Well both poetics, s to speak, have their audiences, & one i undeniably larger but I’m not sure how much more politically active it might be.
Both are full of contradictions (i.e., in both one can find misogyny, conservative vs progressive, etc).
To be sonically complex is certainly one of my ideals in poetry (& perhaps I simply cannot hear it in rap, but), & to go back through the centuries is to find that, even in the best work by ‘anonymous’ (see O Westron Wind).
And maybe not all workshops (at least outside the US) are so much the same.
Doug
> On Sep 12, 2016, at 10:09 AM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> ...poets’ extreme proximity to the academy grants them a measure of security and professional status otherwise unattainable. But this association with higher education is hardly an unmitigated good for the art of poetry itself. Given that university attendance is the hallmark of middle-class status and virtually all roads to poetry—canon formation, poetics seminars, creative-writing workshops—run through the academy, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that to speak of poetry today is to speak of middle-class poetry. Identity for the middle class is, essentially, a compound of neurotic introspection and uneasy social positioning; this sets it apart from working-class identity, which is predicated on physical strain and material exhaustion, and upper-class identity, whose non-performative introspection is rooted in the occluded arrogance of financial control. Disciplined by the conformity of the workshop setting and distilled by the claustrophobia of the poetry world as a whole, this middle-class mentality generates a discourse whose resonance is entirely contingent on the audience possessing the same tendencies toward status-anxious narcissism as the author.
>
> etc by one Frank Guan
>
> https://thepointmag.com/2016/politics/class-dismissed
>
> It concludes:
>
> In America there has always been a strong degree of skepticism and aversion to the figure of the poet. The suspicion runs deep that poetry is an aristocratic and communal art that is difficult to harmonize with a democratic and individualist culture, and this suspicion is, I believe, in large part justified: in its increased sonic density and heightened tone, the language of poetry exists on a superior plane to that of everyday discourse, and the poet who produces such elevated language can only be, by that token, a noble spirit. Yet since the core audience and core artists of hip-hop belong to an underprivileged race and an otherwise unheard class, the cultural aristocracy that hip-hop relies upon and upholds promotes increased social equality. It’s silly to overstate the power of poetry to transform society, but it’s hard to doubt that the possibilities of social change are greater when the poet whose tastes carry the most weight in American culture is Kanye West in Chicago instead of T. S. Eliot in London. It is hard—it will always be hard—to unequivocally affirm the potential of a convergence between aesthetic innovation and political progress. Yet insofar as that potential now exists, the credit for its existence does not belong to writers dependent on the academy; rather, it belongs to West, who dropped out of college and then, proudly, titled his first album The College Dropout.
Douglas Barbour
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https://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
Recent publications: (With Sheila E Murphy) Continuations & Continuations 2 (UofAPress).
Recording Dates (Rubicon Press).
Four or five couplets trying to dance
into Persia. Who dances in Persia now?
A magic carpet, a prayer mat, red.
A knocked off head of somebody on her broken knees.
Phyllis Webb
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