The Blogger Union has partnered with CreativeMornings/Miami for a collaborative storytelling marathon. Tune in to read the story of our city told by local creatives, bloggers and entrepreneurs. Each week, a different member of CreativeMornings will take over to post what inspires them about South Florida. Do you want to take over the CreativeMornings/Miami blog and share your take on our community? Email Paola at info@thebloggerunion and we’ll get working on it!
About Josie Urbistondo: Hi! My name is Josie. I have been teaching writing and literature and writing myself for about a decade now. Currently, I teach at the University of Miami and mentor high school dual enrollment faculty for Florida International University. It wasn’t until I had my daughter that I yearned for a new space to exercise creative freedom that captured all facets of my identity. Our blog, www.doubtsanddesires.com, I co-author with a dear, long-time friend, Linjen Neogi, became just that. We broker content we find valuable, fun and enriching.
We strive to be a stop for the brainy, hungry, traveling, all around contemporary mami – we hope to provide meditations on life, love, motherhood and the spaces in between. We are here for the constant reader or the casual glance. Working around nap schedules, board meetings and all around beautiful chaos.
This article was originally published in Latino Rebel then republished on Doubts & Desires.
The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. Let’s be real…even if you love to read and love literature it is increasingly difficult to dedicate time to the solitary exercise.
doubts & desires
doubts & desires
Two memories come to mind as I engage with this new anthology published by Haymarket:
◾As an educator I constantly struggle with getting my students to be interested, to connect with and to see themselves in the literature we read.
◾Also, I remember a couple years ago chatting with my cousin who is now in college about Lil Wayne and how he has self-proclaimed ‘the greatest poet alive.’ My cousin could not reconcile how a rapper, artist, celebrity could also be a poet.
Why is this book different, worth your time? It accomplishes two things simultaneously. First, it brings hip-hop and young urban, minority culture to the page, which although books and print culture may be a dying art form, it still legitimizes who speaks and how within literary and public intellectual circles. We need our young, vibrant, hungry, optimistic voices complicating the narrative of literature, of what it means to pen a legacy, a tradition.
Historically, hip-hop was a countercultural movement, a response to mainstream oppression, but as soon as suburbia began jamming to BIG and Tupac, it has revealed hip hop culture’s resonance and message in its purest form transcends its very personal and sociocultural roots. And it also reveals that not everyone should be wearing Adidas track suits.
Second, it makes poetry young, improvisational and fun again. I will admit I am more of a novels and short story person, but the works in this text don’t feel like I am reading for homework; they transport you to a dim lit cafe or someone’s home who you know is way cooler than you are so you nod and try not to say anything too dumb.
With younger generations opting for entertainment and distractions that don’t include reading, I hope this exercise in cool brings new readers to the fold and reminds older readers that sometimes the best gift one could give our children and ourselves is the world of imagination and creativity housed in books.
doubts & desires
Standouts I recommend that have so much heart -
Jessica Care Moore (1971) “mic check, 1-2 a duality battle. materials: poem breath & voice. for Lupe Fiasco” - Moore is a badass. There’s no other way of putting it. I enjoyed this poem, but I love her work. She is a force. Please look her up; I hope you bump into her web site.
Douglas Kearney (1974) “Drop It Like It’s Hottentot Venus” - Some if not most people may not have heard of the historical figure, the Hottentot Venus (Sara Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman from southern Africa who between 1810 and 1815 was exhibited in London and Paris for her overtly sexual body and thus inferior being.) In very racist and problematic ways, she was a black woman spectacle for white audiences to gawk at and marvel. She was sexually appealing and considered grotesque at the same time. So Kearney reinvests a historical meaning to Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it Like It’s Hot.” There are a couple ways of reading meaning into this moment. Snoop’s lyrics can be misogynistic and bringing the Hottentot Venus as an image here provocatively examines how the female body, and more specifically of women of color, has been commodified, for sale, for wonderment and at times a freak show. Also, there are plenty of women who enjoy rap, like myself, knowing how problematic some of the messages are…Kearney’s poem should make us as readers a bit uncomfortable with how women are portrayed. And I can’t help it but the poem reminds me of Chris Rock’s skit where he talks about women dancing and celebrating extremely misogynistic lyrics.
Steven Willis (1992) “Beat Writers for Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg” - Willis throws out to the literary universe a unique connection between the Beat generation and literary hip-hop. If you have never read Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” I highly recommend it. The poet speaker walks around a supermarket and basically sees Walt Whitman and Garcia Lorca lurking around. The history of hip hop is in this book, but it doesn’t stand alone. This text links various literary and cultural moments spanning centuries but delivering each line with such immediacy. For me it’s all about the references…looking them up and seeing what and how the poet brings together various references to produce a new message; however, you can read and enjoy each poem for what it comments about just the now.
doubts & desires
The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Haymarket, 2015) “is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who’ve never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.”
