con/ c r e s c e n t 2

a biannual journal of the arts, fall one-zero

con/crescent 2 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution -
Noncommercial – No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

To view a copy of this license, visit:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/

Distributed by con/crescent press, 2010

Edited by Nicholas A. DeBoer & J Townsend

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Heidi Weiss
Cover Art 01

Patrick Lucy
'Music is...' 03

Nicholas A DeBoer & J Townsend

An Editor's Note 06

Denise Dooley
A Night of Passionate Karaoke Bars Brought
About a Series of Profound Thoughts Here
They Are for You Sincerely Denise Dooley 07

Greg Bem
Unsound: Memories of Sound 11

Travis Cebula
Will Alexander in the Aether 13

Matthias Regan
Toward a Harmolodic Poetry 16

Rap Prosody and Contemporary Poetry, a Preliminary Gallery 21

Dorothea Lasky
Hip Hop is American Poetry 22

Paolo Javier
R.I.P. Keith Elam 25

Garrett Caples
How to Rhyme 26

Chris Martin
Choreosophagraphy 27

Lauren Levin & Alli Warren

The Chorus 29

Thom Donovan
Notes on Rap Prosody and Contemporary Poetry 33

Dana Ward
It's So Easy 37

Matthew Landis
Glam Rock & Punk Rock: The 'Grotesque' Anatomy
of an Artistic, Erotic and Transgendered Sub-Culture 47

John Courie
Cartoon 51

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AN EDITOR'S NOTE
J: I was talking about double-flat notes and it hit me “a convergence of axes”.

N: 3rd grade stabbing of pencil lead into the person next to me in home room.

J: When it started, the concern of feeling a way in real time, like people smoking on
the hoods of their cars & there was always an accompanying tone, a realization of
precise abandon.

N: Black and white television sets on UHF 50. Just enough audibility to know that the
Meanies were taking over Pepperland. Enough audibility that I was never at home.

J: Slip, stutter & intimate. The drag that holds a complete process, its destruction
& how attractive.

N: You have to drift through. A pitch of color below the surf. Faint pins of the light
house. Water layering up my chest, lift.

J: I love the names: Magnetic Fields, This Heat, Ghostface – claims on a set of
immediacies, an intimate depth of resonance that springs up and send downs
rootwork; the basic ones, that they have always been there.

N: The sonics and pressure at a mile down. The Fall's frayed crack on the Titanic's
rusticle deck. Ears pop. The deaf ends of r-a-w--p-o-w-e-r. A w a k e! There is no
geography when I listen to music, just the belly of large space.

J: & all the momentary convergences, how the play and swing, swings in to hold a
pitch too long, how that drop becomes the whole body's motion. It is setting up nets
in the evening after the rain. Setting up a drumset on the roof.

N: At 16, running alleys and drenched. Achilles' Last Stand. Air stapled shut ice.
Pulse of the presence unnamed in melody or countered to best friend's best mix tape
selections. It was about, even then, you and I can be others together.

J: There is a metal chord struck, it means something. Uncanny how familiar.

N: I'm nowhere near the top of the smokestack, a canary in a coalmine strangled
by. The ruins of horizon carry that weight.

J: Don't call it a comeback.

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 A NIGHT OF PASSIONATE KAROAKE IN TWO DIFFERENT
BARS BROUGHT ABOUT A SERIES OF PROFOUND
THOUGHTS HERE THEY ARE FOR YOU SINCERELY FROM
DENISE DOOLEY
Denise Dooley

I. Mary's Attic
I have never cared about music very much.

Of course my life centers on it. Especially the part that is lived with other people. That's
common for people with my kind of clothes and schooling. It's always there. But it's not any
kind of main thing, not a driving impulse.

And sure I have loved songs. I like rhymes.

Since prince was on apollonia. Since oj had isotoners.

My headphones got filled up easy by friends who were all “Here you will like this.” They
were right! All music is good if you don't know how to make it yourself. That's how car
commercials work.

II. Copa Lounge

“I don't know what I'm for. To praise, he might say.

I don't think so. “You have no philosophy,” he says,
“That's the one thing you need to be great.”
I'd fight back, but the buzzer rings, Marion
She comes over daily, before everyone else
In her halterneck denim jumpsuit, anemic, what's
A person for. Answer me late 70's."
- Alice Notley
I wasn't in a band or a photographer for a band or a dj or a girlfriend of someone in a band.
But I had headphones on a few hours a day. Listened to songs on repeat (while love was
changing, turning on or off). Went to one or two shows a week.

To go out. To be with people, to do something. What if folks went out to cafes or roller
rinks or something. Then we could talk more. But they went to shows so I went to shows.

At least you could wear neat dresses. You could cram close in small houses then go out in
the dark with smokers. Really-into-music people are plenty sexy. Tall-and-reedy or short-
and-soft, those are nice varieties. At shows I would jump around and so would the boys and
all the sweating and we were together.

Here is my age group: in the late nineties I went to deep-house shows where we all got
tapped like toy drums. 2001 was Omaha and I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert so I
cried during it. And hardcore and garage to glare-mirror back things we already believed,
sure. Train to Sussex in 2006 and bike to Pitchfork summers and by then songs wanted to
be fables, inscrutable and demanding, so we sat together cross legged on our story rugs.

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I liked seeing people, funny friends in heavy bellied dance pits, meth gummed boys, braided
suede ladies. I remember close to nothing about set lists or performers and rarely really
watched the stage. Feeling the feelings was my only real reason. That covers about fifteen
years.

III. Blue Frog Bar and Grill

I mean to set out opposite another kind of contact I know about but do not have:

At a party at his house when Ryan became suddenly sad he put on a mournful pop song and
played the cello with it. We didn't really know he played the cello. We were surprised.
David said “Yeah he does this sometimes.” He was eyes closed, cupped around it. Vein
tapped sound. A coal vein, in bedrock.

Sarah goes on record digs and is a DJ, so's Bobby, Gena and David write reviews, Doug made
an intricate, well oiled album all by himself and instead went to professor school. They sure
know how to listen.

As a teenaged american Amanda sat home and practiced lush piano songs by women of the
nineties (the ones who had that moment). That she could do it! That her teenage sorrow
and overwhelm had this gesture available!

To run four miles when you really need to think. To do a backflip when you are backflip-
happy. Musicality carefully builds emotive features.

You grow a perfect valve.

IV. Hidden Cove

Karaoke became a thing my friends were genuinely into. This includes dear musicians in
austin, in new york, in chicago, detroit, san francisco. All separate, of their own volition,
anyone who had been into pedals/buttons/vinyl got good at doing Wham duets. They
wouldn't tell you it's a “main interest” they acted like it was accidents. But something
that happens most weekends is claiming a lot of your time.

Derek who paints and has good parties rigged a pirate machine in his house. American
Legions cram full of us. Family bars make shit tons of money off this and even they are
surprised by it. Around this time all the new music diminished. We got older than the
newest bands. We went Paul Simon, Carly Simon, R Kelly, Springsteen. We listened
through the familiar to find what it had sounded like at first. Then the distance let us into
it.

V. Red Head

Maybe you gather fluency, then detach. You sense the minor chords mean to pull your heart
strings, which dampens their first-punch power. You don't trust other people to do this on
you. The stage moment opens the valve. Artifacts start asking you to make them.

VI. Howl at the Moon

Alternately, self nurture holds our ankles in its own cement.

Split yourself like a sheaf – here is fifteen year old me with more balls than sense, here is

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twenty one year old me with his awful dangers, here is twelve or thirty year old me and the
boots in his ass and the endless beat down, watch him cry. Say you meet those people
constantly and care for them as strangers. You can sing them their preferred songs. Or its
just there's less we have in common. All lives diverge. A branchy group of friends is harder
to sweep up inside a song.

My friend who is worn out by babies, does he want to stay up all night and jump? My
dumped friend with the guy who drives her to work in the morning, she dies from arm-
contact with him sometimes, how can she and I fall under the same spell? My own heart has
gone so lazy fat. Our lives have separated out like eggs and demand their separate spells.

Karaoke gives you whole books of them. Pick your own.

Some people have a song they always do. For comfort. Maybe “Free Falling”, “Proud
Mary”. Maybe “Can't Get Next to You”. Soren the Smoldering-eyed says: “Repetition's
love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection's love, it does not have the restlessness
of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of
recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment”(Kierkegaard, Repetition and
Philosophical Crumbs].
When you sing it, when your name is called, you are full flooded with adrenaline and blush.
The song comes on like drugs. You know that analogy! We used to get rushes together as
part of a crowd held in thrall. Experts now, we gotta do the thrall on ourselves.

VII. Trader Todd's

What matters is the music is not new. Never something you would put on at home or
something you especially believe in. Overheard music from the break room radio, from the
Delilah show. Somebody else's station watered down, gurgled by an elevator. Reaching back
for something really helps.

We laugh watching one another but the whole point is embarrassment, so you aren't.
Embarrassed.

In the year of its release, a customer in the intended audience might be captured, acted on,
manipulated. But this takes it at a savvy remove from intention. Take it out of the laminate
book. Clear some space to bloom sincere. Don't cough. Don't preen.

Sometimes we go to the private karaoke rooms. These look like Steamworks, with booth-
couches, and laser lights. They bring beer buckets. You choose the background. If there is
a straight guy he picks the topless-ladies one. Three flat screens of rising nipples have that
effect on everyone but see this is a joke. The room hums so silly. Whiskey beer whiskey.
Sing “Thunder Road”. Sing Pussycat Dolls. Stand on the table grab yourself and scream.
We are friends and all go home separate.

VIII. Rory Lake

All your stages stack to get here. On average: wherever you grew up, wherever you went to
school, lived abroad, crammed chorusing we're so broke, where you started work, went for
more school, moved with your lover, took better work, thought it would help to be closer to
(or farther from) the water.

That's five or six cities to shake anecdotes from. They bounce like bone dice. This one time
you had a big fat friend, a dark eyed friend, a crate of peaches, arrests, a silver car, some

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bikes. Here's where the stories get their legs. Now you really tell them.

There is the sense that as this goes on and on it gets mixed up. Sediment back into the
solution. Sign up and go around until it is your turn again. Slow pull out the glorias as they
climb up the screen.

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 UNSOUND: MEMORIES OF SOUND
Greg Bem
One
It takes a lot to stand up on this sphere with a suitable conviction with such sonic weight. In
a land of extensive found symphony, we have yet to learn to cover our ears. It is not a new
thought. And yet one day I still hope that we will run and scream from the drop of water
dripping onto glass or metal or wood. One day we will run and scream from the noise of an
engine, or the peeling of an orange, or the ruffling of papers, or the skin tip-tap-typing on
the keyboard.

Two
Sound has taught us how to self-treat through soothing and overwhelming. We bathe in the
warmth of these waves. We are impaled by these waves as they are projected with the fierce
projection of a Gatling. I wait for the day when I will be able to sit still without hearing.
Being deaf, with love, dear god, can we pray for it? I pray it won't be in death that the
therapeutic requirements of absolute, horizontal silence are appreciated by the above, below,
and average average human being.1

Three
I first encountered vibrations at a young age. Have you ever tapped on an automobile's
steering wheel with such fervor, or bounced a fork on a ceramic plate? Have you ever banged
your head as the amplifiers struck into your eardrums like the swords of one hundred
paladins felling the worst ghoul? It was a victimization I did not let go of, if not for the rush
then for the pain, until leaving a life of amphetamines and accelerated writing experiments.
That was in college. It started in third or fourth grade. It was not romantically early and it
was not romantically late.

Four
When I first heard Lightning Bolt I shied away from it. Background music, I told myself it
was, just background music with no place in my world. Things sink into place if you are told
that they will. Joe Dwyer of Providence, Rhode Island, introduced me to new genres, new
heights. You can tape your foot to a padded carpet and you can bash your fingers into the
plastic desk until they bleed. When I first listened to Metal of the likes of Metallica and
Cradle of Filth I would idiotically tap with more fingers than I owned to the melody of the
guitar. Learning how Lightning Bolt's drums went everywhere all at once, mimicking the
reflective properties of the sound wave, I upgraded. My skills became inconsistent but fun. It
was for the sake of chaos, everything trying to be disemboweled and deconstructed. I was
living in a poststructuralist world and I didn't even know it or care about it. Isn't that the
way it's supposed to be? I am breathing and my heart is pumping blood and I want to scream
but I am having too much energy put into a dance with a song. Have you ever danced to a
song?

Five
The White Mice for me are a different can of mice. I never listened to them on a CD. I would
go to the warehouses in Providence and bathe in the stretches of sound that were landscaped,
like being on a piece of paper as sequentially bleeding plots of space. It would be like
submerging into a bath full of angry knives, excited razors nicking the skin. You shoot off
into another room before you're certain you're going crazy.
1 When unconscious we can still hear things. You wake up when you hear something too much, but the same catatonia is
perpetuated through all the little sounds. Just as in consciousness we sludge through the auditory waste. The grins on our
ears are permanent, fixed, prepped.

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Six
Just before I turned 23 years old I stopped bobbing my head to the beat of the hip hop I
loved. With trip-hop and turntableism I found the love to groove and yet when I saw everyone
was listening to rap in each and every direction it became more of a question of status. Now
I've always been one to notice how people perceive me listening to music and I'm sure you
have too. But really, have you? Have we? It's easier when you're blocked off in your room but
when you enter the grow-up and go-out stage in life you surrounded by so many people.
Adapt or become destroyed.

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 WILL ALEXANDER IN THE AETHER
Travis Cebula
Question: what is Luminiferous Aether? Answer: it is the substance postulated by
Christiaan Huygens to explain the possibility of light's movement as a wave-form through
space. Waves of all kinds need a medium in which to propagate, and Huygens theorized that
Luminiferous Aether is the enabling medium through which light waves travel—for example
allowing light to move from the sun or stars to Earth. Will Alexander uses this idea as
partial basis for his characterization of the Goddess, Solea, in Exobiology as Goddess, and also
recognizes the essential commonality shared by light waves and sound waves through the
metaphor of a Goddess singing in the depths of space. Alexander's language evokes the
beauty of music in the voice of a Goddess:

the splendiferous dolorosos of Solea

with her blind electrical surges
with her transmundane penetration
like a rain of green sorrows
with their clairvoyant ethers
(Alexander, p. 1)

& so I can speak of her fraternization of coils

(Alexander, p. 6)

become the motion in which sound floats

(Alexander, p. 8)

her voice
echoes across a veil of ink
(Alexander, p. 15)

Will Alexander's skies fill to bursting with music, singing, light, and color. Alexander's
musical imagery serves as a support for his lyrical/spiritual journey. To be fair, Will
Alexander is not the first writer or scientist to postulate the presence of music in the
heavens. More than two thousand years ago, Pythagoras hypothesized a celestial harmonic—
not audible so much as mathematic, kinetic, and aesthetic. In years to come, astronomers
such as Johannes Kepler referred to the Pythagorean ideal as “musica universalis,” or
“music of the spheres.” As recently as 2006 the metaphor continued, becoming far more
literal with Greg Fox's creation of a musical piece entitled “Carmen of the Spheres.” Fox
achieved an audible, and haunting, music by evenly increasing the frequency of each planet's
orbital period (using sound as the measure) until that frequency is within audible range. He
proceeded to play the sounds produced by all the planets in our solar system simultaneously
and recorded the varied tones—creating, quite literally, a music of the planets. The theory,
in brief, “musica universalis,” is that the sun, moon, planets, and earth all interact and
move in a harmony identical to that found in music—furthermore, this harmony is
mathematically measurable and understandable. We can use music as a tool to understand
our universe.

Nature, which is never not lavish of herself, after a lying-in

of two thousand years, has finally brought you forth in these
last generations, the first true images of the universe.
By means of your concords of various voices, and through
your ears, she has whispered to the human mind, the favorite

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 daughter of God the Creator, how she exists in the innermost
bosom.
-Johannes Kepler, Harmonies of the World

It is unlikely that “musica universalis” was far from Will Alexander's thoughts while
writing “Solea of the Simooms,” considering the preponderance of musical language and
singing references as cited before. The name alone, “musica universalis,” has a certain
lyrical quality that lends itself to poetry, certainly. The image of planets in harmony singing
to each other across the void is a compelling one even without invoking the Goddess, Solea.
It is likely that science alone is responsible for an invocation, but there is also another,
somewhat obscure, layer to the history of “musica universalis” that could be a contributing
factor in Alexander's creation of “Solea of the Simooms”(a title which brings to mind
nubile, dancing, sword-wielding, multi-armed Hindu goddesses).
Fascination with Pythagoras did not extend exclusively to Western figures such as
Johannes Kepler, Dante Alighieri, Greg Fox, and Will Alexander. Indeed, it seems
Pythagoras had a following outside of the West. He was considered a satguru among some
Hindus in India (specifically Surat Shabda Yoga Satgurus), otherwise known as a true teacher
who can lead one to enlightenment. Furthermore, proponents of “musica universalis” in
India consider it to be synonymous with the shabd. Shabd is a Sanskrit concept variously
translated as “The Word,” “Audible Life Stream,” “sound current vibrating in all
creation,” and “Essence of the Absolute Supreme Being.”
These words echo throughout the celestial singing of Solea. It would seem clear, then,
that Will Alexander's search for the divine through music and light in space is not only real,
but has at least a modicum of universal appeal. Others before him have traveled these
winding paths of science to their termini, seeking God in the places beyond the limits of
strictest human knowledge. Pythagoras strode them before. In Exobiology as Goddess,
finally, Will Alexander's voice is alternately descriptive, mad, pleading, and exultant: the
eternal voice of a human singing to God for understanding. In the power of life and light he
manages to hear the sacred, if only for a moment.

Solea
over & beyond the 50 cosmic nutrients of the heavens
over & beyond its dark revolving ganglia
over & beyond its kinetic registration

she is not condemned to any specious realm

to any one molecular force or atom

it is the Goddess & her living insular ghost

it is the Goddess & her phenotypic African form

we are the glorious heat from sub-eclectic Minoan candles

like an interjective mist projecting heated spores from Andromeda

& I can easily enunciate

bell
lion
lantern
star
by which we burn as an invisible eclectic
(Alexander, pp. 88-89)

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 WORKS CITED

Alexander, Will. Exobiology as Goddess. Santa Clara, CA: Almaden Press, 2004.

Fox, Greg. “Carmen of the Spheres.” July 31, 2006. Internet Archive. October 16,
2 0 0 7 . <http://www.archive.org/details/GregFoxCarmenoftheSpheres/Greg-Fox_Carmen-Of-
The-Spheres160.mp3>.

Kepler, Johannes. Harmonies of the World. Translated by Charles Glenn Wallis. 1939
(Public Domain).

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 TOWARD A HARMOLODIC POETRY
Matthias Regan
In the last several years my practice has been increasingly given to what I call “harmolodic
essays.” In what follows I employ aesthetic concepts articulated by the musician Ornette
Coleman & several American poets in order to describe the method of harmolodic
composition. My description is also an appeal to pursue certain lines of practice over others. It
rejects the sentimental, ego-boosting lyricism that emerges from confessionalism & which
continues to contribute to a social atmosphere that locates the “subject of true feeling” in
first-person narratives of middle-class victimhood. But in rejecting the mainstream poetic
practices of the baby-boomers, the harmlodic essayist does not automatically take up the
increasingly institutionalized practices associated with the baby-boomer's punk better half—
the language poets. Some of the best poets associated with the language movement practice
compositional techniques similar to harmalodics, but this essay appeals to an early moment in
order to find a more populist base & directly political direction for the craft.

The tradition of practice from which harmolodics emerges is that of “objectivism,” broadly
conceived. The objectivist poets—Zukofksy, Reznikoff, Neidecker & others—represent only
one generation in a craft tradition initiated by modernists (Williams, Pound, Hughes, Moore,
Stein, etc) and continually practiced throughout the century, primarily by poets affiliated
with the San Francisco Renaissance / Black Mountain and Black Arts / Caribbean Nationalist
“schools” of post-war poetry. Amiri Baraka's poetic practices most centrally define the
practice, which I also find in the work of Rae Armantrout, Kamu Brathwaite, June Jordan
and Alice Notley. I do not know for certain that these writers work in the mode I am
describing, but my experience with their poems suggests to me that each does in his or her
own way.

In short, the harmolodic essay is here conceptualized as belonging to a century-long techne—

a way of doing & making that is learned “on the job” & comprises a life's work. This genre
of practice belongs to each practitioner separately, yet is shared by all. It configures a form
of the commons which has increasingly come under attack in this era of globalized capital.
Nonetheless, the craft continues; some of the methods which contribute this or that person's
contribution may have been learned in school, but even in that environment this way of
doing & making is primarily passed down from poet to poet through a process of imitation.
One reads, for example, William Carlos William's poetry & figures out how to do it
themselves. It is this practice of learning by listening that links poets & musicians. Among
cultural workers, learning by doing is a pedagogical strategy most commonly employed by
popular musicians. Many blues, jazz, folk, rock & rap performers “pick up” their trade in
churches, by means of informal lessons and on the road. A similar mode has been employed
by poets in the Whitmanian tradition.

Among contemporary jazz artists, few better represent an effort to proceed from practice to
theory than the “free jazz” musician Ornette Coleman. For many years, Coleman has
compiled notes on a yet-to-be-published theory of musical practice he refers to as
“harmolodics.” Coleman's is a practitioner's theory of how intellectual organization arises
from the spontaneity of jam sessions which directly relates to my equally practical & partially
realized approach to a mode of poetic composition that depends upon learning from a
moment's idiom:
“Harmolodics is the use of the physical and the mental of one's own logic made into an expression of
sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group. . .
harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time and phrases all have equal position in the results that come from
the placing and spacing of ideas.” Coleman - “Prime Time for Harmolodics”

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Harmolodic composition moves from “one's own logic” toward a “unison” which may be
“executed by a single person” yet which brings together different compositional elements.
The project is both intellectual--derived from “the placing and spacing of ideas”--& sensual,
being, in Coleman's case, a spontaneous, “free form” musical activity. It postulates a
dialogical relationship between formal elements of the composition, such that the performer
learns from the performance, the practice giving rise to the motions of thought which
animate it.

Aural harmony is not strictly achievable in poetry, save through multi-vocal performances
(discussed later). However, the “placing & spacing of ideas” by attending to “melody,
speed, rhythm, time and phrases” are terms easily comprehensible when viewed in relation
to the practical principles articulated by the modernists. That poetry “should aspire to
music” was as close as Pound came to dogma in his writings on imagism. In “A
Retrospect,” Pound concedes that “The term harmony is misapplied in poetry; it refers to
simultaneous sounds of different pitch,” but notes that “there is . . . in the best verse a
sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an
organ-base.” The immediate juxtaposition of poetic materials, one with the other, produces a
zone of overlapping stimulations-the “residue” of one phrase “lingering” into the next, so
that something like harmony is available to the poet as a soloist the same way it is available
to the organist. This site of overlapping claims on the reader's attention was the basis of
Pound's poetic material from some of the early poems in Canzoni (1911) through The Cantos.

Pound's approach depends upon juxtaposing “images” or “emotional & intellectual

complexes” in order to exploit the effect produced by the sliding of one unit of poetic
signification into another. This practice of arrangement was taken up by many poets,
including Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff and Robert Duncan, who employed a metaphor
of weaving in order to convey the ideological tapestry that emerges as a result. The musical
analogue frequently deployed to explain this mode is that of the fugue. This metaphor, like
that of weaving, implies a precise & well-researched collage of sonic, emotional & meaningful
elements.

An important variation on this general method stresses a less rationally plotted method of
composition; this second method was first identified by Williams & practiced to great effect
by him, as well as by Langston Hughes, Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Amiri Baraka and
others. It follows the same principle of “composition by residue,” but borrows from the
perceived & practical immediacies of jazz. Williams' XVII in Spring & All, is genetic:

Our orchestra
is the cat's nuts--

Banjo Jazz
with a nickelplated

amplifier to
soothe

the savage beast--

Get the rhythm

That sheet stuff

's a lot of cheese.

[. . . . . . . . .]

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In this poem, “equal position” is given to “melody,””rhythm,” and phrasing, which
measure & are measured by the “placing of ideas.” The poem is a sequence of boastful
statements made by the leader of a jazz band about the band; the singular idea is restated in
a number of ways. The selection of statements and their placement relative to each other is
determined by rhythm (William's “variable foot” here improvises around a traditional two-
beat line), melody (clusters of assonance & alliteration & internal rhymes organize the lines—
o's and r's in the first line, t's in the next, etc), and phrases (the idiomatic or colloquial
organization of terms-- “cat's nuts,” “to soothe the savage beast” & “Get the rhythm”
are utterances that owe their relations to the language as spoken rather than the poet's
inventiveness).

This jazz-based poetry immediately forsakes the classical qualities of the page. “That sheet
stuff / 's a lot of cheese” declares an ideological preference for the compositional practices
of African slaves over those of bourgeois Europeans; enjambment, replacing rhyme as the
primary mode of lineation, performs this ideological expression by violating core principles of
the classical mode, such as the one which states “thou shalt not break words across lines.”
Aurally, the effect is of a drawn-out syllable—a slurred utterance.

Viewed from another perspective, of course, these effects depend upon the page they boast
about getting away from. Enjambment is always & inevitably a textual effect. There is no
escaping mediation, & no truly spontaneous composition of the written text. This is true—as
far as it goes. But it goes only as far as the page itself & even when read silently the poem
exceeds these bounds. As Williams never tired of saying, poetry happens “in the
imagination.” Although mediated by the text, a poem may be immediate & spontaneous in
the imagination.

For Williams, it was the dialectic of imaginative and materialistic or actual elements which
drive the poem. Alongside the musician, the farmer is a frequently used figure for the poet in
Spring & All. The most important parallel Williams draws between farmer and poet is that
both allow their imaginations to be influenced by the immediate atmosphere in which they
find themselves. The dream of possibility--“the harvest already planted”--is revised,
moment by moment, by the “the world” that “rolls coldly away” “on all sides”--
“black orchards / darkened by the March clouds.” The totality toward which the poet
directs his thoughts in the act of composition is determined by the immediate particulars with
which he works. The farmer's thoughts are influenced by the wind; the poet's by the motions
of music and meaning he finds already there in the world.

The poet who first fully recognized how this practice could be put to essayistic ends was
Langston Hughes. Montage of a Dream Deferred is bebop poetry composed in a mode similar
to Williams on the theme stated in its title. “What happens to a dream deferred?” is the
question this poetic essay pursues, using the street life of Harlem in late 1940s as a case
study. The poem interrogates its question by listening to the language of Harlem's residents.
The practice of listening is, according to Hughes, premised on that of innovative jazz:
“this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances,
sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam
session, sometimes like popular song, punctuated by riffs, runs, breaks and distortions of the music of a
community in transition.” (Hughes, Collected Poems 387)

The opening number, “Dream Boogie,” exemplifies the bebop style:

Good morning, daddy!

Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble

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 Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a--

You think
It's a happy beat?
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

Already, the reader can perceive the two most important contributions Hughes makes to the
practice here. Like Williams, his basic units are colloquial expressions on the one hand and
traditional poetic formal elements (rhythm and rhyme) approached with a jazz musician's
deconstructionist & reconstructionist shaping. Added to this is the predominance of the
phrase “dream deferred,” which adds an additional mode of organization. In the
compositional process (which, again, must be imagined, because the imagination is the
perceptual field in which the poem operates), equal weight is given to the organization of
elements primarily organized by the music & those primarily organized by their relation to
this phrase, which is elaborated upon throughout the poem.

Hughes demonstrates the balance by means of the poem's bebop “interjection.” The
meaningful residue of the stanza which ends “Beating out and beating out a--” motivates
the subsequent line dialogically. That is, the interjection interrupts as one interrupts oneself
in conversation—the voice crosses itself in relation to an expected response. In the
imagination, this reversal depends upon the prediction of a rejoinder; such a prediction is
formulated in real time on the basis of colloquial, logical, atmospheric & gestural or tonal
patterning. Because this splice interweaves idiomatic and textual realms of attention, it
indicates the equal weight these very different approaches to the poetic experience have been
given. The poem proceeds by listening to the language of its own unfolding. For jazz
musicians, this is the kind of listening which drives the improvisations of a jam session.

Crucial to this kind of listening is a fullness of signification that is frequently missing from
poetry today. This fullness of meaning is that part of the poem I refer to as essayistic. The
poem is about something other than the subject; it does enact the drama of self-articulation,
but organizes itself, however spontaneously, around a theme. Hughes was one of the most
important cultural workers on the political left in the twentieth-century; his willingness to
write “ideologically” (I use the term here according to its most popular form of expression,
which makes it analogous to “propagandistically”) is unquestionable. His book on the
atmosphere of Harlem is essayistic because it is an exploration of a theme.

The poem analyzes its topic by reading the symptoms of its own making—where does the
immediacy of colloquial expression, which belongs to worldly atmosphere, interrupt or yield to
the abstraction of aesthetic elements which strive toward a totality of their own? We are
asked to attend to the presumptive mediation of utterances by the contexts in which they
occur. The phrase is “overdetermined” or multiply acted upon by a range of inflections
which originate within the event but are directed beyond the confines of the encounter. In
this way the actual raises itself, by performative means, toward the truth of its own being.
The idiom speaks to the poet, whose performance is also a performance for another—a
performance for the truth of the imagination, the truth of the poem. This truth is embedded
in the sphere of music, for it is toward this that the harmalodic essay strives to fit its words.

Many of Coleman's pieces proceed in the same manner. Listen to “Broadway Blues” on
New York is Now—you will hear right away how this harmolodic essay begins with an

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idiomatic expression—a phrase from a popular broadway tune—a phrase your ears know even
when your brain does not. The placing & spacing of ideas occurs around this initial phrase,
just as it does in Hughes' poem. We hear a series of multiply determined explorations away
from and around the theme; these occur in real time; the pressures of live performance
demand a certain amount of thinking on your feet, and this spontaneity demands both
sincerity to the initial notes & by each musician toward the living totality of their collective
being in the moment of composition and practice—one needs to know what one is doing in
order to compose in this way. In short, the deconstruction and reconstruction of the original
idiom occurs under conditions of practical immediacy—the need to continue to play right
here, right now. Clarity replaces ambivalence as the driving principle, & the composer
responds, sensually & ideologically at once, to the contingencies of the present. And listening
to the language in this way leads to new thoughts—by the very act of composition one's
experiences are mediated in such as way to to give rise to new forms.

As a method of composition, the harmolodic essay is practiced probably most frequently by

gangster rappers who have developed it in a parallel tradition that emerges from Black Power
poetics. Back in the 1960s, Carolyn Rodgers wrote what she called “poetic essays, otherwise
known as raps.” The rapping she, Larry Neal, Baraka, Jordan & many others were
practicing was part improvised political speech, part Black Mountain style proprioceptive
poetics. Some rappers continue the tradition today despite the prodominance of sentimental
hip-hop lyricism. Ice T and NWA were major innovators in the pop-music form, and the best
contemporary performers I have heard are Paris, Dead Prez & Boots Riley of The Coup, for
example on “Fast Cats & Bigger Fish” off the Genocide & Juice album; the song, Byronic
in register & formal idiom, recounts a day in the life of a young man “pimping the
system,” which requires living by one's wits. Riley describes an ethics based on the
improvisational negotiation of worldy atmospheres.

Like Williams', Riley's poetry is densely performative while at the same time mediating its
own relation to this part of itself. Like Hughes, Riley (who claims as a mentor Emory
Douglas, whose work strongly shows Hughes' influence) approaches his theme through the
idiom. He observes the details of everyday life by using the language of the street. As with
Hughes, the metaphoric slippage necessary to reproduce his arguments under the real-time
constraints of improvising to a melody which itself unfolds in relation to the idiom is the
dynamic that drives Riley's performances. They are not reproducible on paper & for this
reason (plus a shit-load of other reasons related to the structural racism Riley is so good at
identifying in rhyme), are not to be found in most poetry classrooms. But in the tradition of
practice I believe we should endeavor to make our own, they are among the best poems
written today.

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 RAP PROSODY AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY,
A PRELIMINARY GALLERY
After my suggestion under a post at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet weblog this past spring
that Jay-Z might be read in tandem with Louis Zukofsky in terms of their mutual
indeterminations of an English lyrical tradition (the “pentameter” post-Pound), the editors
at con/crescent magazine solicited me to write a short piece about Jay-Z. My response was
that the editors and I might propose creating a gallery devoted to contemporary poetry and
rap prosody, to which the editors responded enthusiastically.

The following collates responses to a call for various friends and colleagues whose work we
felt to be somehow determined by Rap prosody to respond to the influence of Hip-Hop on
their work. I hope it is just the beginning of contemporary poets engaging more critically
with the confluences between Hip-Hop culture, Rap music, and innovative poetries.

Thom Donovan
NYC, 8/26/2010

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 HIP HOP IS AMERICAN POETRY
Dorothea Lasky
It's big pimpin', baby.
- Jay-Z

Writers are rappers who haven't put out an album.

- Blake Butler

I. Two Personal Memories with Hip Hop

Poetry is now just realizing its indebtedness to Rap and Hip Hop. To me, it has been a slow
turn. But that is because Hip Hop has been important to me most of my life.

As a poet, it has always seemed like an obvious connection, but I guess it always isn't. I
remember in 2004, workng as a tutor in a university writing center in Boston. A fresh MFA
grad, I overheard two female creative writing graduate students there talking about an
undergraduate in one of their poetry classes who was into Hip Hop. I guess this student was
also having behavioral issues with his teacher and the two women were discussing how best
to connect. One said, you know, “God, he is so arrogant in class and he doesn't even know
anything about American poetry. He hasn't ever read Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. He's
never heard of Walt Whitman. How did he ever get into school here? I asked him what kind
of poetry he liked and he said the only thing he liked was Hip Hop. Hip Hop? But then I went
on the internet and listened to some Hip Hop songs and you know, the Hip Hop songs today
are a lot like poetry.” The other woman said “Wow, I never ever thought of that.” I
wanted to clock both of them. They were just learning this?

I don't know why I should be so self-righteous--then and now. What am I but a middle class
white woman? What connection do I hold to Hip Hop? I sometimes struggle with my love for
it and whether it is right for me to love it so much. I wonder if it is just and if I am
appropriating something that doesn't belong to me with my profound love. But I guess it is ok
—I grew up with Hip Hop. And it means a lot to me. And it is my poetry, too.

When I think of Hip Hop, I sometimes take a trip down memory lane, but that's how deep the
music goes back into me. Looking back, I didn't have a lot of friends until I was in 7th grade.
I was an odd and lonely child and I spent most of elementary school, wanting friends and all
that, but basically holed up in my room writing poems and reading. Eileen Brennan was my
neighbor and who knows if it is true, but in my mind, she was the first friend I spent a lot of
time with. I used to go over to her house after school and we'd watch movies, eat a lot of
snacks (I still like Chips Ahoy with peanut butter, after those days), and gossip about boys we
liked. Eileen had an older sister who was in high school and she had an African-American
boyfriend. Sometimes her older sister would take us to the mall in her 1985 beige Toyota.
During the rides there, we would all sit quietly in the car, listening to Hip Hop, go about our
business in the mall separately, and then ride back to our neighborhood, listening to the same
songs all over again. I remember thinking that Eileen's sister was really cool. Those car rides
are happy memories for me.

One afternoon after school, I went over to Eileen's house and she was very excited. She said
her sister had gotten a copy of a tape of a local rapper that you had to be 18 to buy. “You
are going to love this!” she said. “Oh yeah, I'm so excited!” I told her. Then we rushed to
her room to listen. She said some of the songs were really bad, so we should put a towel
under her door, so there was no chance her parents could hear. I remember putting her

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maroon bathtowel under the door diligently and then she turned on the tape. What I heard
was the nastiest music. I couldn't even believe it. We sat there listening for hours, completely
dumbstruck, to the most beautiful beats about blood, love, bodies, death, and sorrow.

I could say that that moment was a really important one in the development of my writing
voice, but I don't know that that is true. That moment was a really important one to my
development as a person, which I think might be a different thing.

II. Why Hip Hop is so Excellent: A Small Deconstruction

That first quotation up there, at the start of this note, is from Jay-Z's song, “Big Pimpin'.”
The song is funny and it is also kind of misogynistic, but I can't help it, I really like it. After
the beginning line I quoted up there, later in the song Jay-Z says:

Heart cold as assassins, I got no passion

I got no patience and I hate waitin'

That part has always been my favorite. Why? Because part of what attracts me to Hip Hop is
the sheer greatness of the persona within the songs. They are all encompassing and great, so
large and cold than they ever could be in real life. In the song, the speaker has “no
passion.” Then he explains how big pimping is about showing how much power you have.
Jay-Z has so much power (so many women, so much money, he is so famous) that he is above
passion. He has exceeded the need for passion. I think that coldness is in all great poetry.

I recently was at the PS1 Museum in Queens, NY and I saw a piece that really moved me. It
was by Rashaad Newsome and was called “The Conductor (Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi)
(2008). The installation was a music video projected in a large, darkened room. While
classical symphonies played, visuals from vignettes of popular Hip Hop videos moved
simultaneously. So, in the moments of great crescendo in the songs, I, as viewer, saw groups
of men and women dancing and pumping fists, Cristal champagne poured, money thrown
like confetti, and cars bouncing. It was another world I saw on the screen, but also a world I
recognized. Everywhere there were diamonds, shining like icy rocks filled with death and all
potentiality. Without the music behind it, the videos were no longer filled with time and
space, but were inherently on a spiritual plane. Such are the images associated with this
great American poetry.

Hip Hop songs constantly make me realize what you can do with language. They also make
me think more clearly about the concept of direct address. In a song called “Carry Out,”
Timbaland at one point says:

You look good, baby, must taste heavenly

I'm pretty sure that you got your own recipe
So pick it up, pick it up, yeah I like you
I just can't get enough I got to drive through

Cause it's me, you, you, me, me, you, all night
Have it your way, foreplay
Before I feed your appetite

And then continues to tell the listener (who he is addressing) what a good lover he will be.
What interests me about his language is the oscillation between me and you, you and me in
the line “Cause it's me, you, you, me, me, you, all night.” The song is about you and it is
about me. And the third space, the unspoken relationship between you and me, is really what
the song is about. And this direct connection between poet, listener, and relationship can

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only be achieved with the repetitive swagger of this sort of (seemingly simple) language. O,
how gloriously brutish is this syntax that Timbaland employs, which echoes Stein, Williams,
and Stevens in its American clunk.

I am not a music scholar, but I think the beauty of the sound of Hip Hop has to do with
layering and the timing of sound layers. I know that in terms of language, repetition is what
is important. The fact that lyrics can repeat 20 times or more within a song makes the songs
incantations. And what they might be incantations to—power—further ignites my mind.

Also, there is something important (and probably problematic) that Hip Hop does in
conflating power, language, and money. In most Hip Hop songs, the power of the speaker
relies on the depth of his or her language skill, which in turn, brings him or her more money
and power. I find it important, however, because I think money and poetry have an
unnecessarily bad relationship. What other poetry of the last 20 years has made millions of
listeners believe in the monetary power of language? Sure, you can argue that money is not
important to language. But money is very important to survival in 21st century America. So,
when language gets closer to survival than it has in a long time, then I think that this poetry
is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

III. Finally, Hip Hop is American Poetry: A Closing

And lastly, I love hip hop, because I love American art and Hip Hop is wholly American. Hip
hop is as American as a T-bird and an ice cream parlor (and apple pie and a sunset and all
that). It is as American as the concept of a teenager, which to me, feels completely
American. And America, in its brutishness and sweet arrogance is still a teenager. And like a
teenager, it may crash its car in a fiery heap or it may grow up to a great adult. But
whatever happens to us, Hip Hop is the music of America. And it is not adolescent––it is
ancient. And whereas beautiful America rolls on with its teenage eyes, Hip Hop is its eternal
and ancient song. And when there is no more America, there will still be Hip Hop. Because
it contains an eternal and universal sorrow within it and that's what makes it poetry. And I
am an American poet, but Hip Hop artists write poetry better than I ever will. And from one
poet to the next, those American poets will always have my respect.

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 R.I.P. KEITH ELAM
Paolo Javier
April 20, 2010

“Try me, and you'll descend into your end

Never thought it could be you
well think again my friend, my pen illuminates..”

Just heard the news about Keith Elam, aka Guru of Gang Starr's passing. This saddens me,
as Guru's lyrics and Gang Starr's music were so formative to my interest and pursuit of an
alternative education in poetry back in the day. The fact that Guru translates to teacher
(guro) in Tagalog was never lost on me then, a brown kid struggling to reconcile his passion
for Filipino history and culture with an equally fervent interest in Euro-American avant
garde writing and art. Somewhere, somehow in that mix, Gang Starr provided the crucial
tracks to sound off from.

“Just behave and be a good son -- or else

I'm bringin the noise cause most emcees are puns”
A longtime Native Tongues follower, I remember getting my Queens-loving ass handed to me
that fifth year of undergrad studies at UBC, when I slid Hakeem's copy of Hard to Earn into
my Tercel's tape deck and first gave listen to Guru's monotone brag and DJ Premier's
visionary production of hard beats grounded in the birth of cool—a bold counterpoint to all
the Parliament and James Brown-biting average rap groups selling millions of like-sounding
records at the time. Here is Brooklyn, I remember feeling about Gang Starr on those long,
rainy drives home to the borderlands of North Delta. I went on to play Hard to Earn until
the Tercel chewed it up a few days before graduation. Guru's rhymes illuminated, doomed
the fakes. They kicked more facts than paperbacks for research. They encouraged you to
pursue knowledge that's available, before your chump-style game and your punk friends
failed you. They were the chain and the star, mystical and never typical. They sustained the
true pain of wisdom.

“True indeed, I believe in takin my words far

Across the seas and deserts, through the trees and grass
And if you ain't on point, then we comin for datazz”
Be at peace, Guro.

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 HOW TO RHYME
Garrett Caples
Has hip hop influenced American poetry? I'm not sure. Or rather, I can only speak to its
influence on my own practice. In all but the most reactionary neo-formalist spheres, rhyme
had long fallen into disuse and disdain, a long slow decline beginning with modernism and
ending more or less definitively with the New American Poetry (SF Renaissance, Beat, Black
Mountain, NY School). To be sure, this evolution was necessary to the greatness of American
poetry in the latter half of the 20th Century. But is it the case that rhyme is antithetical to
genuine poetry? This question, for me, was forced by the rise late in the century of hip hop.
For hip hop displays an inventiveness with the aural aspect of language that quite frankly
exceeds the vast majority of poetry being written in America today. And rhyme, of course, is
its cornerstone. At the same, much of the aural genius of hip hop is oral, dependent on the
flow of a recorded voice in a way that usually can't quite come across on paper. Nonetheless,
hip hop's verbal inventiveness seemed to call out to poetry, or at least to me; I wanted a piece
of that action, not for parodic or pastiche purposes, not to invoke hip hop's aura or aesthetics,
but to use some of its techniques, to do something new rather than attempt something
nostalgic.
Aside from its oral aspect, which can bend the vowels of two non-rhyming words such that
they rhyme, hip hop succeeds with rhyme due to its reconceptualization of how to rhyme.
The end rhyme remains primary, of course, but within this structural arrangement, the
rapper created an expanded sense of how to move from rhyme to rhyme. If you'll excuse a
certain amount of offensiveness, consider this example by the late Mac Dre, from his song
“She Neva Seen” on The Genie of the Lamp (Thizz Entertainment, 2004):

listen: you wouldn't want to miss this

I met this bitch the night before Christmas
baby made my hit list Christmas night
she let a nigga hit by the Christmas lights
We might note the inventiveness of Dre's first rhyme, “miss this” and “Christmas,” is
characteristic of contemporary hip hop in the sense of using multiple words to make a
compound rhyme. (Dre can take this technique much further out; elsewhere, he speaks of
driving a car with a “catfish front” while getting high off a “catpiss blunt,” or, when
asked by a woman to go “grocery shop,” he tells her “no-sir-ee, Bob.”) Between the two
end rhymes, however, he inserts an off-rhyme (“this bitch”); he repeats this technique in
the third line (“hit list”), but then uses the reappearance of the rhyming “Christmas” to
transition to the next rhyme: “Christmas night” and “Christmas lights.” Note too that
the initial rhyme is somewhat foreshadowed by “listen” and somewhat echoed by “nigga
hit,” resulting in an aural structure as wrought and complicated as, say, a passage in
Andrew Marvel.

I'm not certain whether I've successfully incorporated any of this, and certainly haven't been
writing end-rhymes. But the mid-line rhymes and half-echoed ones are features I've
borrowed here and there. I've seen such moves in other poets too—say, Micah Ballard—but I
don't know whether the inspiration comes from hip hop or by some other route. In any case,
I feel like rhyme is once again available as a technique for innovative poetry, so long as the
rhyming itself is innovative. And for me, it was hip hop that opened this particular door.

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 CHOREOSOPHAGRAPHY
Chris Martin
If rap is primarily experienced as a rhythmic patterning, of equal but less acknowledged
significance is the “rhythm of shape,”1 as Edwin Denby puts it. In terms of rap, we could
say it's the shape words make as they expand and contract between each rhythmic stress. If
we take Denby's lead and extend it to consider the becoming-dance a mouth (and indeed
entire body) makes in the midst of rap, we might start by recognizing the syllables
themselves as choreographic figures leaping from one stress to the next, from one inhalation
to the next, bounding from the beginning of a phrase or line to the next pause before
rebounding once more into oral space. A rap is comprised of thousands of these exhaling
leaps, which interlock and overlap each other, consisting as they do of variable durations.

Choreographically, these different durations can be seen as different parts of the body,
working together but carrying out separate movements; what José Gil terms, “the
simultaneous superposition of multiple positions in space.”2 One shape defined by the
multiple shapes its parts make—the impact of consonants, the building moan of vowels, the
way a syllable drags like a toe in the throat before catching another shaping gust. Returning
to Denby: “You begin to see the active impetus of the dancers creating the impetus moment
by moment. They step out of one shape and into another, they change direction or speed,
they erect and dissolve a configuration, and their secure and steady impetus keeps coming”
(Denby 302). Putting aside for a moment Denby's use of “secure and steady,” this passage
beautifully illustrates the unique fluidity and flux of performative structures. It is much less
the frozen moments that compel us, but how the body moves through a putative diagram of
steps to arrive, repeatedly, at the middle of the performance, where the lived experience of
time becomes suddenly but fleetingly visible to the viewer. The structure, therefore, is what
provides for the body's ontological moment, but only through its elusion, which repeatedly
forces the performance into an oscillation between structure and improvisation until, finally,
as Deleuze wrote, “structure is rhythm.”3 That's why I find Denby's “secure and steady”
problematic. It is exactly the disequilibrium of dance that we find in its impetus; a
protracted chancing of the middle, where insecurity breeds energy and unsteadiness propels
us forward.

Shifting our attention from dance back to rap, it seems to me that the emanations of the
voice possess a double belongingness, as both music and movement. The melody of the words
is clearly musical, but to a certain degree so are the words themselves, consisting as they do
of complex rhythmic elements—plosive pops, sibilant lisps, glottal stops, etc. So words are
melodic and percussive simultaneously. And though I've spoken of the movement of words in
symbolic terms, they possess a complex range of physical forms. The actual movement of a
rap consists of seen or extensive movement—the gestural exterior body, the mouth rushing
through its convoluted array of shapes—and unseen or intensive movement—an inner dance
including the whole vocal apparatus, larynx constricting, cords shuddering with air, strange
inner protuberances of skin flapping as breath pushes into sound, lungs expanding, holding,
and slowly shrinking under the ribs. Further, there is the preparation of the nervous system
and the tensing of myriad muscles, both out of utility or anxiety, the latter being a site for
endless exploration when it comes to rap performance, though that's outside the scope of this
short description.

Spinoza says we must begin by asking what it is a body does. Dance is one answer and I'd
1 Denby, Edwin. Dance Writings. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 293.
2 Gil, José. “The Dancer's Body” in A Shock to Thought. Ed. Brian Massumi. London: Routledge, 2002. 119.
3 Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 142.

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like to propose that rap is another. One may point out that all spoken phenomena share the
characteristics I've outlined above and that's absolutely true. It's similar to the way all
movement, from the spastic convulsions of an epileptic to the museum guard shifting foot to
foot, could be construed as dance. It's exactly because this is true that rap and dance are
ontological practices; they require nothing but the body and what is given to it to do. What
is interesting to me about rap, both as a listener and as a performer, is the energy it brings
to the body. It speeds the body up, engages a certain type of aggression that has both
negative and positive facets, and unites the variegated workings of the body into a single
flow that sprouts like some barely controlled growth from the mouth. There's something
desperate about the way this energy is harnessed, or the way it harnesses the rapper. There's
an urgency that compels the rap forward, often breathlessly, as the rhythm of shape begins
to overtake the original script. The word sinks into the mouth, and then further sinks into
the throat, the scene of its sound's origin. Here is where the dance is happening, in the
esophagus. This is rap's choreosophagraphy.

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 THE CHORUS
Lauren Levin & Alli Warren
I think in many ways I respond to music as an opportunity for participation.

Music may be the way I relate the most to the concept of being ｀drunk on group joy’.

And I can hold onto the reality and the line of time it has created by re-singing and re-
experiencing it in my head.

I can attend to it; it has reality to me.

Like, a knotted rope, and you can feel back along the rope by hitching back along the words,
which bear more reality with them because they have all that background texture of vocal
character and pronunciation.

I don't know that what I respond to is performers that seem to “really feel the emotions
they're describing/performing”, but something I think I respond to the signs of a being or
character in the voice.

A sense of characteristic vocal gesture, or maybe not even that – cadence, phrasing,
attention, syllable-rolling in mouth, something.

A habit, or a way that voices come out of throats that is like body and mind and emotion. I
love the way different rappers vocalize to feel the beat and get into their lines differently
(like Biggie's Hypnotize beginning “Unh! Unh!”).

Our engagement with sound – rolling the syllables around in a mouth, remembering the
body, carrying the sound out into the world – carries so much meaning. Is meaning. And
emotion. And power.

Which is something we as poets (I shouldn't speak for you), something I as a poet am

interested in—working to undo some of the ways in which oppressive systems dominate
language. Which is a domination of our capacities to think and feel and move.

Working to allow the visceral power of words, their Unh, to take hold.

Music insists that the body participate in enunciating sounds. It reinserts the body back,
where it belongs.

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If the body of the singer is there, it is impossible to ignore this subject position. And so we
have opportunities for group participation, interaction, for the creation of group spaces.

Where does this group response come from?

That visceral response of pleasure is a life-preserving, but private response, so there's the
question of what happens next?

What can we make from the music that affects us viscerally? What kinds of (bodily,
emotional, political) meanings do we make then?

I think of the dancing scene at the end of Century of Clouds.

Would it be possible to say that part of what musicians, poets, and friends do is to re-coup
our forms of language (or components of language) as non-instrumental, non-useful,
recapture them for scatting? Or find their non-useful dimensions?

That is to say, not only putting something in, though I believe we (we as people) do that too
– how Biggie's UNH puts voice and YES into a syllable. Putting something in - also
listening, responding.

To hear what is there, or what has the potential to be there, or to become there for the next
listener. Describing to each other in a way that might affect “What kinds of (bodily,
emotional, political) meanings we can make then”.

I was watching the “Feelings” video again and thinking about Nina Simone's interpretation
of the song.

“I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that”.

While I watched, I felt like her performance was telling me: “I believe in this song. In fact,
I flood its emotion with my emotion. I respect its response, I recognize it, I add to it.

But, as part of this performance, what I'm giving you, I do not believe the conditions that
produced a situation that demanded a song like that. Let us render these conditions
impossible, in which we ｀forget all our feelings of love'”.

Something utopian and paradoxical about fully recognizing and even embodying a grief,
while refusing to allow the legitimacy of the conditions that created that grief.

She makes the song frightening by making it a vehicle in which I hear the feelings of pain
that one person can have from another. Makes it impossible to forget that other people have

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feelings.

And the question of response to them: as partner, as audience:

“Scaling up” private response, to “see what the materials build, in concert”:

I want to say I believe in simple methods of putting one's body in the situations one wants
desperately to be in (socially/economically).

And then to figure out how to make that self-determination happen across a wide swath of
people. To support, to buoy each other.

And I want to make sure I fight against the impulse to fall into a pit of self-sabotage &
hatred & disbelieve in the power of make-change. I don't want to lose the faith I have in
others, in our common sounds.

& I also want to say that a private visceral response (scaling up) is perhaps always already a
larger social one.

But we have to dig out from under all the shit.

I do not believe in the conditions that produced a situation that demands a world like this.

By not believing I mean I want to redo.

Because it's impossible to forget that other people have feelings. Just that. Nina reminds us.
The feelings resist. Despite the systematic structural forgetting, the tongue & the diaphragm
remember.

To make a life a process of just that.

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____________________________________________

Questions we asked each other:

When do you listen to music? & in what form? (vinyl, digital, radio, etc). What is your way
of imagining the emotion felt or performed by the musician, when you're viscerally
responding to something? How does music affect your romantic relationships? Do you more
fully enjoy a song whose socio-political sense of the world you agree with? How do you think
about “authenticity” in music? When you're sad, do you listen to sad music to match your
mood, or do you try to bring yourself out of it by listening to something very up? When you
are critically engaging with a song whose point of view you don't 100% agree with, how does
that work temporally? How does music affect your friendships and communities? Do you
imagine the musician's experience of performing? Could you fall in love with someone whose
music tastes wildly diverge from yours?

Songs we referenced:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypP8sMHo74Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH5ZE3N8cxU

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 NOTES ON RAP PROSODY AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Thom Donovan
I often think of Nathaniel Mackey's scholarship about the origins of Robert Creeley's lyric in
his invaluable book, Discrepant Engagement. A sudden excitement when Mackey recognizes
that Creeley's literary community wasn't very receptive to his early works—those before an
embrace and exploration of Bebop prosody. One of Mackey's arguments is that Creeley's
"nervous" syntax originates in an engagement with Bebop/Free Jazz, a Black Radical
Aesthetic Tradition (Fred Moten). I also recognize this as true—that Creeley's nervous prosody
is profoundly influenced by Black music—and often wonder something similar about Hip-Hop
in regards to my own generation's literary output.
Hip-Hop is not a strictly Black cultural form—it is obviously a hybrid. A hybrid,
originally, of South Bronx culture. African-American, Latino, West Indian. Where do you
think Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Cool Herk got all their records from? Their Dance Hall
loving parents, that's who. I read somewhere once that early DJs were so competitive with
one another that they used to corrode LP labels in bathwater so that their rivals wouldn't
know what records they were spinning, therefore not be able to steal their “breaks” (the
greatest trade secrets among early DJs). Now Hip-Hop culture is an international
phenomenon. Representative of global hybridity—a massive cut n’ mix amidst fault lines
and shifting tectonics—Hip-Hop extends through the world as an extension of diasporas, a
collective diaspora that most of the world now participates in as the result of globalization.
First primal experience of Hip-Hop: suburbs, 1980s, Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool
J. Jam-Master J knocking down walls with Aerosmith. Glam rock/Rap mash-ups.
Second primal experience of Hip-Hop: Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to
Hold Us Back. For a White, middle class suburbanite, encountering Chuck D's and Flava
Flav's lyricism driven by a Black Nationalist content was explosive for my political
consciousness. Whereby I had to think about legacies of Black Power and oppression in a
serious way for the first time. Any sense of righteousness and political conscience I maintain
largely originates in Public Enemy's albums. Yet Chuck D, whose lyrics were often shaped by
pun and wordplay, remains influential for his prosody too (e.g., “C.I.A. you see I ain't
kidding”). Righteousness and rhetorical effectiveness and pure wordplay. Deterritorialism,
Black noise, common sense and the senses of nonsense.
While I imagine other poets growing-up memorizing Shakespeare, I memorized more
Rap songs than I ever I ever did poems. Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold
us Back and Fear of a Black Planet are emblazoned in my memory. So is A Tribe Called
Quest's The Low End Theory, many of the Wu Tang Clan's solo albums, MC Lyte's “I Rock
the Party That Rocks the Body”. More recently songs (compositions?) by Notorious B.I.G.,
Jay-Z, Kayne West. Scarcely a day goes by when I don't recall a line from a Rap song. What
does this mean for my poetics—its prosody? What does this say about cultural inheritance?
Growing-up in a predominantly White town (albeit White, working class), Rap was
contact with the “other.” The other in this case being Black. What does it mean to learn by
heart the language or music of another culture? It has to change your way of thinking, your
“being,” no? In all of this is a structure of feeling. In all of this is a commonly shared
affect that does not erase histories of oppression so much as wonder how oppression becomes
diffused and understood. For many White teens of my generation, I suspect that Hip Hop/Rap
music was a way to initially begin to understand oppression. It also taught ｀us’ how to
speak and write at a certain limit or edge of language use. Rap prosody was strange but also
incredibly familiar. Rap as primal scene of encounter.

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 Late/Modernist poetry, so-called “difficult” poetry, I don't doubt is often (perceived
as) difficult for its attempt to address and give form to the experience of oppression.
Certainly this is true of the many immigrant poetries throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries. It is also true of African-American poetry and writing, which obviously emerge
from an environment in which literacy was suppressed, communication drastically limited to
the aural/oral/subtle. My own embrace of “experimental,” “difficult,” and/or “avant
garde” writing practices was, I believe, partly born from an equation of oppression with
hermeticism. To make obscure or codify one's “message” seemed important because if you
did not that content might become co-opted, used for purposes never intended or desired.
James Baldwin's message in “If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What
Is?” rings true here. For I understand Baldwin as saying that Black English emerges out of
the need to codify, and codify specifically so as to resist the repression and hegemony of
White authority. The master's house is less dismantled than negotiated through a constant
struggle to reinvent a language that is not merely other, but in constant proximity to the one
perceived to be a means of domination and subjugation. Rap “flows” therefore resist
capture by a particular kind of non/sense. The sense of the dominant tongue with which it is
in relation. And the sense, as well, of language irreducible to what it would convey as
“meaning”. Rap, like poetry, is highly communicative. Yet what it communicates is not
just said, but breathed, gestured, performed, uttered, growled, cried where the cry of now
time, redolent of the cry of slaves before the whip, is everything to both its speaker and the
speaker's audience/addressee. Rap, in other words, also brings a listener to the heart of
difference. Cultural difference and the differences that emerge through oppression,
persecution, genocide, diaspora, disastrous cultural encounter.
This leads to another problem, which is that of how we position Rap in terms of
“difficulty”. Difficult forms enfold difficult content, which is to say difficult
intersubjective contexts and cultural circumstances. Cultural experiences that would seem
unspeakable, unwriteable often times. Was Paul Celan attempting to be difficult? Was Aimé
Cesaire? Will the person escaping from genocide or political persecution today make art to be
difficult? Though difficulty can be willed, it is more often than not intended. I want to see
Rap along similar lines, in terms of common sense forming a line of flight from the capture
of dominant expression, but also as drawing upon forms extended—in fact deeply imbedded—
within a cultural context which one can find strength in faced with the intolerable and
unthinkable.
Real and/or perceived hermeticism (difficulty, obscurity, nonsensicality) are more
often than not very specific cultural expressions deriving from specific cultural forms. I don't
doubt the Jewish character of much 20th century writing considered to be avant garde.
Stein's metonymy; Objectivist “sincerity”; the discourse pragmatics of Language Writing
extending from Midrash and Jewish comedic sensibilities. Nor do I doubt the avant garde
character of much art extending from an African diaspora, even when the work is foremost
recognizable as commodity (from Blues to Jazz to Rap).
It is interesting, for instance, the substantial body of work generated by Rap artists
devoted to the right to control production and distribution—questions of property. “Eric B.
for President” by Eric B. and Rakim; the whole Strictly Business album by EPMD; songs
like “The Breaks” on A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory. Was the Rap artist's
sense of the commodity form not always grinding against, which is to say in utter tension
with, a simultaneous sense both of reparation (getting paid (back) after genocide) and non-
appropriation (that the work should ultimately be owned in common, by a community once
numbered as commodities themselves)? The turn in the 90s to a “bling”-inflected discourse
only amplifies this sense of tension, the language edge Rap creates being maximally involved
with a community's sense of itself in common while gravitating, if only in content, around a
desire to attain wealth through the creation of commodities (i.e., “ghetto fab”).
One could take up here Fred Moten's invaluable work on the “ensemble” in regards

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to Jazz in his book In the Break, or Taylor Brady's (unfortunately as yet unpublished) work
on the dialectic between improvised and recorded Jazz in terms of (common) ownership of the
music. And what of the many controversies about sampling in Rap music, the sample being
the principal mode of recent avant poetic practices. Sampling is about who is speaking and to
whom, but also the right to control and manipulate this material within a discourse that is
always also about being expropriable, exploiting, and exploited. Inasmuch as Rappers have
pioneered the legality around digital sampling, they are most avant garde, or at least most on
the edge of where common property (music, language, rhythmic expression) flickers with
commodity.
What I am saying here I hope is in the interest of recognizing Rap as vanguard both in
form, content, and especially in relation to the commodity form as it is in tension with a
commons—common rights to use and enjoyment of a particular property. Yet, in so many
ways, Rap also partakes of the most formative problems of prosody, performance, and
composition. And it is here where I would like to think about convergences between
“contemporary poetry” and Rap prosody.
Undeniably, poetry can be and often is about rhetoric/acting rhetorically. What one
can do with words; how language performs and is performed. Part of this performance
involves dialogism. The sense that one is establishing a dialogue with their audience. Also
that the audience can holler back, break the fourth wall. I think about this breaking down of
the fourth wall in the practices of Brandon Brown and Dana Ward in particular, two
contemporary writers I know to be working in very self-conscious ways after problems that
derive both from contemporary “avant garde” (or “post-avant”) poetries, but also,
perhaps even more so, Rap music and Hip-Hop culture.
So seeing Brandon read for the first time at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in the spring
of 2007, I remember him answering his cell phone in the middle of the reading. Seeing him
read another time, with Dana and Cynthia Sailers, I registered the way that he was using his
voice. It was somewhere halfway between “talking” and the “singing” of (lyrical) poetry
so that it was difficult to tell when he was addressing you/the audience and when he was
reading a poem. I love the effect this had and relate it specifically to the ease with which
MCs also move between speech and song, conversation with their audience and their “act”
(as though these interruptions weren't every bit as much a part of the act as the
rapping/reading/free-style itself).
Dana does something similar, which also has to do with the qualities of his voice, an
uneasiness about who is speaking and who is being addressed. Are you talking to me? Are
you talking or reading? Are you making this shit up as you go along? Seeing Dana read with
Brandon and Cynthia during the same reading, I recall listening to him read and thinking
how much it sounded like these recordings of Jack Kerouac from the Steve Allen show and
other various studio recordings. Suddenly Dana interrupts: “but that would be like
Kerouac”. Dana moves in a similar way in his recent chapbook, Typing Wild Speech,
specifically where he starts to do the voice of the blurb. You know that voice, right? Part
commercial, part review. In Typing Wild Speech, Dana starts to do this voice but then, once
again, he pulls back from the frame of reference: But then I would be writing a blurb.
However much “slang” enters into Dana's, Brandon's, and others’ work, it is not
about taking up the vernacular of Hip-Hop culture so much as it is about inhabiting an ethos.
And this ethos is one of interruption, dialogue, self-reflexivity, foregrounding of frames. It is,
in other words, a Modernist sensibility, however anachronistic or non-European this
modernism. One can detect a similar sensibility in performances I've seen by Rodrigo
Toscano, Judith Goldman, David Larsen, Alli Warren, Julie Patton, Dorothea Lasky, Paolo
Javier, Filip Marinovich, and others who persistently break through the fourth wall of the
poetry reading to achieve something that I find entirely original within a poetry context.
A way out of “quietude,” but also a way out from the manner of other, previous

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avant garde strategies which also worked through problems of discourse pragmatics,
virtuosity, and artifice/irony. As a matter of engagement, participation, and discourse how to
bring poetry, and particularly the performance of a poetics, to a place where one feels truly
invested in the act of listening, is positioned in such a way that they feel intimately included
in what the performer is saying? I am not talking about someone “baring their soul”, but
someone, in a way, baring the soul of address itself—how one listens, how one attends, how
one feels included. I think this is something Rap can get at, and I also think this is what
some of the most interesting writers working today are also getting at.

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 IT'S SO EASY
Dana Ward
This has to be easy or it won't get done.

Another glacier of text inhospitable & trying to be both affable & dense.

Well I'll lineate it then that's pretty easy.

I have always confused weight with marvels & disgust in myself.

It is easy for me to feel fat when I am not.

It is easy for me to hate the thought of being fat how superficial though it's hard, impossible
indeed

to allow this nuroses to move beyond me & implicate other bodies

which I'll tell you I love in an easy & open Whitmanic sort of way for their variousness
yet about myself I play mean with all of the shapes I have been over these my easy years.

Lame. Fucking

lame. But it's easy to be stilled in familiar disgust

as if, in the dream, the house had no other rooms, & contended, & contentment

hard to come by is easy to never want to leave

even if to stay there is grim.

I am writing this then because I need to write something easy.

First, I am writing it for Thom, who invited me to write something.

He's editing a section on hip-hop, poetics, & prosody, for a magazine.

He knows me so he knows that it's kind of easy

for me to say all sorts of things about that.

Too, I am writing it specifically to flesh out my book it's almost done.

The book is called 'this Can't Be Life'.

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Reading it this morning I found it somewhat wanting

both in its overall arrangement & in some of its content specifically.

It's a book about mortality, & politics, & daily life, & it is, in staying true to those things

quite repetitive. It is hard

for me often times to know where life ends

& art begins, an old question, as are the fraught interrelations

of those other aspects I mentioned so I guess it is an elemental book.

Is it too easy to tell you outright?

It's hard for me in one respect to do so for I like flirtation as far as it goes though I'm not
subtle.

On the other hand its easy for me to ask this question--

What good would come from any Hide & Seek?

Hide & Seek is a perilous game for a child.

The world, at that stage, is enormous, & the children who excel at disappearing

are often times never found again.

Its easy for me to think then of Guy Debord

who conceived of himself, & his friends as lost children.

After their transformative adventures the world was to be bereft of means

by which to integrate their roving orphanage for work.

Naive, bittersweet, ingenious or all three indeed this bracing tactic

calls to me now & what it says in a spurned voice come-hither makes me leery & thrilled.

It is easy for me to repeat my consternation about it

to think of it endlessly, daily, in fact my book glancingly addresses it some.

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It addresses it directly.

It repeats itself because of its relation to elemental things.

It is hard for me, now, in their midst to ever think of writing otherwise

much how Kevin Killian said once he began to write about Kylie Minogue he just couldn't
stop.

I will never stop writing about Jay-Z ever.

I like to lay on the floor & just think about that dude!

One day I will stop this book & start another.

Not long after I stop they'll be a cradle.

It is hard for me to take the cloying feelings I have when doing such self-referential writing.

This piece is especially hard to that end because even by my standards it is pretty self-
involved.

The ease of this piece finds its floor in conventional tedium

its ceiling in a nuanced & immediate self-appropriation by which it positions itself

in a challenging confection of contemporary writing

where it is easy to find galvanic solidarity sometimes & other times

things feel very hard, & very weird, & I start of think of like, animal tensions.

So this has to be only things I feel like I forgot somewhere else in the text.

I should remember my own ambivalence about the word text, how much it's like my weight.

In one way I hear it very beautifully & primly, mystic shot through with mild holiness or
something Kabalistic, polyamorous

something constellating in time.

Sometimes I hear in it this antiseptic thing & see a pair scissors floating embalmed in
formaldehyde in text.

People are barbers.

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People are barbers.

The easy allure of frozen pizza never ends.

What's easy?

Nothing.

Everything.

Horses wonder who you are.

It's easy for me to sit in this room while the cat sleeps in the sun & consider the word text for
an hour.

If it wasn't easy I would get up from my desk, & go smoke, & my chest would stiffen & my
heart race some more.

If it wasn't easy the easier thing would be pacing in the overgrown lawn.

It isn't easy to mow when it's tall.

It's never been easy for me to push those blades over flowering grass tops I guess.

It's a challenge because if you read too much Whitman when yr. young yr. sublimated love of
that will change you.

Even this though of course becomes difficult.

I do get up to smoke.

It's easier than ever though I'd love to quit love to live longer and produce more texts.

It is easier for me to call them poems call anything that easy then to paper over real
distinctions.

What is easiness then?

The absence of labor, or labor undertaken effortlessly, the pride of place in rap of one's
prosodic ease.

I admire that.

It's the elaboration of struggle after having, in one sense, overcome.

It's like it's just there it's just sitting there, shining.

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Lenin said the Bolsheviks found power lying in the street & simply picked it up.

That's expressive though we know it wasn't really that easy.

It's hard to imagine revolution being easy.

Though it's easy to imagine it is obviously necessary.

It was easy for Lenin to pick up state power because that's what he wanted to seize.

It's hard though because what if one doesn't want power at all.

What if, while hoping to find something sitting in the street, the thing you hoped to easily
find

was some sign, some indication, that power itself had been destroyed.

It is hard to know what that looks like.

It is hard when one follows any thought, & for me, it's easy to admit that any thought,
intimate,

comedic, erotic, or whatever

begs for some interrogation to that end I mean a little

just a little easy searching through its contents for the street where one sees

whatever one thinks one might see of that trace & I'll tell you its hard

to even hold onto this poise that is blurrier effervescence straining after

a difficult theory of itself in present custom made domestic something kissed me on the
cheek.

Sometimes, & this is really hard, it simply seems

our oppositional posture is a lab where dominion invents its vaccines.

Sometimes the shot leaves a scar.

It's not easy to know what I think of those marks

when I seem them on my body, in the city, in the air

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or on the computer with all my dead friends.

The easiest thing is to repeat oneself forever, or to become righteous, or intractable in

everything.

What's hard about this for me, in a prosodic sense is, I can't find the lilt, & that makes me
feel like I've lost myself.

That's rough in one sense, &, in another, kind of sexy.

It's easy to remember that 90% of the world's resources are controlled by 1% of its
population.

But it's hard as a butterfly to know what we have done.

It's easy for me to write a line like that having read my Jack Spicer early too.

Neither as early, nor as easily at first as I first read Whitman.

Someone said to me once that Spicer is easy for the young & for the old but hard for those in
neither group to really love.

It's easy for me think about that I've never forgotten it.

It's clear though, writing this, that easiness is predicated mainly on labor.

On someone doing something for you.

Predicated on you, I, whoever not having to do anything ever.

The easiest thing in the world is to just sit there & take it.

It's easy too to think you're not doing that to think you're doing something else.

Jay-Z just walks in the booth & there it is.

It's so easy for him he doesn't even write it down.

Again, here's the absence of labor.

Yet he often calls this 'putting in work'.

His Martians are easy.

They're not the evasive, parsimonious type that Spicer lectures on.

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These Martians are 1% of the world's population.

Jay communes with them, & this communion is indelible & troubling & realist in a certain
kind of way.

That 1% percent seems more alien to me that Spicer's Martians.

On the other hand they're easier to picture.

It's easy to know who they are in a way.

Bill Gates, how easily his face swims into view, he's a celebrity I guess.

It's hard for me to picture the others though they're there.

Though, because it's easier for me to desire to seem totally & completely contemporary

& harder to have to feel dated a little, or a little out of step

that's too hard to feel

while it's hard as well to feel on top of it all

or say what sounds like what someone who is on top of it all says

well it's easy to see in that formulation how figures of dominion appear

how easily swagger is often mixed up in brutal privilege

as too, it is often hard won--

the construction or ingenious fabrication of someone's seemingly unlimited coversantness

with ease

How much swagger do I want?

So fucking much, all of it, all the time, easy.

It's too hard to tell you the amount it's so much.

Because it is more than expression can hold.

I don't want to do anything with it except write really well

where it can be turned to vulnerability & passion

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& I'll never have to struggle over poems I'll just sit down, &. . .

BAM!

there they'll be.

Jay style.

Weezy.

Ready-mades, Warhol. . .

various modes of modernity & post-modernity are enabling in this respect

when it gets too hard to live in service to one's Martians.

Apropriation is easy it's language in the street, in the ether-net, contrived, & it too

has a spectral & Martian-y life

if one cultivates a mind & critique that might max out the frame

of its reception in our life as lived this unknowable resistance metabolized

in fights with complacence.

To know how we live everyday is very hard.

It's easier though because others are real, they are there

this solves nothing though it changes everything completely if taken as the only real place to
begin.

What's tough for me to think about, though easy by virtue of its constancy is to think about
being a parent.

It's easy to know I'm going to be one.

My partner is pregnant, & barring something awful, the child will born.

Society will tell me with the greatest of ease that I'm a father.

It is super fucking hard for me to think about being a father & I don't want to be one if the
easy definitions of that obtain at all.

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My father died when I was young so its hard for me to even know what it's like to have one
around the house of whatever.

Joubert writes "There is a class of society where pious children do not know their parents are
mortal. They have never even dared think about it."

That absence of daring, the piety related indeed to class but too to the warm conditioning &
blindness love nurtures

in children thus kept from the mortal fact that made it hard

so hard, as hard as really dying, to accept, at eight, my fathers mortality the world I knew,
whole

became a fragmentary place of emotional precarity & this for me is easy to think of--

Stanley says that Duncan writes "Children's lives are fragmentary. They don't know what's
going on. Episodic"

Though in my experience inverted.

Things were whole & set in place, & then broke, & that breaking, which through the piety

by which I was delivered with ease into the love-rich fact of my daily life

jolted open into pieces, & feeling, built for me as a blissful deluge

revealed its quelled floods to that child.

I would say that sudden aridness made me a poet.

It is the hardest thing in the world for me I think, to consider

as one who has taken only marginal care of my body

to think that I too might die when my child is young.

That I might turn them into a poet.

Through the world's machinations it is easy to have such bleak & guilty dreams

as they are easily drawn from the better part of care though they often are hard to
distinguish.

Death is the original readymade because it appropriates you.

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Then the question of how one might max out the frame, make it bend away from easy
violence & oppression

can the mortal fact be given to a child in some way that wouldn't consecrate the
monstrousness that such a thing suggest?

It seems incredibly hard.

Look how tall all those over-grown tips of grass are

how easy it is to feel in them for Whitman's beard, for Marx's beard, for Santa Clause's beard

all those long, white, 19th Century beards

so enormous, so easy,

it looks like they just let them grow.

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 GLAM ROCK & PUNK ROCK: THE 'GROTESQUE' ANATOMY
OF AN ARTISTISTIC, EROTIC AND TRANSGENDERED SUB-
CULTURE
Matthew Landis
The risks and sufferings of the modern transgendered artistic community also provide us with
a tragic and yet provocative example. In cultural and fashion history, the movement of glam
rock was especially powerful in confronting a rigid structure of gender identity with radical
cross-dressing, androgyny, and transsexualism. One notable example is David Bowie. Bowie's
notoriously androgynous stage characters Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and even the dandy-
like Thin White Duke embodied a rebellious sexual energy and gender identity. Bowie in his
performance and lyrics dwelled in the in-between, insisting upon being allowed to explore the
full continuum of gender. Throughout his career he has appeared as himself in a typically
masculine (though highly stylized) fashion and in full blown androgynous drag. The covers of
his early albums depict him as a thin waif and a strikingly girlish figure. On the covers of
Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane his appearance is strictly androgynous and his personality is
seemingly morphological: an effeminate/androgynous man playing raucous rock and roll with
highly sexual and confrontational lyrics. In the song “Rebel, Rebel” off of the album
Diamond Dogs, he sings of the glam rock scene of which he was a pioneer and the awkward
and difficult lifestyle that accompanied it.

You've got your mother in a whirl/ She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl
[ ]/Rebel Rebel, you've torn your dress/Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess
/Rebel Rebel, how could they know?/ Hot tramp, I love you so

- David Bowie, Rebel, Rebel

Just in these few lines we are confronted with the reactions of family and the confrontation
between one's peers in the glam community and one's own self-identity (an apparent hold-
over from the conflicts between mainstream standards, sub-culture standards, and the
aesthetic/ethical standards carried over from dandyism of self-creation and fierce
individualism). Later in the song, he mentions the drug use prevalent amongst this
community of transgendered individuals, a problem still prevalent in the community today
according to much of the psychological literature. These themes are tied-in directly to the
aesthetic and musical culture of glam on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust in the song
“Lady Stardust” in which the main character, a ridiculed glam boy, is referred to using
both the pronoun he and the title “Lady”.

People stared at the makeup on his face/ Laughed at his long black hair, his
animal grace/ The boy in the bright blue jeans/ Jumped up on the stage/
And lady stardust sang his songs/Of darkness and disgrace

- David Bowie, Lady Stardust

In a darker vein, forerunners of the glam movement, the Velvet Underground, and their
songwriter Lou Reed, were notorious for their graphic lyrics about heroin use,
sadomasochism, and deviancy. Part of this “deviancy” is actually a touching song (“Candy
Says”) about Reed's experiences with his close friend Candy Darling, an M to F (male to
female) transsexual actress, prostitute, and performer in late 60's/early 70's Greenwich
Village (and a member of Warhol's factory). This song documents his impressions of Candy's
journey towards self-creation and the suffering she endured (“Candy says/I've learned to

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hate my body”); a journey cut short when Candy died due to cancer she developed through
hormone use. Candy is a character in a later song by Reed “Take a Walk on the Wild
Side”from his solo Transformer album as well. The song tells the tale of the many
“deviants” he met in Warhol's factory: homosexuals, transsexuals, drag queens, cross-
dressers.

One of the most radical and striking examples of the glam/punk movements challenge to
homogenized gender identity is Wayne (Jayne County). With her band the Electric Chairs she
wrote aggressive punk rock with titles like “Transgendered Outlaw” and “Man Enough to
Be a Woman” (which would become the title of her autobiography). She began as a member
of the Factory when she was pre-operative (and known as Wayne) and worked in the theater
scene of Greenwich Village in the early 60's. Inspired by glam bands like the New York Dolls
and David Bowie and the aggressive music of Iggy Pop and the MC5, she started her own
band and quickly became one of the top draws at the punk/glam scenes home bases: CBGB's
and Max's Kansas City. After the punk movement petered out, she traveled and worked as a
prostitute, eventually earning enough many to pay for sexual reassignment surgery
(becoming Jayne). She still performs with the Electric Chairs, her band, and is a performance
artist as well. She still confounds people today by presenting as a female and incorporating
masculinity into her identity through her music (often Sticky Fingers era Stones' styled
vamped up blues rock), posturing, dress, and attitude. Despite the masculine overtones of her
art and personality, she still remains and insists on being recognized as a female.

What the glam and punk movement demonstrates is an aggressive reaction to the repression
of self-constituted gender identity. All of these people (Lou Reed, Bowie, Jayne County, the
New York Dolls, etc) were attempting to carve out a niche in a world intent upon exclusion.
Reed's parents subjected him to electro-shock therapy and he was (like most glam/punk
artists) a notorious drug user with a fetish for speed—his rebelliousness was only matched by
his morbidity; Bowie was perpetually a topic of gossip columns regarding his sexuality and
often portrayed as a freak or deviant and often lived up to the standard due to his cocaine
induced paranoia; Jayne/Wayne County was simply too radical to ever be mentioned in the
mainstream media—a former prostitute and drag queen who underwent a sex change is
simply too extreme of a phenomenon to be represented and recognized. The glam rock and
punk movement was seen as a freakish phenomenon. However, it is precisely this attitude the
community was reacting against. Glam rock, popularized by artists like Bowie, T-Rex, and
the New York Dolls and later exploited by groups like Kiss and Aerosmith, began as a
movement to violently counteract the dispossession of transgendered individuals and other
“freaks” and mount a call for recognition.

Glam rock can be said to dwell in the in-between because it did not resort to simply inverting
sex roles or aestheticizing their project (as the dandies did). Surely, there was an aesthetic
component (Bowie's stage performances in the 1970's were notoriously theatrical and lavish),
but gender was chosen as the medium of performance. In the face of repression, many of
these iconoclastic artists highlighted for the first time (certainly in mainstream culture) the
constructedness of gender as well as the repression which the binary structure accorded to it.
The in-between of glam rock was non-existent and did not have a distinctly counter-culture
voice. The glam rock movement attempted to make space for such a discourse to take place.
It provided an area for the arrival of the event of dialogue. More than iconoclastic, glam rock
and punk rock invented a new iconography: the trans iconography; one of the first systems of
art and representation to give a voice to explicitly trans individuals and issues in popular
culture—consequently, glam rock and punk rock were far from popular and often repressed
or homogenized at best in the mainstream media. However, this does not take away from the
significance of glam's cultural protest. If anything, glam's significance as a "gender fucking"
or subversive LGBT movement is highlighted by even more aggressive tendencies exhibited in
punk. Patti Smith's sacramental portrait of male on male rape and of adolescent sexual

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confusion in "Land" highlights a fundamentally Rimbaudian strain in punk poetics: the
beatification of what is ugly and depraved.

The boy was in the hallway drinking a glass of tea

From the other end of the hallway a rhythm was generating
Another boy was sliding up the hallway
He merged perfectly with the hallway,
He merged perfectly, the mirror in the hallway

The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run,

but the movie kept moving as planned
The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker,
He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny
The boy disappeared, Johnny fell on his knees,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started crashing his head against the locker,
started laughing hysterically

When suddenly Johnny gets the feeling he's being surrounded by

horses, horses, horses, horses
coming in in all directions
white shining silver studs with their nose in flames,
He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses.
Do you know how to pony like bony maroney
Do you know how to twist, well it goes like this, it goes like this
Baby mash potato, do the alligator, do the alligator
And you twist the twister like your baby sister
I want your baby sister, give me your baby sister, dig your baby sister
Rise up on her knees, do the sweet pea, do the sweet pee pee,
Roll down on her back, got to lose control, got to lose control,
Got to lose control and then you take control,
Then you're rolled down on your back and you like it like that,
Like it like that, like it like that, like it like that,
Then you do the watusi, yeah do the watusi
Life is filled with holes, Johnny's laying there, his sperm coffin
Angel looks down at him and says, “Oh, pretty boy,
Can't you show me nothing but surrender?”
Johnny gets up, takes off his leather jacket,
Taped to his chest there's the answer,
You got pen knives and jack knives and
Switchblades preferred, switchblades preferred
Then he cries, then he screams, saying
Life is full of pain, I'm cruisin' through my brain
And I fill my nose with snow and go Rimbaud,
Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud,
And go Johnny go, and do the watusi, oh do the watusi
- Patti Smith, Land

Smith's ecstatic sexual imagery (her leering, rhythmic paean to a young girl "humping on a
parking meter" in her re-interpretation of the Them's "Gloria") is rife with violence and
conflict because it seeks to not only interrogate and explore sexual difference, but to destroy
the very concept of sexual normalcy. The symmetry between the anonymous boy "driving it
deep in Johnny" and Johnny's revelation of an array of blades beneath his jacket makes this
rape or at the very least rough, violent sexual encounter mirror the logic of conquest. But the

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conquest sought for here is not purely sexual or based on some dimension of social power, but
rather, a conquest of self. Johnny's reaction, his lashing out, his fierce self-assertion, his
manic energy is a celebration of his confusion and ambiguity (notice, NOT ambivalence). His
supplication to his anonymous "lover", is not a sign of weakness; it's not a sign of anything. It
is a liminal, undetermined moment. We're not even sure what to call it. All that we know is
that when prompted ("can't you show me nothing but surrender"), Johnny is anything but
submissive. Johnny, the "pretty boy" is a weapon. His sexual virility is a weapon, an
unleashing of great power and energy. It is telling that Smith, a woman who on the cover of
the album Horses is dressed in nearly totally androgynous drag, glorifies the sexual potency
of this male adolescent through a homosexual encounter. It turns the myth of rock n' roll on
it's head (the invocation of the watusi and other popular dances. Smith confounds the
expectations of rock history by not playing up her girlishness a la 60's girl groups (who
ironically enough, provided ample fodder for the New York Dolls brand of Stones' inspired
"cock rock"), by diving head first into avant-garde performance poetry, tough three chord
rock and roll, and a decidedly twisted take on the rock n' roll archetype (inherited from the
blues) of male sexual conquest. More than a shocking lyrical turn, it is a statement of
feminine rebellion and a celebration of the spectrum of male sexuality. It challenges not only
the mainstream cultural understanding of women in rock n' roll, but it undermines the
notion that homosexuals = sissies. It is Johnny, the passive agent in this homosexual
encounter, decked out in a leather jacket, wielding switchblades (a la the "leader of the
pack"). "Land", as an artwork is an attack on sexual mores and a fittingly Rimbaudian
gesture, eschewing mainstream stereotypes of women and homosexuals and dismantling the
iconography and standards of the effeminate, flaming gay male in one fell swoop. One might
even say Patti Smith pointed the way toward a new, tougher dandyism.

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John J Courie, II

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BIO-GRAPH

Bem, Greg – recently spent a two-year stint in the norther reaches of

Philadelphia serving as a mentor to high school students and as a
member of the poetic community. After growing up in southern
Maine, he lived in a bohemian new-academic life in Rhode Island.
Philadelphia's bombed out landscapes got to him, so he moved to
Seattle where he lives under the willow trees and writes poems about
Seattle (seattlepoems.wordpress.com) and about New York
(ghostny.wordpress.com). In the fashion of and out of rspect for the
greatest naysayers we dream to live with, a confirmation: idiocy,
spoken word, dumpster beautification projects, and coded satellite
streams.

Caples, Garrett – is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader and

Complications. He's an editor at City Lights Books and a
contributing writer to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His
pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English,
was recently published by Wave Books.

Cebula, Travis – lives and writes in Colorado. He holds an MFA in

Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. His poems, essays,
stories, and photographs have appeared internationally in various
print and online journals. He is also author of three chapbooks and
one full length collection of poetry, Under the Sky They Lit Cities,
forthcoming in late 2010 from BlazeVOX Books.

Courie, John J – is 33 he has a degree in computer science and hates

all art.

DeBoer, Nicholas A – is alive. At least ey is considers the sense of it.

Ey lives in Fishtown, Philadelphia. Ey has a siamese cat, named
Alias, who likes eir sometimes, but cuddles nicely. Ey has had work
published in Fact-Simile, Bombay Gin, In Stereo Press, others. Ey
is currently shopping eir manuscript around. It's a good one. It's
called The Singes and intends to be in your head like the bass line in
Daytripper.

Donovan, Thom – lives in New York City, where he edits Wild Horses
of Fire (whof.blogspot.com) weblog and co-edits ON Contemporary
Practice. He is a participant in the Nonsite Collective
(www.nonsitecollective.org) and a curator for the SEGUE reading
series. Currently he is working on a collection of critical writings,
Sovereignty and Us: Critical Objects 2005-2010, and on the Project

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 for an Archive of the Future Anterior (with Sreshta Rit Premnath).
His book The Hole is forthcoming with Displaced Press this fall.

Dooley, Denise – lives in Roger's Park, Chicago. Her chapbook, Drum

Tops, will be released this fall from con/crescent press.

Javier, Paolo – is the new Queens Borough Poet Laureate, and the
author of two full-length collections of poetry and four chapbooks,
most recently Megton Gasgan Krakooom (Cy Gist Press). He edits
the language arts journal 2ndavepoetry.com, and lives with his wife
in Queens.

Landis, Matthew – is a poet, musician, and songwriter/produce from

the Philadelphia area. He is a graduate of the Richard Stockton
College of NJ & the University of Pennsylvania's MLA program,
where he studied poetry/poetics & critical theory. His first, self-
published chapbook Like a Moth from His Dead Mouth was recently
released and his poems & essays have appeared or will be appearing
online/in-print in places such as Critiphoria, Try Magazine, Literary
Kicks & The Apiary Corporation. He is a member of the New
Philadelphia Poets and runs the Jubilant Thicket reading series with
Debrah Morkun & Sarah Heady. You can read his block at
http://abecedarianfx.blogspot.com.

Lasky, Dorothea – is the author of Black Life and AWE, both out from
Wave Books. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including
Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She currently
lives in New York City. She can be found online at
www.birdinsnow.com

Levin, Lauren – was born in New Orleans, raised in New Orleans,

lives in Oakland. A chapbook, Keenan, is forthcoming with Lame
House Press. Recent work is findable in a chapbook Not Time
(Boxwood Editions) and in Try!, Realpoetik, Sal Mimeo, Mirage
#4/Period(ical), Rabbit Light Movies, labday2010.blogspot.com, and
Elective Affinities. With Jared Stanley and Catherine Meng, she
edits Mrs. Maybe.

Lucy, Patrick – lives in Philadelphia where he is a member of the New

Philadelphia Poets. Recent work has appeared in elimae and Gulf
Coast. He is the author of the chapbooks LIVE FIELD: GROWTHS
1-5 (_Catch/Confetti) and WILLIAM (con/crescent, forthcoming)

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Martin, Chris – is the author of American Music, recipient of the
Hayden Carruth Award and published by Copper Canyon Press. His
second book, Beaming Weather, will be published by Coffee House
Press in April of next year. In addition to teaching learning
challenged kids, he is the curator of Futurepost, and a performer of
choral rap. This spring he will work in collaboration with five
choreographers to present a translation of his long poem, “The
Small Dance” at the Poetry Project.

Regan, Matthias – helped to organize the Next Objectivists, the

world's only free, autonomous writing workshop dedicated to the
poetry & poetics of the outsidereal. He is a key holder at the Mess
Hall in Chicago and professor at North Central College. He's the
author of numerous little chapbooks, pamphlets & broadsides,
including The Most of It, Death Blossoms, Huckabee Goes Electric &
Oil Slick Rainbows (forthcoming).

Townsend, J – has poems and essays published or forthcoming in

Bombay Gin, The Cultural Society, Fact-Simile, Wheelhouse, Volt,
Elective Affinities, & Jacket. With Nicholas DeBoer he edits
con/crescent press, a chapbook publisher & print magazine focused
on discursive essay / creative non-fiction. He writes and performs
with the New Philadelphia Poets & lives in E. Kensington, Phila.

Ward, Dana – is the author of Typing 'Wild Speech' which is out from
Summer BF Press. He lives in Cincinnati, hosts readings &
publishes under the Cy Press banner, & works as an advocate for
adult literacy at the Over-the-Rhine Learning Center.

Warren, Alli – 's recent chapbooks include Well-Meaning White Girl

(Mitzvah Chaps) and Acting Out (Editions Louis Wain). Alli lives in
Oakland and co-curates the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand.

Weiss, Heidi - is an exhibiting artist currently attending Cranbrook

Academy of Art as a Master of Fine Art Candidate. She also holds a
Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts in Painting from Western
Michigan University. Her work deals with phobias both personal
and universal, and the ways in which they are exploited through
mass media and consumerism. www.heidiweiss.com

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(55)
con/ crescent p r e s s
Nicholas A DeBoer J Townsend

Philadelphia, PA
www.concrescentpress.org
concrescentpress@gmail.com