I was going to write this blog entry on the mundane topic of hip hop lit as the urban fairytale. I was. It was going to be a literate conversation about the elements of fairytale and make believe that characterize the literature of hip hop and why we should be paying attention. I was going to talk about girls and how fairytales inform their lives. It was going to be all pink frilly dresses and tea parties. Really. Now, I’ll have to get to that in my next entry because as I sat here eating my cereal this Wednesday before Memorial day (a completely irrelevant factoid) and perusing my husband’s Wall Street Journal something caught my eye. Mind you I hadn’t opened it yet, I was just flipping around the front page! There, right under the lead article about the U.S turning up the heat on BP (re: the oil spill in the gulf) and the ongoing saga of North and South Korea, was a little article about Flarf poetry. Yep, you heard me. On the front page of the Wall Street Journal was an article about Flarf poetry.
Some of you, no doubt, are wondering just what in all God’s green goodness is Flarf
poetry and even more importantly, what in the world does it have to do with Hip Hop Literature. First questions first. Flarf poetry is a kind of “found” poetry that gets its feet from the internet. According to the Wall Street Journal what happens is people use words from random search strings to create poetry… Okay. ..
If you say so.
As for the second question, the answer is simple: everything…and nothing.
It just made me angry that Stanford University professors could chime in on Flarf poetry which by definition is a kind “rubbish verse”, meaningless gibberish and the poetry can be featured at readings at the Whitney Museum and in credible literary magazines but if somebody brings up Hip Hop Literature we have to hear all about ignorance and illiteracy. Flarf poetry is about people looking for a new way to imagine poetry and language. The African American literary community could take a cue from this conversation.
I can already hear the arguments forming in the mouths of detractors. I know them all, save your breath. The point is, the academy decides what gets credibiity and what doesn’t. What this article confirmed for me is that Flarf poetry, poetry made up of random google-searched concepts that on their own mean nothing, can attain street cred because the peope who decide such things have decided that it deserves credibility. They want it to have credibiity because they need it to have credibility because they like it. Period.
As a writing teacher, if a student brought me Flarf poetry, I’d have to ask the hard questions. I wouldn’t argue that it’s not poetry. That would be counter productive to any conversation about creativity. I can even see its appeal (okay, that’s a bit of a stretch but whatever. The point is I’m open). And that’s my point. I can even see its value even though Flarf poetry as far as I’m concerned is merely a fun exercise in language, something you do when you’re trying to unravel the brain to get to the juicy stuff.
So why is everybody having such trouble with hip hop literature, which has a defined value and meaning in our literate society? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s not being produced by what we deem literate people and its focus is that part of ourselves and our society we don’t want to discuss. We don’t like what we think it says about the progress of black thought and black upward mobility in general.
What is even more distressing is that as a community we have the power to give hip hop lit the same kind of credibility as flarf poetry. Some guy is rewriting the Shakespeare sonnets flarf-style. No comment.
Flarf poetry. An idea that started as a joke and takes its name from a police blotter where a kid described marijuana as “flarfy”. ‘Nuf said.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Literary Genealogy Part II
If Paul Laurence Dunbar is the essential great grandfather of hip hop literature with his novel The Sport of the Gods, then Chester Himes and his gritty street and detective fiction is the Grandfather. His novels are often categorized as crime or detective fiction but a closer look reveals a very close bloodline to the very fiction many of us are rolling our eyes and sucking our teeth about today.
If we look at Himes’ body of work it is clear that he had an affinity for the street. He understood the people as more than just hoodlums and criminals and undesirables, primarily because for a time he was one of them. They were real to him. They had voices and stories and it was obvious he felt the desire to tell those stories. Most people familiar with Himes know that he went to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio for robber and, in fact, began his writing career there. Prior to his turn in prison, he was known as Little Katzi (after the Katzenjammer kids comic strip) and could often be found in gambling joints and whorehouses throughout the Cleveland area.
Himes’ biography reads like well written street lit. And his fiction is no different. Drawing from his personal experiences in Cleveland and New York, Himes crafts a lifetime of stories about characters who are the victims of racism and capitalism and how those concepts shaped their opportunities.
He was highly intelligent. According to his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, he was informed after his entrance exams to Ohio State University that he had the fourth highest IQ of freshmen entering that fall. He stayed there two quarters but was so distraught at the overt racism both on and off campus that he dreaded the idea of going back. Drawn by the street life since a crippling accident left his family in a shambles and him unable to work in order to collect his disability, he thought it would be fun to take a group of coeds to a Columbus whorehouse he’d discovered. When word got back to the Dean, his already failing grades and poor attitude made the decision to dismiss him easy.
From there his descent into the dark world of the gambler and overall thug is rather quick. To avoid his bickering parents he takes to the streets and is quickly “adopted” by the local gangsters. They give him responsibilities around their clubs and he takes to the life rather nicely. The violence and immediacy of the streets suits his quick temper and need to respond to the racism both toward and among African Americans he sees daily.
His gangster journey culminates with a seven year stint at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio. He is arrested in Chicago as he tried to fence jewelry stolen from a house in Cleveland. When the Chicago police can’t pin a local robbery on him they handcuff him, hang him upside down and beat him until he confesses to the crime he did commit. In prison he finds that he is unique among his colleagues in that he can read and write and here he begins to tell stories.
Himes’ novels take us through the streets of Harlem, through bus stations, whore houses, and down back alleys and through respectable neighborhoods to show the irony and contradictions of black life in America. For his trouble Himes received little to no acclaim in the United States. He had to move to Paris for that. His most famous characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two black Harlem detectives, were vastly complex characters often overlooked because of their inclusion in a pulp style novel.
Like Dunbar, Himes understood his characters’ disenfranchisment and the elements of society which caused it. Dunbar believed that the Hamilton’s were at the mercy of the gods, that elements of their fate were out of their control. Himes portrayed the same lack of control in his characters, only what Dunbar called the gods, Himes called American society.
From Himes comes many other writers like Donald Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, to name the most popular. The W.W. Norton company has published what they call “old school” books/authors which include many more street novels than a lot people probably even knew existed.
The point of this entry is to reiterate the fact that the literature is not new. It’s not even unique. It has a history because the people who write it have a history in this country. The only real claim that this genre can make for itself in terms of groundbreaking achievement is its current public popularity. Himes and his colleagues never got the attention they felt they deserved for telling the stories of people whose voices generally go unheeded.
If we look at Himes’ body of work it is clear that he had an affinity for the street. He understood the people as more than just hoodlums and criminals and undesirables, primarily because for a time he was one of them. They were real to him. They had voices and stories and it was obvious he felt the desire to tell those stories. Most people familiar with Himes know that he went to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio for robber and, in fact, began his writing career there. Prior to his turn in prison, he was known as Little Katzi (after the Katzenjammer kids comic strip) and could often be found in gambling joints and whorehouses throughout the Cleveland area.
Himes’ biography reads like well written street lit. And his fiction is no different. Drawing from his personal experiences in Cleveland and New York, Himes crafts a lifetime of stories about characters who are the victims of racism and capitalism and how those concepts shaped their opportunities.
He was highly intelligent. According to his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt, he was informed after his entrance exams to Ohio State University that he had the fourth highest IQ of freshmen entering that fall. He stayed there two quarters but was so distraught at the overt racism both on and off campus that he dreaded the idea of going back. Drawn by the street life since a crippling accident left his family in a shambles and him unable to work in order to collect his disability, he thought it would be fun to take a group of coeds to a Columbus whorehouse he’d discovered. When word got back to the Dean, his already failing grades and poor attitude made the decision to dismiss him easy.
From there his descent into the dark world of the gambler and overall thug is rather quick. To avoid his bickering parents he takes to the streets and is quickly “adopted” by the local gangsters. They give him responsibilities around their clubs and he takes to the life rather nicely. The violence and immediacy of the streets suits his quick temper and need to respond to the racism both toward and among African Americans he sees daily.
His gangster journey culminates with a seven year stint at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio. He is arrested in Chicago as he tried to fence jewelry stolen from a house in Cleveland. When the Chicago police can’t pin a local robbery on him they handcuff him, hang him upside down and beat him until he confesses to the crime he did commit. In prison he finds that he is unique among his colleagues in that he can read and write and here he begins to tell stories.
Himes’ novels take us through the streets of Harlem, through bus stations, whore houses, and down back alleys and through respectable neighborhoods to show the irony and contradictions of black life in America. For his trouble Himes received little to no acclaim in the United States. He had to move to Paris for that. His most famous characters, Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, two black Harlem detectives, were vastly complex characters often overlooked because of their inclusion in a pulp style novel.
Like Dunbar, Himes understood his characters’ disenfranchisment and the elements of society which caused it. Dunbar believed that the Hamilton’s were at the mercy of the gods, that elements of their fate were out of their control. Himes portrayed the same lack of control in his characters, only what Dunbar called the gods, Himes called American society.
From Himes comes many other writers like Donald Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck, to name the most popular. The W.W. Norton company has published what they call “old school” books/authors which include many more street novels than a lot people probably even knew existed.
The point of this entry is to reiterate the fact that the literature is not new. It’s not even unique. It has a history because the people who write it have a history in this country. The only real claim that this genre can make for itself in terms of groundbreaking achievement is its current public popularity. Himes and his colleagues never got the attention they felt they deserved for telling the stories of people whose voices generally go unheeded.
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