Trump and Education

PARAGRAPH: Donald Trump and the Education of America

The 21st century urges us to reconceptualize the meaning of education.  Laugh if you must at Donald Trump's foibles and his signature, signifying hair.  Sleep in anger as you dream of his mini-lectures and his offensive utterances.  Applaud, with appropriate trembling and fear, his bold articulations of the twisted ideas and values you hide in the privacy of your mind. Or, if you have a different mind, flush his utterances down the toilet of imagination.  From whatever angle you behold Trump, you have to admit that he is the contemporary and negative equivalent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a negative humanist.  He is having no little success in exploding and refashioning the American mind and the education of America.  He is teaching us that education is not confined to civil exchanges in spaces of academic pluralism.  On the contrary, education is what occurs in the public sphere of the American body politic or polis.  The Internet, Twitter, Facebook, and ideological blogs are the living textbooks we study.  We exercise our vernacular pieties and  vulgarities with democratic fervor.  Education is the conversation where people actually bleed as they teach and learn prejudice and counter-prejudice.  The conversation is driven more by emotion than reason; it is most assuredly a war among conservative, centrist, and liberal passions; the combat zone is an abject space where   envy, hatred, dubious assertions about what God said or did not say, and maximum distrust flourish like powerful weeds. In the education of America, the message is the medium and Donald Trump is neither a trope nor a metaphor. He is a tenured professor.  Never forget that, for if you do you become a candidate for your own enslavement.

chop

CHOP/THE WORLD/THE KWANSABA

 

Redmond, Treasure Shields. chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie  lou  hamer. Stow, Ohio: Winged City Chapbooks, 2015.

"Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience," Herbert Marcuse wrote in the conclusion of The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978), "a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle" (72).  Like other thinkers of his tribe, Marcuse reified the limits of the binary as he struggled to break free from its grip.  His dilemma is nicely refracted in the closing proposition of his lucid essay: "If the remembrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous historical revolutions" (73).  Echoing a bourgeois title to locate the conditional, he illuminates the suppressive force of language that imprisons one in "the established reality principle."  Is there no way out?  Yes, there is, but Marcuse stopped short of taking it.  Reality principles are not established or fixed; they are remarkably fluid.  Over a long period of time, a revolution first changes prevailing modes of thinking, which,  during another span of time,  changes the material conditions of human life.  Thus, Fannie Lou Hamer was a bit more perspicacious than Marcuse in understanding revolution.  She lived what he could only theorize.

As an engaged poet who wishes to open a hitherto rarely accessed dimension, Treasure Redmond is to be commended for crafting a collection of kwansabas as a tribute to one of the bravest women who ever lived in the Mississippi Delta.  chop is book that W. E. B. DuBois might have mentioned favorably in The Gift of Black Folk (1924).  Redmond took the challenge of contemporary poetics to be innovative in using a fixed form, the kwansaba; she also accepted the challenge of representing how the forms of things unknown functioned in Hamer's mind and in Hamer's  letting a light shine on the American body politic of the twentieth century.  In her introductory remarks for the collection, Redmond asserts that her intention was to let "the poems seek to work in concert using the economical nature of the Kwansaba form to get at what was most essential about Hamer's mammoth contribution to American life"(2).  chop is a remarkable fulfillment of that intention.

The collection is a practical touchstone for testing Marcuse's theory regarding aesthetic dimensions. The kwansaba, for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with the form, was invented by Eugene B. Redmond in 1995, and it is a form that demands discipline, craft and craftiness.  A kwansaba must have seven lines; each line must contain seven words; each word must have seven or fewer letters.  Many poets choose to write lines in their kwansabas that flow with minimal  internal punctuation, enabling readers to experience uninterrupted sweeps of sound.  Treasure Redmond, however, maximizes the implicit economy of the kwansaba, using short units of sound to imitate the syntactic/synchronic character of thought and the additive qualities of speech.  Consider five lines from "justice" (page 14):

 

we stay in holly springs. can't stay

in oxford.  awaiting trial like daniel. den

so loud we hear it 25 miles

away. sheriff, police, highway patrol namd law

breakr. they got cousins in the jury

Line 2 is the jewel .  The occurrence of a period between "daniel" and "den" is a rewarding disruption of our clichéd expectation ---daniel (in the lion's ) den; we are also sound-slammed into recognition of the hitherto unavailable by "den/so loud," momentarily hearing  the "din" in the  "den,"  a most accurate rendering of Mississippi Delta dialect.  One suspects that Redmond learned how to use dialect judiciously from the master poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and  Sterling A. Brown and from listening attentively to how talk sounds and means in some parts of Mississippi.

It unlikely that chop or any collection of modern poetry can or should escape the reality principles signified by language, because the dimensions the kwansabas open for us are not ahistorical.  Indeed, for readers who know little about Civil Rights history in Mississippi, a full appreciation of those dimensions might require surfing the Internet, or, reading For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) by Chana Kai Lee and other books about the unfinished struggles for civil and human rights in the American South.  The specific referents in the poems -----"winona /jail," "fannie, annie and vickie," "marlowe," "paps," and " 'lantic city," for example--and Redmond's chronological sampling from Hamer's life history test one's cultural literacy.

Readers will construct the aesthetic dimensions of chop in accordance with the knowledge or lack of knowledge they can use in negotiations with the kwansabas.  Much to her credit, Treasure Redmond demonstrates how the discipline of the kwansaba can move readers to have transformative aesthetic experiences in acquiring a more critical sense of America's  history.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

September 15, 2015

CHOP/THE WORLD/THE KWANSABA

 

Redmond, Treasure Shields. chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie  lou  hamer. Stow, Ohio: Winged City Chapbooks, 2015.

"Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience," Herbert Marcuse wrote in the conclusion of The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978), "a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle" (72).  Like other thinkers of his tribe, Marcuse reified the limits of the binary as he struggled to break free from its grip.  His dilemma is nicely refracted in the closing proposition of his lucid essay: "If the remembrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous historical revolutions" (73).  Echoing a bourgeois title to locate the conditional, he illuminates the suppressive force of language that imprisons one in "the established reality principle."  Is there no way out?  Yes, there is, but Marcuse stopped short of taking it.  Reality principles are not established or fixed; they are remarkably fluid.  Over a long period of time, a revolution first changes prevailing modes of thinking, which,  during another span of time,  changes the material conditions of human life.  Thus, Fannie Lou Hamer was a bit more perspicacious than Marcuse in understanding revolution.  She lived what he could only theorize.

As an engaged poet who wishes to open a hitherto rarely accessed dimension, Treasure Redmond is to be commended for crafting a collection of kwansabas as a tribute to one of the bravest women who ever lived in the Mississippi Delta.  chop is book that W. E. B. DuBois might have mentioned favorably in The Gift of Black Folk (1924).  Redmond took the challenge of contemporary poetics to be innovative in using a fixed form, the kwansaba; she also accepted the challenge of representing how the forms of things unknown functioned in Hamer's mind and in Hamer's  letting a light shine on the American body politic of the twentieth century.  In her introductory remarks for the collection, Redmond asserts that her intention was to let "the poems seek to work in concert using the economical nature of the Kwansaba form to get at what was most essential about Hamer's mammoth contribution to American life"(2).  chop is a remarkable fulfillment of that intention.

The collection is a practical touchstone for testing Marcuse's theory regarding aesthetic dimensions. The kwansaba, for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with the form, was invented by Eugene B. Redmond in 1995, and it is a form that demands discipline, craft and craftiness.  A kwansaba must have seven lines; each line must contain seven words; each word must have seven or fewer letters.  Many poets choose to write lines in their kwansabas that flow with minimal  internal punctuation, enabling readers to experience uninterrupted sweeps of sound.  Treasure Redmond, however, maximizes the implicit economy of the kwansaba, using short units of sound to imitate the syntactic/synchronic character of thought and the additive qualities of speech.  Consider five lines from "justice" (page 14):

 

we stay in holly springs. can't stay

in oxford.  awaiting trial like daniel. den

so loud we hear it 25 miles

away. sheriff, police, highway patrol namd law

breakr. they got cousins in the jury

Line 2 is the jewel .  The occurrence of a period between "daniel" and "den" is a rewarding disruption of our clichéd expectation ---daniel (in the lion's ) den; we are also sound-slammed into recognition of the hitherto unavailable by "den/so loud," momentarily hearing  the "din" in the  "den,"  a most accurate rendering of Mississippi Delta dialect.  One suspects that Redmond learned how to use dialect judiciously from the master poets Paul Laurence Dunbar and  Sterling A. Brown and from listening attentively to how talk sounds and means in some parts of Mississippi.

It unlikely that chop or any collection of modern poetry can or should escape the reality principles signified by language, because the dimensions the kwansabas open for us are not ahistorical.  Indeed, for readers who know little about Civil Rights history in Mississippi, a full appreciation of those dimensions might require surfing the Internet, or, reading For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999) by Chana Kai Lee and other books about the unfinished struggles for civil and human rights in the American South.  The specific referents in the poems -----"winona /jail," "fannie, annie and vickie," "marlowe," "paps," and " 'lantic city," for example--and Redmond's chronological sampling from Hamer's life history test one's cultural literacy.

Readers will construct the aesthetic dimensions of chop in accordance with the knowledge or lack of knowledge they can use in negotiations with the kwansabas.  Much to her credit, Treasure Redmond demonstrates how the discipline of the kwansaba can move readers to have transformative aesthetic experiences in acquiring a more critical sense of America's  history.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

September 15, 2015

Yi-Fen Chou Affair

The Yi-Fen Chou Affair

If Sherman Alexie had remembered good advice from Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince when he was deliberating about what to include in The Best American Poetry 2015, there would be no discussion in American poetry circles of the Yi-Fen Chou Affair.  Alexie would have used a universal truth, one that is useful in political practice and literary negotiations and especially powerful in dealing with the regressive conditions of life in the United States in 2015.  In Section XV of The Prince, Machiavelli proclaimed that "any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.  Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires."  If Alexie had applied this advice, Kwame Dawes would not have castigated Yi-Fen Chou (a.k.a. Michael Derrick Hudson) in a Prairie Schooner blog (see http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/blog/prairie-schooner-and-pseudonyms) for using "identity theft" in order to get the poem "The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve" published.  As matters stand, Hudson can smirk as many of his peers burn with anger and blame Alexie, and by association Dawes,  for exposing how aesthetic judgments are ultimately political ones.

To be sure, the progress of terrorism throughout the world and the ascent of systemic racism in the United States have more physical and moral gravity than the hoax of the Yi-Fen Chou Affair.  The Affair is a squall not a hurricane.  But for those of us who have the luxury of talking about ethnic American literature and of writing either inside or outside a range of literary traditions, the hoax is more than a small pest to be sprayed or swatted with eco-correct instruments.

I recall how Alan Sokal's 1996 publication of a nonsense article on "a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" in Social Text  fed popular disdain for the humanities and theory-enthralled cultural studies.  In the context of that memory, it angers me that Hudson might believe it is o.k. to steal the identity of a Chinese American and to exploit good faith efforts to embrace diversity and fairness in literary commerce.  Alexie's confessional essay "Sherman Alexie Speaks Out on the Best of American Poetry 2015" (see http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/ , September 7, 2015) is a rich illustration of the mind in pain. I am not angry with him for bending over backwards to be good.  Perhaps in an imagined future I shall thank him for intensifying my anger about the assumption among some (let me stress some and not all) self-fashioned white males and females that God blesses their entitlement to do and say whatever they please and not be held accountable.  Alexie urges us to "continue to debate The Yi-Fen Chou Problem."  Yes, Mr. Alexie I shall do so, remembering as Peter Johnson suggested that "heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination." [ see "Unravelling Foucault's 'different spaces', "History of the Human Sciences 19.4 (2006): 75-90]

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    September 12, 2015

 

September 7, 2015

 

September 7, 2015

(for Lenard D. Moore)

 

In those digital domains

worry did reign.

Labor's guilty light

gave summer day

to wintry sagas:

sentences strung in cursive,

the art work of hands

ennobling undocumented dirt,

tired feet, and  weary hearts.

Often, eyes contrite

in pain await

poetic  blessings

for the mechanical brain.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Centennials

CENTENNIALS

 

Thanks to the troublesome  "magic" of instant communication which informs us about  what happened prior to its spatial and temporal manifestations, we might  welcome the rest and recuperation that a centennial can offer.  Yet, remembering and reassessing  what happened one hundred years ago can only  make going from the new frying pan to an old skillet a paradoxical exercise in hopeful despair.

Consider this year's Margaret Walker Centennial, the shuttling between the strengthening message of "For My People" and the agony-laden news of "Jackson State, May 15, 1970." Implacable, absurdly hungry Death triumphs over the godless trinity of class, race, and gender in the twenty-first century. Rereading Walker is to suffer knowing our young are "Not rich with gold but priceless truths of life and death, of/ giving self and sharing love for this is all there is."  Lives of all colors matter, with or without hash tags, dog tags, car tags or tags period.  Margaret Walker was one of many poet/bridges between the oral traditions of the enslaved Africans  and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the multiethnic  break beat voices of 2015.  All, including refugees straight out of Syria, Palestine and Iraq,  are compelled to voice and revoice  Walker's closing stanza from "Jackson State...":

Now all may see their faces in a marble monument, and

                walk this plaza where they died in vain; but we will not

                forget, for nothing is the same; never ever be the same

                since that blue-reddened night.

The specific "where" in the stanza is Lynch Street  (named for John R. Lynch not for an obscene verb).  The name bleeds, however, in the fates of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas (1916) and  Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi (1955); it casts a lurid gloom on daily violence and death in the streets of the United States of America, in the global landscape.  Death must be proud of how effective it is in making our remembering of the past an uncanny projection of our futures as it clobbers John Donne's Holy Sonnet X: "Death be not proud."

After December 31, 2015, centennials may provide hours of hope and ancestral celebration for some African Americans and twelve months of anguish for others.  We can use what is left of free will to select angles of vision and revision. 2016 is time for remembering Alice Childress, John Oliver Killens, Frank Yerby, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  The population of ancestors to remember will be increased in 2017 by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ossie Davis, Thelonius Monk, Jacob Lawrence, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, Lena Horne, Bruce McMarion Wright, and Ella Fitzgerald.  I beg the unnamed and forgotten to pardon my lack of omniscience.

The spiritual centennial locus for 2017 shall be near Ferguson and its hypertension-inviting conditions --- East St. Louis, July 1917, replete with democratic  American hatred, riot, and death.  There people will be saturated with music, visual art, theatre, and poetry yoked  the  prose of Killens and Yerby from 2016.  People will recall how jazz swept the United States in 1917; that Freud published "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" and only 38 Negroes were lynched;  that migration was in motion as the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz recordings for somebody's Jazz Age,  and F. W. Mott proposed a theory of shell shock to account for the odd behaviors of some WWI soldiers.

If we are lucky, we may be renewed and empowered  from observing centennials.  May!!.  As with all things influenced by time and  the emotional gravity of moon and  sun, absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      September  4, 2015

 

Strong Readers Reading

STRONG READERS READING THE DIFFICULT LONG POEM

A metronome does not measure the pleasure of reading a long poem.  The pleasure exists, outside of time, in a reader's total aesthetic experience of bringing something to the poem and taking away much more than she or he arrived with.  Only  strong readers survive,  and some of them opt to transform knowledge gained  into actions.  Others hoard their intellectual wealth.   In American time-and-capital-driven cultures of reading, one might argue that becoming a strong reader is often a luxury enjoyed mainly by the incarcerated, for they are condemned to live in "abnormal" time. While they may open their readings to the sufferings of history, they do so without the Kabbalistic gestures Harold Bloom ascribes to strong readers in A Map of Misreading (1975).  They employ fierce independence and common sense.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Blue Fasa. New York: New Directions, 2015.

In Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), Mackey provided theoretical foundations for grasping why his poetic practice diverges from the orthodox frames of referentiality described in Stephen Henderson's groundbreaking Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973).  Nevertheless, attentive readers of this book can detect that Mackey's practice is not alien in the tension-marked dynamics of modern African American poetry.  The relatively uncanonized works of Russell Atkins and the canonized ones of Melvin B. Tolson, for example, are prototypes of what conservative academic  critics might judge to be the transgressions of Mackey's poetics.  They provide evidence that difference and difficulty are inherently normal in our poetic tradition, normal to the extent printed poetry can replay music.

 Aware that his work appeals most to a small,  specialized readership, Mackey warns in Discrepant Engagement against "the totalizing pretensions of canon formation"(3) and urges us not to dismiss  "reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend" (19). Ultimately, however,  we can account for where and why he is included by paralleling the critical efforts of Brian McHale, T. J. Anderson III,  and Aldon L. Nielsen with those of Carolyn Rodgers and Kalamu ya Salaam and using Amiri Baraka's writings on black music to walk the thin line between the blues and jazz that paradoxically includes what it excludes . Note well that paralleling is not identical with comparing. 

Do not take my word for it. Use independent  common sense to parallel

Anderson, T. J. , III. Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004.

Baraka, Amiri. Black Music.  New York: William Morrow, 1968.

McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rodgers, Carolyn M. "Black Poetry --Where It's At." Negro Digest (September 1969): 7-16.

ya Salaam, Kalamu.  The Sound(ing) of Black Poetry: A Study Guide to the Theory and History of Black Poetry (unpublished 1995)

[[Much of Kalamu ya Salaam's writing on poetry and music can be studied by accessing  the poet Rudolph Lewis's ChickenBones at   http://www.nathanielturner.com/kystable.htm and ya Salaam's "Breath of Life" at http://www.kalamu.com/bol .  We are deeply indebted to Lewis and ya Salaam  for their  unique efforts to document African American literature and culture.  It is unfortunate that academic pretensions "silence" their  contributions to literary and cultural discourses.]]

 

Prefaces or introductions to poetry books are often lightweight, but Nathaniel Mackey is generous and wise in making his preface heavy.  It is a tutorial for reading Blue Fasa that drops knowledge, that plies the slipping string.

The syntax of his prose is itself instructive:

 "Blue Fasa continues Nod House's continuation of Splay Anthem and the work that came before it, braiding the two serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and "Mu,"  It continues a long song that's one and more than one, "The/one song the songs all wanted in/on, all inwardness inside out.  The/ one song the songs, added or/ not, added up to, song any one song/ was," as "Song of the Andoumboulou: 68" puts it (xi)

Mackey painstakingly explains that the vibration one might hear in the music of Rahsaan Roland Kirk "brings multiple senses of string into play." Mackey takes care to position the words lyric/lyre/liar, so that his desire to integrate poetry and musicality is not lost upon his readers.  Neither is his yoking of the West African musical tradition of griot epic with Brazilian bossa nova.  Following his pull, a reader can swim in quantum (recall the string theory of contemporary physics) and the waters  of rag to reach the shore where the voices of refugees from history speak in Blue Fasa, where "the wandering 'we" of this if not every long song, this if not every long poem, especially this if not every serial poem, this extended lyric, dream and would usher in a new history" (xv). Strong readers will say we see what you are pulling our coats about. Reading Blue Fasa demands that we take small steps and savor the particles before we dare engage the whole.

Ultimately, we can read Mackey's Blue Fasa by willing ourselves to  think in jazz, by subordinating totalizing pretensions to what we will into being.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

September 2, 2015

 

to pimp an iceberg

TO PIMP AN ICEBERG

 

Gifford, Justin.  Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim.  New York: Doubleday, 2015.

 

In the first quarter of the 21st century, American literature and literary criticism have no immunity against the "viruses" that afflict the American body politic.  Indeed, it might be argued that as elements of culture, literature and criticism can be made to serve the interests of an imagined literary Center for Disease Control, the criticism being a Petri dish for growing intellectual viruses for covert experiments in the managing of American popular thinking.  A reading of Justin Gifford's biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr. (aka Robert Beck/aka Iceberg Slim) suggests the book has less-than-accidental kinship with the film "Straight Outta Compton," a Hollywood virus.     Under the guise of being legitimate expressions of popular culture, the film and the book achieve sinister, divisive ends.

Street Poison is a breezy life history which positions itself to canonize Iceberg Slim, rather than to present a judicious literary biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr. or Robert Beck.  It is a narrative of a commodified self-fashioned persona.  As the poet Dave Brinks said recently, we are now dealing with "magic materialism."  His quip points to the Spinglish usage of "magic realism" as a category for critical analysis, the gesture Justin Gifford makes in his effort to pimp an iceberg.  Gifford's alabaster motives, and those of other scholars who are complicit in servicing neogliberal agendas, warrant censure rather than censorship.  Despite the antics, the cacophony of the literary marketplace and cultural studies that affect all of us, a few of us have the ancestor-anointed right to standards of judgment and the pursuit of honesty.  To acknowledge that pimping occurs in international politics, academic discourses, the sex industry, and the conduct of everyday life is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for minimizing opposition to what is morally reprehensible. 

Gifford's book is predicated on an insulting, outrageous claim, for he wishes to argue that for nearly half a century "Robert Beck's works have quietly, from the underground, transformed African American literature and culture.  There would have been no street literature, no blaxploitation, no hip-hop they way we know them today without Pimp: The Story of My Life.  We might appreciate Beck's contributions to American life more fully if we consider the everyday people who he moved" (223). The automatic question Gifford refuses to answer is "Moved to do what, to think what?"

Without gagging on the oily reference of "we" in Gifford's claim, astute readers might indict him for incendiary rhetoric and profiling hyperbole in his cultural performance.  The history of African American literature and culture and their multi-leveled transformations must be told by way of principled explanations of accommodation, resistance, assimilation, and damnation of hegemony in the American public/literary sphere.  Gifford's claim is devoid of nuance.  It borders on thuggish arrogance.

Three key terms in the motivating claim Gifford proffers  for venerating if not canonizing Beck are underground, transform, and would have been no.  "Underground"[please listen to track #4 on Curtis Mayfield's album Roots (1971)]  ----underground is no exclusive African American location in the American cultural imagination.  It is the locus of Wall Street insider trading and Ponzi schemes, labor exploitation, health-threatening practices in the food industry, the drug traffic abetted by secret government agencies, the viciousness  which taints the music and entertainment corporations, and the protocols of fascism.  "Transform"  --any change for which Beck's writings can serve as a cause is not divorced from inter-ethnic struggles for human rights and equitable action and the companion ethnic discord in ideological trends.  "Would have been no" ---it is three inches beyond omniscience to proclaim that street or urban literature, hip-hop phenomena, and blaxploitation could not have developed without Beck's writings.  Gifford's claim is disingenuous.  

Despite his failure to apply due diligence in constructing a literary biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr (August 4, 1918-April 30, 1992), Gifford brings inevitable attention to links between  American writing and commercialized American sexualities.  He does depict arresting development and implacable abuse of women,  and he does model the pathology which is undermining the credibility of so-called mainstream cultural exploration.   Had he demonstrated greater awareness of the speculative, theoretical  work in Street Lit.: Representing the Urban Landscape (2014) and Susanne Dietzel's commentary on black literature and Holloway House in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Street Poison would be a stronger and more persuasive book.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

August 31, 2015