Blog 6

There are so many different voices in the poems we read this week. Even one poet can take on multiple voices, which I notices especially in LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs' work. She is so fluidly able to blend language and slang and meaning and turn it all on its head. I think the question of 'what are their instruments' can have so many interpretations. Sometimes it made me think of the sounds and vowels in a poem, sometimes the typeface, sometimes the words themselves.

In No Moon in LA by Anthony A. Lee I think Light is an instrument. " Taco Bell on the left blinked red, gold, green the 7-Eleven next door gave out its halo glow through the glass." These are the lights that define the space the speaker is in. There is no moon in LA according to the title, but there are these bits of artificial light. Which is at once very human and very not. I also noticed a repeating patterning of G, B, and T sounds which are another instrument the voice uses. I also love how all the sentences seem to run together with no definite stop, this could also be an instrument of the voice in the poem, though I tend to think of punctuation and spacing choices as an instrument of the poet, it is these choices that create a voice. In terms of difference I see this poem as trying to break down how difference is viewed and how people who are different are dismissed.

When it comes to Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith I have heard this performed by someone and they did it in the voice of a little girl filled with hope and wonder and creativity. So reading it now I cannot get that voice out of my head and I think it heavily affects the way I interpret the poem. A way I see this poem as viewing difference is the ideas of how white people would create this movie about a Black boy and a dinosaur and how a Black person would do it. This difference illuminates how white artists view Black people and create these images of difference and movies based in voyeurism of the Black body. I think the voice of this poem, for me being a small girl, or child, is so powerful because that is who this movie would be for.

Blog #6: View of Difference and Voice by Tien Dang

Prompt: How difference is viewed, who are the voices, and what are their instruments?

In this week's list of readings, I felt like I could relate to most of the voices in the poems.  Particularly, I felt a strong pull towards Anaid Carreno's piece, "Snake Tongue: Lengua de Culebra."  I felt the voice in this poem was a victim to colonialization and forced assimilation.  The poem is very telling on what the sentiments were: loneliness and segregation as well as an obvious difference: "Only the echo replies" (55) showing that there's a sense of vulnerability in not being heard and not being taken into account.

The strongest point made in Carreno's piece is the last line: "My snake-like tongue has no mercy and will not cease until I see dignity and peace" (55).  This line told me that the voice will fight to be heard and fight to make peace.  It's a consolation to feel like those who feel shackled by the systems overpowered by racism, stereotypes and unjust.  However, I question what is the instrument?  Is the voice a part of the instrument because the poet decided to write the poem and message in a very specific manner?

The instrument question continues to linger for me as I read the other poems like Anthony A Lee's "No Moon in LA' and "William Archilla's "Three Minutes with Mingus".  In Lee's piece, I questioned the relationship of the voice to the focal character of the poem.  What is his/her relationship to this man?  A viewer?  A actual physical/intimate relationship?  Or...?  What makes Lee's piece powerful is the typography is made so that it feels like a recollection so that it feels realistic to the readers.  I felt this was a real retelling and that the voice has a close relationship to the man who is burdened by the culture of L.A. and distraught with drug/alcohol addictions.

Similarly, William Archilla's "Three Minutes with Mingus" gave me a similar impression.

 "I want to go/ back to my childhood, back to war,/ rescue that boy under the bed, listening/ to what bullets can do to a man"32.

I felt the pain reading this line and the horror and terror.  War torn territory bringing the worse fears in people and causing human nature to react in certain ways - the boy hiding under the bed and witnessing via sound and sight the death of his adult role models.

Again - what is the instrument?  I can't seem to pinpoint.  Is it the recollection itself?  Is it the way it's written?  I feel like it is.  Words are the strength in these poems and the personalization makes me feel like it's real and means something.

I really feel like Smith and's pieces really represents protest poetry in that it clearly states the wrong doing and ripple effect of the horror and destruction wrought on to the citizens of America and people coerced into the American culture.  "No one kills the black boy" is reference to how easily black characters are murdered in movies just as in real life.  Why is the character who represents anything other than white easily dispensable to the cinematic culture?  And now look at what's been happening through history left and right with police brutality and hate crimes all over the country.

I cannot find a better way to end than the last two quotes in "Dear White America" by Danez Smith.

"Take your god back: though his songs are beautiful, his miracles are inconsistent...
We did not ask to be a part of your America."

Loud as Voice

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’ instrument is encoded language   Her first poem who you callin’ a jinx (after mista popo) put me and anyone reading it on notice, this poet is loud and won’t back down or shut up for nobody.  It’s almost a spoken word piece the way it lays on the page.  The words and the attitude wring into the work defiance and indignation.  By shaving words and using near sounding words that rhyme like “Hater-aid” she makes language her servant.  Slant rhymes like Aladdin’s bottle with laughable cannibal are unexpected and fly.  (I guess the word now is dope but I ain’t trying to front.)

She really made me work for her poems.  There’s a level an outsider like myself has to decode if I want to experience these poems.  To Diggs, it’s irrelevant if someone who’s not all the way down doesn’t get it.  These poems are for her inside fellow family members of culture and there’s no apology.  There’s no need.  Get it or bless it and move on.  Her work feels like the deliberate embrace of a poet ensconced deeply in her oeuvre groove.  gamin’ gabby made me read out loud and it brought more awareness of the poems in through an experience of the language heard.  It took me a couple of tries to understand the last poem of the four in gamin’ gabby was a re-rendering of the first of the four.

Making me work just as hard at decoding is the graphic poetry of Douglas Kearney.  I didn’t know one could control text to that degree to make it do the work of fooling a listener/reader into thinking they might know a direction the poem is heading in – the sky? – only to be shoved back into the green groin of Liberty.  But hey, who loves ya? America.  Love, America.  I could smell the scratch we’re all after in this country and we have to do a level of bending and bedding to get paid.  It’s wrapped in the phonetics of beatboxing and that too made speaking it aloud part of my understanding.  In Kearney’s poems, text is the instrument bent to sound through size manipulations among the words framed and rebuilt to suit the noise level.

What does Danez Smith do with the essay prose form?  He claims a place in space for the difference he’s tired, tired, tired of having to explain, navigate, negotiate to survive.  He’s done with it and he lets Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin bring him the waters to turn the soil into the good wet earth that is his and his people’s color.  His work was the most emotional I read.  Because the writing doesn’t hit like a fist, more like a plea to heaven for release so filled with longing it makes me join his chorus in support.

The poets in Coiled Serpent were all cleanly wrought pieces, each with a distinct representation of an instrument.  For William Archila, it’s perfectly visualized metaphors for Mingus’s bass, including one description of “Chinese acrobats bubbling.”  Anaid Carreno rides the tongue of the snake to declare her freedom from an America that shackled and labeled her.  It is the taut retelling of an encounter with a homeless man by Anthony A. Lee that silenced me into a reverie of grace and awe.  His precision with the poem, the work on the page, the reclamation of Christian lessons to treat everyone as his brother as the Christ would have, the holding of accountability to our fellow kin on this planet, “the least of these” that made me bow my own head in praise.  How different is that man who was dry but relapsed?  Is he really the other, or are we when we refuse to see?

Reflections on "difference"

Anaid Carreno, in her poem “Snake Tongue: Lengua de Culebra” writes about how a white supremacist, anti- immigrant society imposes demeaning and demonstrous roles on Latinx people and begs them to perform the stereotypes.  Here, Carreno rejects this imposition of criminal and subservient labels.  Carreno writes, “I am not illegal and you don’t have the right to label or decide/ I am not a criminal, I never was” (55).  Difference is something imposed onto the speaker, a social construction.  Nevertheless, it is a real oppressive force.  By actively rejecting the master narrative white people force onto the speaker, they create their own counter narrative.  

In “No Moon in L.A.” Anthony A. Lee ponders his relationship with and detachment from an addict who needed his help who he only gave five dollars.  He prefaces the poem with Luke 24:25, a verse which implies that those that think they are wise and are unwilling to take in new information are the biggest fools.  Lee’s speaker judges the addict for his “brown hair tangled and greasy” and other outward appearances and mannerisms (181).  However, at the end of the poem he wishes he would have taken the time to be compassionate and helped the man through his addiction.  I think that this speaks a lot to how difference is viewed in our current society.  Compassion is often an afterthought and we are very materialistic and selfish.  Difference, because of our implicit biases, is often viewed as purely cosmetic.  Most people won’t even take the time to hear a person’s story, especially if some trigger in their brain is conditioned to believe that person might hurt them or is pathetic or lazy.  It is very rare that people are humble enough to let go of their privilege and let helping another person without judgement or pride “save [their] soul” (180).  

In Danez Smith’s “Dinosaurs in the Hood” a pitch for a movie simply about “the little black boy on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless/ his dreams possible, pulsing & right there” (257).  Smith’s speaker lists all of the celebrities he does not want in the movie.  The intention of the speaker is very clear- the movie should reflect the real aspirations of hardworking people who live in the hood and should not be a stereotype.  The speaker says, “this movie can’t be a black movie” (256).  I interpret this not to mean that the movie shouldn’t star black people or be centered around elements of black and brown culture, but that it cannot be a vehicle for white Hollywood’s furthering the oppression of black people by framing the narrative of oppression.  To me, what is obvious and implicit about this poem is that white people should have no say in deciding what valuable or invaluable black or brown art is and/ or attempting to canonize it. Smith’s speaker is introducing different kinds of narratives to the audience that might not address “difference” in a way framed by white Hollywood.  This is just what I got from the poem, but I would love to hear other interpretations. 

Reflection #6: Differences and Voices

The readings this week left me in a world of thoughts and confusion but that's probably not a bad thing. When thinking about difference, some themes jumped at me: difference is superficial and difference can show superiority or inferiority.

In Snake Tongue, Carreno uses a cooperative and assertive voice to showcase that difference is superficial. I say this because the tone I pick up in when reading is like "I'm not any different just because we have differences. In fact these differences that you use to separate us aren't even real." This is the assertive voice but it was interesting to me that the poem started with "please," as if asking the reader to listen up and consider what the author has to say. The instruments that Carreno uses to support the claim of artificial difference is the comparisons of her reality vs. what society has deemed as reality for her. "I am not illegal and you don't have the right to label or decide."

I see this superficial difference again in "No Moon in L.A." Lee opens up with a Bible quote, which is the greatest instrument you can use in my opinion to show that you are no different or better than anyone else because of your status, job, lifestyle, beliefs etc. This is obvious throughout the poem as we are greeted by someone with a drug addiction in the beginning, but by the end we learn that the person with the addiction could've saved the soul of the "normal" person. I think the short lines and simple language are intentional to create balance between the brother and the speaker, which makes us look at them as equal beings as well.

On the other hand, difference was used to draw distinctions and a "you can't sit with us" line in other poems. Diggs uses a mocking, almost condescending voice to make the inferior become superior. "Popo, here’s your “black mammy” multi-platinum crowd-pleaser."
Generally when I think of mammy I think of a servant, but to me Diggs reads like "I know what you'll call me to make me feel bad about myself, but I'm going to flip these negative connotations on you."  She mixes culture, history, AAVE, creates new language, rap, rhythm and sound to separate herself from the white gaze and "they" become the "other."

Smith however, uses differences to illustrate how Blacks are made to feel less than in society. In Dear White America, the voice is actually fed-up with being different/inferior "We did not build your prisons (though we did & we fill them too). We did not ask to be part of your America (though are we not America? Her joints brittle & dragging a ripped gown through Oakland?). I can’t stand your ground. I am sick of calling your recklessness the law. Each night, I count my brothers." The instruments Smith uses to showcase how tired he is of these differences is to locate himself in space, above earth and America to look down on what has been going on throughout time to make Blacks appear to be inferior - from arriving on slave boats, to overshadowing our current state of oppression by a Buzzfeed article. Although it may look different in print, the shape or the poem being written in letter form helps deliver the message from Black Americans to America, and the fact that he even has to write this type of letter is an ironic way to show how different we are in this country. I also love the parentheses to separate the different voices of his experience in Black America/America itself.

Blog #6-- The Voices, The Instruments

Okay, so I'm really glad that LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs wrote "who you callin' a jynx? (after mista popo)" because these blatantly racist caricatures are all over anime and childhood and have been mass-produced on a global scale.

Diggs' instruments to critique this mass production of racism are the push and pull of languages, as well as the voices/personas of Jynx from Pokemon Mr. Popo from DBZ. The two anime characters are in conversation, though it's hard for me to tell where the characters are located in the setting of the poem.

She builds momentum in their conversation with internal rhyme: "the most obscene fish queen you ever seen," end rhyme: "spin / gaijins" (gaijin means "foreigner" in Japanese) and "souvenir / brassiere," and a constant back and forth between AAVE and Japanese "Kokujin wanna mark me; I got ya kawaii buddies" (Kokujin means "black man" and kawaii is a manga style of "cute" drawing and affect). This clash of two languages puts difference side-by-side, collages it, makes it into a language that gives the two characters the agency to speak to one another about their context.

As a child watching these shows on TV, Mr. Popo was always pitch black and a subservient to Kami (God). I saw both the original Jynx and the altered skin color purple Jynx. Diggs has the two characters discuss these changes in their skin color in order to make them more marketable to a US audience: "with black/purple flesh supposedly offensive. / make no difference in variation, / check it:      cross pollination. // Watashi wa zasshu = mass circulation" (56) ("Watashi wa zasshu" translates in google as "I am a crossbreed/hybrid"). The change in her skin color is in vain, the racism that perpetuated her creation is left intact--this color change is a bandaid fix and only furthers the U.S.'s and Japan's economies without making any real effort to challenge racism. The tie to racism and capitalism is also reinforced with Jynx's reference to Zwarte Piet, the racist colonialist caricature celebrated in Dutch Christmas tradition.

In this poem, racially and culturally charged language and image are Diggs' instruments. Placed next to each other in sentence and line, each cultural shift or translation forces the reader to critically evaluate their place in this exchange--"exchange" as in their conversation and the cultural/globally economic capital that profits off racism.

POC ASSIGNMENT 6: THE VOICE(S) & Language - TD

Quantum Spit, Douglas Kearney & No Moon in L.A., Anthony A Lee

{Define : Quantum=is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction.}

I have never engaged with a poem like I did with this piece.  I read it aloud once and I caught the rhythm, I read it twice and the message became clearer, I read it for the third and fourth time and I felt the message in a rhythmic beat, it is now an unshakable poem that I hear on the radio hidden under a hype worn out record.

 I reacted to the poem from the first page, and by the second read, I realized Kearney was giving the reader a key/guide so we could follow the voices throughout the piece. This allowed the inner turmoil between the art of rap and the consumerism of the rap culture to take the lead in the lines. After a while, I identified who was speaking by recognizing the font, and I didn’t have to flip back to the glossary, which freed my mind to feel the tug of war happening between the artist and America. The battle of artist versus commercialism/consumerism present in this poem made me think of Kanye West. I felt ashamed for blaming him, I felt ashamed for not giving him more than a “that’s a shame” response as I Instagram watched his defeat. I could not shake the feeling, and remembered the voice of No Moon in L.A. by Anthony Lee. I re read it and realized it spoke to the shame I was feeling, “I wish now I had put my forehead to his shoes I wish I had pushed his bare chest against mine and held on…stayed there to see him through not just a year, ten years, twenty-more let him save my soul”. West, an artist I revered as one of the best before he broke in ½ and splinter into a skeleton of himself reminded me of the “beggar” in Lee’s piece. Like the beggar West to was given money to blow without direction, West once healed many through his words, like the man who had been a drug counselor before relapsing again. When he was a “real MC” I was supportive, now that America has successfully choked him I laugh at meme’s that blast him for his weird behavior, I never even lend an ear to his latest music. Instead I  repeat his album College Drop Out like he is dead and this was his final album. I play it like a homage to the rapper lost, but he is alive and Kearney provides a vivid , poetic description of what that struggle looks like from the inside out.

The fight is literally taking shape on the page as Kearney uses the font, word overlap ,brackets, italics, bold, style and grammar to simulate what a an actual combat between all the voices would look like off of the page. Kearney made the abstract real, by introducing voices on the page at the same time. An example of this can be found on page 112 where America writes  “DEAR MC:

DO IT AGAIN, JUST LIKE THAT!

AMERICA,

LOVE”

 At this point the drums are speaking to the MC, he feels the spirit of the drums…

“and the drums each remember my stories stories”

He is being drummed out of his hypnosis like stat into the true nature of his voice, America is upset that he is going back to “conscious rap” and yells

“YOU CHANGED IT!

-          AMERICA

HOLD IT

                        -AMERICA

STOP!!

                        -AMERICA
SAY IT RIGHT

                        -AMERICA”

America is literally speaking in between the written lines of the MC, trying to manipulate his lyrics which is crafted right there on the page as Kearney attaches words to the end of the MC’s voice, leaving no space for the MC to speak. America’s voice is bolded in all caps and “chokes” out the MC’s consciousness until the MC says

“…Choking…. I can’t make it out”

America is satisfied that the MC has been tamed again, and the voice of the turn table remarks “{…can’t stop..}{…it won’t stop..} {…and it don’t stop…}” – and echo of the 90’s tag line by Puff daddy- that remarks to the cycle of artist oppression

  America keeps the MC preoccuped with “ASSESS, TITTY”- tells the MC that “YOU CAN GO PLATINUM, GET A WHIP!”

                                                            Ghetto –whipped ? –Asks the MC( brilliant word play by Kearny to deliver a message)

                                                                        YES! Responds America

In the end America is a “crab holding onto the penis of the artist”, who based on the cultural of rap, the context clues, and the historical and contemporary system of white America pimping/ enslaving Black talent, is a Black male, from the streets, who as the Battle Rapper voices  “CAN”T MAKE IT OUT ON THE WIND OF NIKE” and sees rap as the only option.

And all the voices, the MC, the MC’s Manifestation and the Battle rapper repeat “Everything sounds like applause these days”. That line resonated with me as moment where all the inner voices, even the soul of the MC are lost without a compass to follow. I paralleled this line with the line in No Moon in L.A:

“ I don’t have any one to talk to

 looked down, arms a his sides, palms up

I said you  don’t  have to tell me

any more humiliating stories

 not for $5, Jesus Christ!”

 I kept thinking Kanye and all of the others lost under millions of lights. No one to talk to, no one who cares, and all we do is give $1.99 to ITunes to consume their work, not wanting to hear any more than what will entertain us.

Sarah Gord Blog 6

One of my favorite poems this week was “Dinosaurs in the Hood” by Danez Smith, where Smith proposes a dinosaur movie where black people get to be human. In this poem, Smith’s “instrument” is both the poem and the film he describes. He wants to see a young black boy and a black community defeating dinosaurs like badasses – in a film that doesn’t become about black pain or kill the young black boy. He problematizes tropes in preexisting films where black people are either not allowed to be three dimensional characters or where black folks are only allowed to wallow in pain, ultimately arguing for more stories of regular black people who thrive in extraordinary situations (but not in spite of or because of a history of violence or pain).  

He declares both what the movie should and shouldn’t be, and a lot of the things he suggests it shouldn’t be are tropes that represent dominant trends in Hollywood movies. He directly addresses the reader as collaborator (beginning with “let’s make a movie”) or as someone who can help make this movie a reality. The primary image he returns to is “a little black boy…playing / with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window / & sees the T-Rex.” This young boy gets to be a kid whose dreams are “possible, pulsing, & right there.” By the end of this poem, the dinosaurs become something much larger; this movie comes to represent possibility for that young black boy.

The speaker is very particular about who gets to make this film (and whose voices are showcased). He is clear about who and what this movie should not represent. Early in the poem, he says, “Don’t let Tarantino direct this,” alluding to the white director known for his violence and freewheeling use of the n-word (later implicitly referenced again when he says “nobody can say nigga in this movie / who can’t say it to my face in public”). He refers to “his [Tarantino’s] version,” where a gun becomes a metaphor and the boy is destined to end up like his father (and therefore he does not have any agency for himself). This, he argues, is not what he wants. The dinosaurs are still a metaphor in the speaker’s version, but for something much more hopeful: they are “proof of magic or God or Santa.”

This is also not a movie about the cops or government saving the day; “this movie is about a neighborhood of royal folks-- / children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exiles—saving their town / from real ass dinosaurs.” For the speaker, “royal” is synonymous with folks who are marginalized in society, who too often are not represented in high profile films. He says, “I want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors / with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses.” The heroes in this movie are regular people, overlooked people, people considered “different” – depicted as they are, human. 

Near the end of the poem, the speaker specifies even more what this film is not. The film is not an instrument for racism, for tropes, or a vehicle for successful actors who often play into stereotypes about their race or accent. He repeats “this can’t be,” highlighting Hollywood’s dismissiveness of a “black movie.” He also echoes his adamant belief that “this movie can’t be metaphor / for black people & extinction.” The movie can’t be about the history of racism, or about black pain for audience’s pleasure. Most significantly for the speaker, he repeats “& no one kills the black boy” three times. Too often in disaster films, the black characters are killed off, either because they are not deemed central characters or because it would be dramatic for the audience. Smith calls bullshit on this trend, and advocates instead for the boy’s storyline to remain hopeful and optimistic. 

He adds near the end, too, “Besides, the only reason / I want to make this is for that first scene anyway: the little black boy / on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless / his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.” This film is not as much about the dinosaurs as about hope and possibility, something readily available and visible in films about young white boys but too rarely depicted in mainstream films about black boys. In this film, the little boy doesn't have to stand for all black people or represent something larger for himself; he just gets to be a little boy.