Malcolm Phillips wrote:
>When you make the distinction between rhythmic language and poetry, is this
>some kind of Northrop Frye - type genre division whereby hip-hop joins
>birthday card doggerel and folk song in the 'verse' category while poetry
>sits to the side? Is it that poetry has to be able to work without musical
>accompaniment, as your comments about Waits and di Franco suggest? I'd have
>more difficulty arguing with this given how few of my favourite rap lyrics
>I've ever seen written down, but it still makes me uneasy as a basis for
>genre definition, particularly given that you seem to make a distinction
>between genre and individual practitioners so that for example Tom Waits
>gets in despite being a songwriter, but then this distinction is not
>applied to rap/hip-hop, which is apparently 'non-poetic' in general. And
>what do you mean by poetic language here? Who's verging?
Whoa up there, boy--I'M not the theoretician here, remember? That's
Minimal Henry to whose proposition that poetry is "rhythmic language" I
replied by asking, okay, but what do you call "rhythmic language" that
isn't poetry, adding that I call it rap and hip-hop, among other things.
When you asked me why, I tried to tell in purely _descriptive_ terms and
more or less at the synaptic level. Then you proceeded to dip me in egg
and flour as if what I'd said was to be Northrop Fryed.
But I have no _argument_ for or against how poetry and/or (some) song
lyrics work on my synapses (blame it on the bossanova), much less any
theory or ideology to proselytize. If that's what I'd had in mind when
I asked Theoretical Henry my question, I would have gone about it more
formally, not waving that sword around or applying a colloquialism to
him such as "poopyhead" instead of the proper term "scatocephalic."
It is somewhat curious that rap doesn't have the effect of poetry on
me, unlike the experience I had when listening to John Foley's tapes
of Avdo Medjedovic "singing" a heroic poem in Serbo-Croatian (a
language I don't understand) at the top of his lungs and at what
seemed like 50 miles/hour while banging on what sounded to my
untutored ear like a kitchen pot, which hit my synapses with a
kindling force (or form) as only poetry can do. But I can't explain
it or speak for anybody else's brainworks, so I can't answer your
questions either--sorry--
Candice
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