break down what he is saying, what it sounds like, the diction and accent, and also the organization.

In the Poetic Statement many of the common themes we have discussed throughout this course are unpacked from Young’s poetry. He uses blues and jazz forms that harkens back to times of oral poetry and tradition. The Statement also notes how Young uses differing poetic forms to mirror what his poetry is saying or commenting including the familiar topics of love and relationships. He also seems to speak about these topics with a vivid quality not unlike what Wanda Coleman did as well.

For all of these reasons, it seems holistic to finish with a poem who address so many of the themes and ideas we have explored throughout this course.

Yes, I did a research paper freshman year about hip hop and whether it still contained a message about problems in urban communities and oppression. I found that over the years hip hop has changed, glorifying thug life instead of creating an awareness of the oppression and bad living conditions in urban areas. Many argue that hip hop began to target white suburban teenagers which sales records seemed to prove. Today there is hip hop that contains that message, but it is mainly underground and not being heard on the radio. Now people seem more interested in making money than really sending a message. But yes, as Sarah points out, that seems to be the case with all music. Protest(political and social) songs aren't really seen on the top 40 countdown... I always found it interesting though why such a large amount of suburban white teenagers would be obsessed with gangster rap. But then again, why not? I am pretty sure I remember one critic argued that they just wanted to piss off their parents/ feel bad ass. It is interesting to compare this situation to poetry though. There are poems that are merely candy, but I feel for the most part poems have a good amount of medicine, some kind of message. I just think that contrast between music and poetry is interesting...

mainstreem hip hop

Saw an article while doing paper research that I found interesting, and thought I’d share the idea with y’all. The article was about hip-hop, and it asked the question: “[D]oes black art still play a role as a place of sustenance for an oppressed people’s spirit, as a site of resistance?”. The article argued that there are two types of hip-hop, the more mainstream type, which has become highly commercialized, and the less mainstream type which is more about politics. I guess I’m interested in why the more commercialized stuff is so popular. Looking at the slam poetry, I found most of those poems to be great. With hard rock fading out and hip-hop coming in style, it’s interesting that there is rarely more than one song per artist that speaks about politics. Usually when I turn on the radio, the music is light, or has somewhat offensive lyrics, but a good beat. I just found it interesting that the author of the article was arguing that most of the smaller hip-hop artists spoke about political issues, while the mainstream ones didn’t—the author argued that it is the smaller hip-hop voices that give oppressed people something to work for, while the main ones help stifle them. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is true for almost all music—not just hip-hop. I know it’s an extreme view, but I still found it something worth thinking about.

Prose Confusion too!

What I found most intriguing about Nathaniel Mackey was his diversity in form. We read prose, poetry and an interview by him, and nearly all of them were equally baffling to me. Like last class, sometimes I found that if I read his poems faster I could make some sense of them, but as a whole I was left wondering about many of the poems. In particular, I cannot say that I as really able to make sense of the visual poems with odd indentations. I tried reading just the right justified words to see if it worked together, or also using the single word as a cue for the rest of the stanza, but still hound no definitive answer. Which left me wondering, what do these visual cues mean? What such discourse in presentation? What is he saying by the way he arranges the poem, not the words within it?

One of the most interesting things for me though was the interview. I thought that Mackey tied together and essentially summarized so many of the discussions and questions we had semester. He discussed the how poems can be both oral and visual simultaneously, how religion and music are often one and the same, how the audience can matter but also be irrelevant, and seemed to express consistent “integration” ideas as Harryette Mullen.

Proposition 209

I got pretty interested in the idea that California (and polititians in general) word things in a difficult manner to make people vote differently than they normally would. I went to my friend Wiki, and looked up proposition 209:

The passage of proposition 209 amended the California Constitution to include a new section (Section 31 of Article I), which reads:

(a) The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

(b) This section shall apply only to action taken after the section's effective date.

(c) Nothing in this section shall be interpreted as prohibiting bona fide qualifications based on sex which are reasonably necessary to the normal operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

(d) Nothing in this section shall be interpreted as invalidating any court order or consent decree which is in force as of the effective date of this section.

(e) Nothing in this section shall be interpreted as prohibiting action which must be taken to establish or maintain eligibility for any federal program, where ineligibility would result in a loss of federal funds to the state.

(f) For the purposes of this section, "state" shall include, but not necessarily be limited to, the state itself, any city, county, city and county, public university system, including the University of California, community college district, school district, special district, or any other political subdivision or governmental instrumentality of or within the state.

(g) The remedies available for violations of this section shall be the same, regardless of the injured party's race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin, as are otherwise available for violations of then-existing California antidiscrimination law.

(h) This section shall be self-executing. If any part or parts of this section are found to be in conflict with federal law or the United States Constitution, the section shall be implemented to the maximum extent that federal law and the United States Constitution permit. Any provision held invalid shall be severable from the remaining portions of this section.

To me this sounds like the abolition of racism and sexism, but in reality (according to Wiki), it really is about doing away with affirmitive action.

California claims that abolishing affirmative action has helped California, "The African American graduation rate at the University of California, Berkeley increased by 6.5 percent,[2] and rose even more dramatically, from 26 percent to 52 percent, at the University of California, San Diego" (wiki. Graduation rates have improved, but enrollment has gone down: "Criticism was made of the fact that of the 4,422 students in UCLA's freshman class of 2006, only 100 (2.26%) were African American[2]. In fact, opponents of Proposition 209 note that there are greater disparities in elite education in the post-Proposition 209 era due to decreased African American and Latino enrollment. Proponents, on the other hand, note that Asian American enrollment rates dramatically increased at a majority of UC campuses" (wiki).

On a lighter note, since we are taking a poetry class, I wrote a poem on the way to class the other day, and because I can't make it to the poetry slam, I thought I'd post it here:

English Major

I majored in English,
But I minored in Gym,
That’s because there’s
three sets of stairs
in Richardson.

Sipping on my mocha-cola liquid-energy,
Running faster than an R.O.T.C.
And time seems to be running faster than me
All this for a college degree?!

But no, wait the door’s locked.
So I knock and I knock,
But the door itself seems to mock,
And the hands on my clock won’t stop.

So I need to go down the steps to go up some more
Another set of stairs!
Now I have to go up four!
All because of the stupid locked door.

So I step and I step and I step and I step,
And I sweat and I sweat and I sweat and I sweat,
And with every sweat step,
I begin to regret
Why I put on Dove deodorant, instead of
Super ultra mega platinum Secret.

So I swan-dive into my chair,
Pretending to be unaware
Of how everybody in my class begins to stare.
...maybe this time the teacher won’t care.

But of course she’s irate,
And I’m marked as ‘late’
But it doesn’t matter how I do in English,
Because in gym, I’m doing great!

George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness"

You can find it here.

Epic Situation

I am glad that i waited to enter my passage in our blog this week, as today's class was difficult for me to grapple with, in particular the assumption that the speaker of a performed piece is to be identified as the narrator. For the sake of qualification, I took performing poetry with Randy Hill and one of the devices we learned about was this notion of the Epic Situation. The epic situation as we defined it was the where and who of a performance. So if you are performing Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman, You would have to decide, where am I going to set this performance and who will I portray? In this case, you may go about the generic route personifying a woman in a public sphere, or you may attempt to portray a transgendered male, convincing himself of his womanhood in a private setting. The point is that unless specified otherwise, we need to contain the narrator to the person within the poem and not the deliverer/speaker. Do not assume that because a black woman is presenting a poem about a skinhead, the narrator of the piece is a black woman. Instead, listen and interpret her words. The opening line is: “They call me skinhead.” Thus with ample critical analysis it may be determined that the poems narrator is, indeed, a skinhead, and not the black woman speaking the poem, shall we relate the stage to the setting of the poem too? It is difficult to separate that which we are so used to trust, our sight, from poetic thought. I am not saying that I know everything there is to know about poetry – we all know that’s not true, but I am saying that I am certain that the speaker is not a black woman and to my knowledge it has nothing to do with the way she’s dressed. Maybe it has something to do with her skin color and the volumes of cultural history that’s bound within, but nothing is indicative that it is about or through the voice of Patricia Smith. I don’t like to generalize, but I do fancy myself to play with the evidence provided to me, and the opening line is enough for me.