Poetry and Oral Tradition/Literature and Hip-Hop: Some thoughts on Paul Flores

OK. Paul S. Flores is bringing together a lot of ideas for me, things I have been thinking about and writing about here, things that concern me in my poetics and poetic work. I am so glad to have gone to see him speak last night at USF. The title of his talk was THE LEGACY OF AUTHENTICITY: From the Anti-establishment Beat Movement to the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop, and as per Aaron Shurin’s introduction of Paul, one of the reasons for this talk was a conversation between these two regarding the links between The Beats and Hip-Hop — who are the poets who fill in the gaps between post-WWII anti-conformity and the urban movement arising out of the 1980’s Bronx street culture. Ambitious talk, as Paul also discussed his beliefs regarding the chasm between the written/”academic” poetry of MFA  programs and his concern with oral tradition.

Oscar has a good write-up here, as well as video of Paul reading from Saul Williams’ The Dead Emcee Scrolls. A substantial part of Paul’s talk entailed linking Ginsberg’s Howl to this Williams book. It’s apparent in the reading of the texts side by side, the similarities in structures/construction and intent. The rest of the talk was that gap filling from Ginsberg to Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka to the Black Arts Movement, to the Last Poets, to Sonia Sanchez, to Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Paul talked about the construction of the choreopoem and Jessica Hagedorn’s performance work here. So it’s clear for me that I have many ways into a discussion on “academic poetry” and Hip-Hop, as I was telling Aaron afterward that Shange and Hagedorn are a couple of my earliest and strongest influences and reasons why I believed in my own ability to find a career as a poet.

There was much talk about Hip-Hop as representing where you are from, representing your legacy. There is so much power here, as Hip-Hop is a culture, and it is a way of life. It gives you, or it is in itself the power to say the unspeakable, the shit that needs saying that others are afraid to speak, and afraid to hear. As well, in Paul’s discussion of the turntable as instrument, I think of creating new uses for old things; this is innovation in art. Oscar and I talk about that, and the graffiti as using what canvases you have available to you to create art. Again, here has always been additional ways into Hip-Hop for me as a poet.

Still, and I am glad I mustered up enough courage to actually speak: I told Paul I want to be down with Hip-Hop, for the reasons stated above. I believe hardcore in those reasons. But the misogyny just won’t let me be down with Hip-Hop. I told him I don’t know what I am supposed to do about this. I asked him, how do I deal with this? And it’s not just the misogyny in what he calls “candy” Hip-Hop, the appropriated, profit-making/lucrative, tailored for mass consumption Hip-Hop, the P. Diddy and entourage on a yacht Hip-Hop.

What I did not say is that to be relegated to bitches and ho’s is to be relegated to voiceless commodified breeding bodies, but it’s true: if you are a “ho,” your body can be bought. And a bitch is like breeding stock. In response to my question, Paul cited the work of Sarah Jones and Aya de Leon as two strong women in Hip-Hop theater and/or Hip-Hop poetry who confront the misogyny head on. Sarah Jones’ “your revolution will not happen between / these thighs,” is a defiant rejection of woman as body-object. Aya de Leon articulates her discontent with MC’s who in call and response, tell the men to shout “Fight the Power,” and tell the ladies to scream. Scream? That’s it? Why don’t the ladies also get to fight the power? Paul acknowledged that it’s a very slow process to expose and undo the misogyny, and told us that to take this gang/street culture from which Hip-Hop emerged and to play it out on a world stage, the misogyny in that original source is also amplified.

Here is where I feel like the feminazi hater for taking such a powerful political and cultural movement and catalyst, and then going about sullying it. But my question ignited other young (diverse) women in the room to also talk about that misogyny, their feelings about it, their experiences of it. Another woman said, well let’s also talk about the misogyny in the Beats, since you are talking about the Beat movement as a predecessor to Hip-Hop. Let’s talk about the invisibility of women there, i.e. let’s not let the Beats off the hook. Diane di Prima, for example, didn’t have the cultural freedom free of consequence to be on the road with these liberated and enlightened trippers and tweakers.

Subsequently, we got to talk about Hip-Hop and homophobia, how popular MC’s (Busta Rhymes, Mos Def) couldn’t handle being asked about the place of gay MC’s. For the documentary Paul cited, these folks didn’t know how to answer that question. So I want to know what this means for Hip-Hop’s potential for liberation. The good news about them not being able to answer this question about gay MC’s is that, whatever they really believe deep down inside, they don’t come right out and say that gay folks don’t have a place in Hip-Hop and that they acknowledge the necessity of the question, that they can’t dismiss it.

Acknowledged afterward by a couple of the young women in the audience, and by Aaron Shurin for asking that question, and that Paul gave my question and the audience’s follow-up questions serious attention, thought, and response yesterday evening — this was the first time ever that my discussing in a public forum the misogyny in Hip-Hop was not met with a larger community’s derision or dismissiveness or straight up hate. No accusations about elitism, intellectualism, sexual inhibition/uptightness, or whitewash. The first time ever.

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So where does that leave us with “academic” poetry versus oral tradition? As Paul read brief sections of Howl, I thought to myself that we don’t really study the Beats in the MFA program (though how much do we love Whitman and Williams, the Beats’ poetic fathers), where the overtly political, where performance, joy, ferocity, and rage are typically frowned upon or discouraged or dismissed in favor of something much more transcendent of the shit that makes you human and a part of human cultures/societies. I actually detest this transcendence for being self-righteous and insincere in its construction.

What I fail to understand is why folks who are invested in intense study of craft and of literary legacy (i.e. we “academics”) do not see the craft involved in oral tradition, and in composing of poetic work that is of the unspeakable. I see this anti-intellectualism pervasive within these alleged intellectuals’ spaces and fail to understand it. And so I find I have much in common with Paul, who, like me is SFSU MFA alum, moving back and forth between academic spaces and community spaces, code switching between the respective languages of those spaces. In many ways, folks like me and Paul benefit from having become quite skilled at this code switching, hence we are able to thrive in both/either, which are really the same thing.

Tags: Paul S. Flores