The New Poetry

I realize that this link is probably going to break next week when they put the new issue up, but in the meantime, enjoy.

I thought that piece was obvious and lame.

How is it "obvious"? I like it because it's impossible to tell whether he's taking the piss out of inane pop lyrics or pretentious modernist poets or neither or both.

Maybe it's just my imagination, but I feel like someplace like the Onion has done the same sort of thing numerous times -- giving rap characteristics to unexpected professions. Or, say, the Mr. Show skit with the East Coast-West Coast war between rival ventriloquists (sic, probably). It just seems like an old joke. And I thought Frazier could have come up with better poems, to boot.

Exclamations like "Hunh! Hotpants!" aren't rap characteristics - they're James Brown characteristics.

Sure the piece doesn't break new ground in humor writing - the use of incongruous juxtaposition is one of the oldest tropes in the humor writing handbook - but I thought it touched on something of the character of the discussions that go on on this webboard.

I recognize the James Brown lines.

Fair enough with your other points. I think the funniest thing to appear in The New Yorker in recent times was the "honku" piece. Absolutely brilliant.

I thought this thing was snidely anti-rap, a sly rejoinder to the NY'er's weird pro-rap critical turn of late (way to be up on that one, brothers). The point being (as I read it): "Isn't just silly to regard this whole 'rap' thing we've been hearing about as some kind of real art form, let alone as an extension of the poetic advances of the early twentieth century? Of course it is! Black music is fucking stupid! Ha ha!" Maybe Frazier intends his conflation of Lawrence with Sisqo to be complementary to both. Maybe I'm Jesus Fucking Christ, I dunno.

What's the line about Ezra Pound having a "huge 'fro." Please.

The Onion Herbert Kornfeld/Smoove B stuff is a far funnier piss-take on the hip-hop lexicon due to its obvious affection for it.

Fuck the New Yorker, especially David Denby, but excepting Peter Schjeldahl.

Yes I have a subscription. It was a gift. Fuck you.

The point being (as I read it): "Isn't just silly to regard this whole 'rap' thing we've been hearing about as some kind of real art form, let alone as an extension of the poetic advances of the early twentieth century?

I completely disagree. I think the piece is a lot more ambivalent than you're giving it credit for. Rappers (at least the kind of rappers alluded to in the piece) are completely devoid of the kind of literary pretension that would make this kind of satire even possible. If that's all that Frazier is trying to do, then he's shooting non-existent fish in a non-existent barrel. I admit that some people might read it that way, but I don't get that impression. For one thing, his depiction of bling-bling culture is too lovingly detailed to be the product of a one-sided rant. He is obviously a person who has listened to the musicians that he is skewering. And - be honest now - haven't we all actually thought these things at some point. Haven't we caught ourselves wondering if there really isn't something deeply profound about a song that has nothing more to say than "Gettin' jiggy wit' it" maybe 40 or 50 times.

I don't think this is aimed at rappers. If it were, you'd be dead-on correct. But I think the sneer is directed at people who like rap and try to engage with it as poetry. He doesn't even try to stick it to people who take it seriously as music.

For one thing, his depiction of bling-bling culture is too lovingly detailed to be the product of a one-sided rant. He is obviously a person who has listened to the musicians that he is skewering

I think "heard" is probably closer to it. Will Smith? Sisqo? Mystikal? Yeah, he dug pretty deep there. And the wierd addition of James Brown at the end (to whom even rapophobes will accord genius) gives the jig away. If he'd made Brown, rap's progenitor, one of the modernists' progenitors (one of the French symbolists, say) it would make some sense. The parallels Frazier mashes up for comic effect would jive. But they don't. He doesn't know, and doesn't care enough to get it right, or thinks he has to.

Besides, bling-bling? There's a fish in a barrel. You don't have to wield the sword of Eliot and Pound to take that apart, do you?

The subject is rap-as-poetry (better, rappers-as-poets), the target is champions of hip-hop, the audience is the middle-supposedly-high- brow readership of the New Yorker. That's where the contempt lies. Imagine Mr. Frazier pitching this to the Source. (the NYer published a long, terrific examination of Jay-Z by Kalefah Sanneh a while back. Strange, no?)

If there's ambivalence here, it may be that Frazier dislikes the Moderns, too, and that's his point. They were just as dumb as Sisqo. I doubt it.

I'm sorry, I can't agree. Instead of laughing, my hackles rose. My hackles, o.nate. Seriously. Hackles.

The piece is hilarious. Frazier's a good writer generally speaking. The target is, in fact, rap-as-poetry -- Pound & krew are brought in for comic contrast, not to be skewered -- and it's a fair target. As to "fish in a barrel" w/r/t bling-bling: NY is a mainstream publication. Rolling Stone et al routinely refrain from saying "This record is kinda funky, but wow, even the univerally-praised Jay-Z is almost utterly devoid of content." Frazier is on target.

If there's ambivalence here, it may be that Frazier dislikes the Moderns, too, and that's his point. They were just as dumb as Sisqo. I doubt it.

I think that is exactly his point. For one thing, did you notice how the supposedly "serious" poetry that he quoted was almost parodically bad? I mean "The bleak twigs overhead/In a full-hearted evensong" - come on, please, this is awful! Or "Thou has flayed us with thy blossoms"? If anything, he's being even harder on the "serious" poets than he is on James Brown - at least Brown's lyrics are about something we can relate to. Who even knows what a "quince" is, for Christ's sake?

'content'

"The Onion Herbert Kornfeld/Smoove B stuff is a far funnier piss-take on the hip-hop lexicon due to its obvious affection for it. "

"Bernard Manning's racist jokes are far funnier because he believes in them!"

Yes, this analogy doesn't work at all.

I think it's, you know, a joke. Frazier can find the idea of a bling bling Pound funny whether or not he likes or dislikes Pound or Jay-Z or both. I like Jay-Z a whole lot more than I do Pound, and I thought it was funny.

Thom is totally OTM, I retract my comment.

This week the New Yorker is featuring a longish profile piece on Mr. Dynamite, James Brown, himself, which I haven't read yet but it looks fairly adulatory. So perhaps the satire last week was some sort of heavy-handed attempt at editorial balance, as GCannon suggested. I still think that it was harder on the modernists though.