Poetry and Pop


Page 3



 1 |
 2 |
 3 |
 4 |
 5 |
 6 |
 7 |
 8 |
 9 |
 10 |
 11 |
 12 |
 13 |







The poems in Sweet Nothings come largely out of what has been
for the last twenty years (with some notable exceptions) the dominant style
in American poetry: plain-spoken, image-bound, a blend of the narrative
and contemplative. Many poems are set either in rural surroundings or in
the suburbs. A typical poem unfolds like the following ("Hully Gully") by former U.S.
Poet Laureate, Rita Dove:






Locked in bathrooms for hours,

daydreaming in kitchens

as they leaned their elbows

into the shells of lemons,



they were humming, they were humming

Hully Gully. Summer lasted



a long time; porch geraniums

rocked the grandmothers to sleep

as night slugged in, moon riding the sky...







Because of its traditional status as an intellectual art, poetry that
responds to pop music raises -- for many of the academic poets who populate
Sweet Nothings -- conceptual and formal problems. For these writers, a central
question is how to mark out a "high" literary space for a
"popular"
musical subject. Different writers answer that question with different
strategies,
but in a poem like "Hully Gully," rock music is largely a generic
pop-culture reference that serves to certify the poem's historical authenticity.
The poem's real attention is elsewhere -- summoning, in romantic language,
childhood and family life during the 1950s and '60s. 






 Click here for a brief 
 au. sample (230k) 
of Rita Dove reading her work







Most of the poets represented in Aloud, on the other hand, don't
seem especially interested in the high/low divide. The poems in this volume,
most of them "spoken
word" texts, take their literary cues not from the mainstream
of contemporary American poetry, but from the margins. Often set in the
city, the poems are not at all self-conscious about borrowing from various
non-literary popular styles: rap music, primarily, but also stand-up comedy,
evangelical speeches, and television info-mercials. The question for these
writers is one that Simon Frith raised a few years back: whether (and how)
literature can occupy the same territory as pop music. Here's the first
stanza of Willie Perdomo's poem "Reflections on the Metro North, Winter
1990:"




Saturday night


I'm on the 8:40


to New Rochelle


and points North


I'm running away


with my woman


running away from


El Barrio, New York City


Fast playing games


symbolic names


Slick Rick


Big Money D.


Hey you!


Who me?


Yeah, you.


On the green-- WALK


On the red--DON'T WALK


Stop! Freeze! Don't run.


Cuz you might get shot


for looking like


the wrong Black man...











 1 |
 2 |
 3 |
 4 |
 5 |
 6 |
 7 |
 8 |
 9 |
 10 |
 11 |
 12 |
 13 |








Back to the First Page
On to the next page