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In Defense of Websites |
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To my readers, aficionados of Nuyorican poetry,
This website is my senior thesis. The traditional requirement for a senior thesis in the Literature Department at Harvard University is an essay of 11,250–18,750 words, printed on acid-free paper and turned in, bound, on the non-negotiable deadline designated many months in advance. Thanks to the extraordinary support of the Department, my creative interpretation of the thesis task is being presented to you. I would like to thank Raquel Kennon (my tutor), David Damrosch (my faculty advisor and Chair of the Literature Department) and Sandra Naddaff (the Director of Studies of the Literature Department)—without the guidance, support and enthusiasm for the project provided by these generous individuals, this website would not be in existence. Their encouragement has been in the forward-looking vein of the recent letter from MLA President, Siodine Smith, published in the Spring 2010 MLA Newsletter. She writes:
Digital media and computational technologies are radically transforming how knowledge is produced, communicated, and evaluated. The digitalization of scholarly work in the humanities brings new modes of research; new formats of presentation; new networks for communication; and new platforms for organizing knowledge, orchestrating argument, and visualizing intellectual exchange...Why should the dissertation remain inflexibly wedded to traditional book-culture formats?1
Given the experimental nature of my project, in line with Smith’s recommendations above, I shall spend a few moments explaining my motivations for presenting the thesis in this alternative manner.
Why a Website?
Presenting the thesis as a website has two effects which pertain to the subject matter at hand. Firstly it renders my critique accessible to anyone who might take the time to read it, engaging a broader community than my readership at Harvard University. One of the founding fathers of the Nuyorican movement, Pedro Pietri, was a visionary in reference to the powers of the internet in broadening one’s readership—he refused to publish his most famous poem, “El Spanglish National Anthem”, anywhere but on his website. Secondly, the website format allows the poetry to be experienced, and subsequently examined, in a form that is as close to attending the original poetry performance as possible. This experimental interpretation of the thesis task is perhaps my own demonstration of what Nuyorican scholar, Frances Aparicio, claimed to be the core of the Nuyorican movement; “Intellectual self-determination, an insistence on understanding that community’s aesthetic on its own terms…”2 Both the Nuyorican movement and my critical perspective on it insist that Nuyorican poetry must be both consumed and analyzed on its own terms. Frances Aparicio comments on the oft failed attempts of publication of Nuyorican poetry in her essay “Loisaida Literature”:
If the essence of the poetry lay in its communal orality rather than in the privacy of the experience on the page, how could that sensibility be reproduced? The centrality of social experience, in every respect, to Nuyorican poetry, as well as the extensive integration of Spanish and musical language, which required of the listener a different kind of literacy, ran against traditional conceptions of lyric poetry and individual genius, and surely alienated more conservative readers.3
Aparicio’s opening sentence describes the essence of Nuyorican poetry as its ‘communal orality’. Firstly, presenting my thesis on the web engages readers in a community—in today’s globalizing, electronically connected world, the web provides a communal space for the exchange of ideas between people who could never have otherwise connected. The opportunity to blog, tweet and dialogue in response to my analysis offers an online version of the audience community at a poetry performance, whilst the hit counter at the foot of this page and at the head of the Reactions page reminds the reader of ‘the centrality of social experience’, indicating how many times the page has been read before their visit. Secondly, to address Aparicio’s comment on the orality of the poetry, the website offers a platform upon which the art can be experienced by the reader in its live form, before being examined critically. Due to logistical constraints, much of the Vintage Nuyorican poetry cannot be accessed in live form, and some recent performances are audio rather than video footage, and often this footage is of low quality. Nonetheless, I gesture towards presenting the art as it was originally presented to an audience, in order to subsequently critique it. If the ’extensive integration of Spanish and musical language...requires of the listener a different kind of literacy’, then the qualities of this poetry also requires of the critic a different kind of analysis. Offering a written critique of printed transcriptions of Nuyorican poetry, which relies so heavily on its performative qualities would undermine the poignancy of my analysis, as I would be ignoring an essential quality of the literature. As far as I know, no other study of the work has been done in this way, where video and sound recordings of Nuyorican poetry have been presented as the ‘text’ to be analyzed. Perhaps this begins to explain why Nuyorican poetry has been often marginalized in academic literature.
A Multi-Media Example
Here I present three versions of Nuyorican Slam poet Saul Williams’ famous poem, “Amethyst Rocks”. The first consists of the transcribed lyrics of the poem, the second is an audio clip of the poem being performed, the third is a video clip of the poem as choreographed in the 1998 film, Slam. The different textures of the experience of this poem will, I hope, persuade even Aparicio’s more ‘conservative readers’ that viewing or listening to live performances of this poetry is a valuable exercise.
Saul Williams: Amethyst Rocks What I got, come and get some, get on up, hustler of culture. I stand on the corner of the block slinging amethyst rocks, drinking 40s of mother earth's private nectar stock, dodging cops, cuz' 50 be the 666 and I need a fix of that purple rain: the type of shit that drives membranes insane. Oh yeah, I'm in the fast lane snorting candy yams that free my body and soul and send me like Shazaam, never question who I am. God knows, and I know God personally, infact he lets me call him "me", I be one with rain and stars and things with dancing feet and watermelon rings, I brings the sunshine and the moon, and the wind blows my tune. Meanwhile I spoon powdered drumbeats into plastic bags, selling kilos of kintae skag, taking drags off of collards and cornbread, freebasing through saxophones and flutes like mad. The high notes make me space-float, I be exhaling in rings that circle Saturn, leaving stains in my veins in astrological patterns. Yeah I'm serious B, doggone niggers plotted shit lovely, but the feds is also plotting me, they're trying to imprison my astrology, put my stars behind bars, my stars and stripes, using blood-splattered banners as nationalist kites, but I control the wind, that's why the call it the hawk. I am Horus, son of Isis, son of Osirus, worshipped as Jesus, resurrected like Lazarus, but you can call my Lazzy, lazy, yeah I'm lazy because I'd rather sit and build and work on top of a field and worship the daily yield of cash green crops, your evolution stopped the evolution of your technology: a society of automatic tellers and money machines. Nigga’ what, my culture is lima beans and tambourines, dreams, manifest dreams real, not consistent with rationale, I dance for no reason, for reason you can't dance, call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance, you can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts, spirit, soul, can be store-bought, fuck thought, leads to naught, simply leads to you trying to figure me out, your intellect's disfiguring your soul, your being's not whole, check your flagpole, stars and stripes, your astrology's imprisoned by your concept of white, of self, what's your plan for spiritual health? Calling reality unreal, your line of thought is tangled, the star spangled got your soul mangled, your being's angled, forbidding you to be real and feel, you can't find truth with an axe or a drill in a white house on a hill or in factories or plants made of steel. Selling us was the smartest thing you ever did, too bad you don't teach the truth to your kids. My influence on user reflection you see when you look in your minstrel mirror and talk about your culture, your existence is that of a schizophrenic vulture who thinks he has enough life in him to prey on the dead, not knowing that the dead ain't dead, that he ain't got enough spirituality to know how to pray. Yeah, there's no repentance, you're bound to live in infinite consecutive executive life sentence. So while you're busy serving time I'll be in sync with the moon while you run from the sun. Life of the moon, reflected by guns, worship of moons, I am the sun, and I am public enemy number one, one one one, one one one, that's seven. And I'll be out on the block, hustling culture, slinging amethyst rocks.4
SOUND CLIP: SAUL WILLIAMS: AMETHYST ROCKS 5
Methodology
In the content of this exercise I attempt to present a critical, scholarly perspective on Nuyorican poetry. The style of the critique that I forward is a blend of approaches commonly employed in literary analysis, the practice of literary and intellectual history as well as borrows from mainstream engagements with performance art. Simply put, my work engages predominantly in literary performance studies.6 While maintaining a sharp and thorough critical perspective, I hope my work is capable of reaching a broad audience; those who enjoy reading poetry, those who enjoy attending live poetry performances and those who are interested in the intersection of art and sociopolitical issues. I attempt, therefore, to negotiate the formal constraints of scholarly criticism and employ an approachable style to present my analysis, rendering it accessible to a varied readership. There is much of myself in this work—all the photographic images on the site are my own, taken in the Lower East Side of New York, including some at the Nuyorican Poets Café. In order to engage deeply with this topic I attended several live performances of Nuyorican poetry and spoke to many critics and poets, including Miguel Algarín, the founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. As a result of many research trips to the Café and the Lower East Side, some of my analysis is anecdotal or derived from personal experience. In presenting my analysis as a website, I engage with the current debates in the academy addressing the definitions and uses of hypertext and hypermedia in relation to literary criticism. George Landow and Paul Delaney are prominent theorists on this topic, explaining the following differences between the text, hypertext and hypermedia:
So long as the text was married to physical media… the text was linear, bounded and fixed…We can define hypertext as the use of the computer to transcend the linear, bounded and fixed qualities of the traditional written text... Hypermedia takes us even closer to the complex interrelatedness of everyday consciousness; it extends hypertext by re-integrating our visual and auditory facilities into textual experience, linking graphic images, sound and video to verbal signs.7
This website is an example of the employment of hypermedia in literary criticism. This is particularly fitting to the project because the nature of the poetry performances, like that exemplified by Saul Williams, present traits of hypermedia themselves—these performances integrate the audience’s ‘visual and auditory facilities into textual experience’. While the debates concerning the relationships and differences between text, hypertext and hypermedia are extensive and fertile, for the purposes of this project let it suffice to say that I am engaging with the theory of hypermedia as I critique Nuyorican poetry through this website, therefore using hypermedia critical form to address a hypermedia literary form.
How do I read the website?
A book has a beginning, middle and an end. “Mind space” or “information space” by contrast has connections and limits—a different sort of dimensionality. It is fundamentally non-linear save insofar as consciousness itself is time-bound and sequential.8
This website offers several minor theses contributing to an overarching argument. Read linearly, beginning at the introduction and progressing segment by segment to reach the conclusion, I hope that this is evident to the reader. However, given the different natures of textual and information spheres, as suggested above by Shutt, I have designed this website to be fitting to the information-space also. The segments of this website can be read ‘non-linearl[y]’—one page in isolation from the others—and the hyperlinks provided within each page are deliberate distractions offered to the reader. I hope that the alternative dimensionalities of the site can be explored, re-visited and enjoyed by each reader according to their own taste. By presenting my work in this manner, I offer my own tribute to the ideology of Nuyorican Newness, allowing Newness in this literary critique to “grow as people do and learn things never done or learned before.”9 ________________________________________________________________________________________________
1:Siodine Smith, ”Beyond the Dissertation Monograph”, A Letter from the President of the MLA, Spring 2010 MLA Newsletter. http://www.mla.org/blog&topic=133 Accessed on 23rd February 2010. 2:Frances Aparicio “Loisaida Literature” in A New Literary History of America, Ed Marucs and Sollors (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009), 977. 3:Ibid 4:Saul Williams, “Amethyst Rocks” lyrics, transcribed by Elizabeth Brook from YouTube video accessed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSR7H580e5U on 12th January 2010. 5:Saul Williams, “Amethyst Rocks”, Accompanying CD to The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, ed Marc Smith (Sourcebooks MediaFusion, New York 2007). 6:Richard Schechner, esteemed critic of performances write the following on Performance Studies: “Performance studies builds on the emergence of a postcolonial world where cultures are colliding, interfering with and fertilizing each other. Arts and academic disciplines alike are most alive at their ever-changing borders. The once distinct genres of music, theater and dance and interacting with one another in ways undreamt of just thirty five years ago.” Schechner, The Future of Ritual; Writing on Culture and Performance, (Routledge, New York, 1995), 21.) 7:Paul Delaney and George Landow, Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies, (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1991), 3-7. 8:Timothy Baker Shutt “Cultural Transmissions: Electronic Orality and Ergonomics of the Mind” in Culture, Politics and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization, Ed Lukic and Brint, (Ashgate Publishing, Vermont, 2001) 29. 9:Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009) 9. |
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“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…”—Miguel Algarín |