Tim Wood is the author of two books of poems, Otherwise Known as Home (BlazeVOX, 2010) and Notched Sunsets (Atelos, 2016). He is also co-editor of The Hip Hop Reader (Longman, 2008). His critical work on poetry and poetics can be found at ActionYes.org and Jacket2.org as well as in Convolution and Leviathan; his poetry reviews can be found at the Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and the Boston Review. In 2017, his poem “Marginalia Inter Alia” won The Elizabeth Curry Poetry Contest, and his poem “Shiki” was first-runner up for RHINO magazine’s Founder’s Award. He also had a poem included in Black Lives Have Always Mattered, A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives. Ed. Abiodun Oyewole, one of the original Last Poets. He holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from U.C. Berkeley and an M.F.A. in Poetry from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Tübingen in Germany from 2013 to 2014, where he taught courses on hip-hop as literature and on American poetry. He is currently a professor of English at SUNY Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. Address: New York
A common conception is that modernist poets had an affinity with new scientific approaches but li... more A common conception is that modernist poets had an affinity with new scientific approaches but little interest in the natural world. T.S. Eliot was an expatriated British banker, Ezra Pound was a cultured sophisticate (before he was a traitor institutionalized at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington D.C.), Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams was a doctor in the suburbs of New Jersey. As the story goes, high modernism arose from a rejection of Romanticism’s direct, emotional engagement with nature. The modernists defined themselves against Romanticism, preferring an urban and urbane imagism to the metaphysically tinged Sturm und Drang of the poet out on the heath. But noting the heady mix of dead leaves and autumn heat in the vibrant air of Eliot’s Four Quartets, or the autumn leaves and butterflies in Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” or the sea-clouds and watery radiance in Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” or a willow by the river in Williams’s “Willow Poem,” you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. These modernists write about nature with vivid avidity, but in ways distinct from Romantic conceptions of “the nature poem.”
Hejinian admonishes the “merely line-counting” reader that in “a proper sonnet ... something like... more Hejinian admonishes the “merely line-counting” reader that in “a proper sonnet ... something like resolution is achieved.” Sonnets remain “the summit of logicality”; in contrast, the poems in The Unfollowing “are intended to be illogical.” Hejinian’s demurrals compel us to view these poems as “against” or opposed to the very form that serves as ballast for Hejinian’s extraordinary poetic leaps. Yet, here I will argue for the idea that these poems are best understood as sonnets. The poems in this volume are profoundly engaged with the sonnet’s essential properties, one of those being its intricate logicality. Hejinian’s linguistic innovations and revelations, emotional protests and rebellions, formal insurgencies and mutinies, are best gleaned when read in terms of their radical instantiation of the sonnet form. As a sequence of sonnets, The Unfollowing enacts an artistic process that coincides with “a revolutionary practice of everyday life” (9). The Unfollowing extends the sonnet tradition, bringing it in contact with new ways of imagining self and culture, and providing other ways for the sonnet, not to mention lyric poetry more generally, to address both personal grief and cultural despair.
“The Message” (1982), hip-hop’s first anthem, ushered in a political aspect to hip-hop that remai... more “The Message” (1982), hip-hop’s first anthem, ushered in a political aspect to hip-hop that remains in the genre’s DNA. Responding to the political and social realities that eviscerated black and Latino communities in the Bronx during the 1970s, “The Message” is widely recognized for its searing poetic rendition of ghetto life. Yet, the song renders the ghetto in two distinct ways. The first part is a lyric, which displays a powerful poetic vision of the speaker’s experience “in the ghetto living second-rate”; the second part is the outro, a convention that has been used in many rap songs but rarely with such philosophical force. Dialectically opposed, the lyric presents the ghetto in a theater of sincerity; the outro re-presents it in the theater of the absurd. Taken together, this dialectical representation of the ghetto forges a trenchant ethical response to intractable social absurdities.
Melville’s centennial poem Clarel is the American epic about geography, the land, and SPACE. The ... more Melville’s centennial poem Clarel is the American epic about geography, the land, and SPACE. The poem is 18,000 lines, composed almost entirely in iambic tetrameter, most of it in rhyme. It is about a young theological student named Clarel taking a pilgrimage in the Holy Land. While Clarel debates major philosophical and religious questions with a coterie of eclectic companions, he traverses a sacred landscape and explores sites saturated with the fundamental myths upon which much of Western civilization is based. Comprised in large part of dialogic treatises that gain significance from the holy sites in which they occur, the plot of the poem may seem flimsy. But Clarel is not about what happens as much as it is about the landscape. Published in a highly limited run, the poem was barely reviewed. Neither Emerson nor Whitman mentioned Clarel. Nor did Stevens. Olson dismissed it as “that rosary of doubt” (Olson 89) where “Christ had contracted [Melville’s] vision” (86). According to him, Clarel, one of the longest poems in American literature, atrophies Melville’s imagination with its astringent religious undertones. Nevertheless, as the poem that traverses the ground of America’s literary imagination, Clarel is the kind of poem these writers seek.
In hip-hop, home is the vanishing point from which one measures the distance of one's exile. Loca... more In hip-hop, home is the vanishing point from which one measures the distance of one's exile. Locality has always been a defining feature of hip-hop's artistic expression, from the original DJs Bambaataa, Herc, and Flash carving up and remapping the South Bronx, to the revolution of gangsta rap straight outta Compton, to the reclamations of the genre to its musical and geographic roots in the Dirty South. At the same time, hip-hop is a music that moves as it "moves the crowd" (Rakim 1987). Not only by way of who and where it represents but also through its samples, appropriations, and allusions, hip-hop swaggers through a literary history that charts an experience of continuous migration beginning with the terror of forced transportation through the Middle Passage and then by the domestic exodus from the rural South to the urban North during the Great Migrations in the twentieth-century. In the context of constant migration, hip-hop's concept of "where you stay" becomes an unsettled point of arrival. When demarcated by the ghetto, this inertia forestalls continuous movement and becomes “the trap.” In contrast, the idea of home becomes an elsewhere, like the North Star or paradise, which continues to transform the conditions of struggle into the promise of possibility and reward. Nevertheless, home as a concept remains immanent. As Kevin Young (2012: 53) suggests, "[e]lsewhere is the goal of going – framed in the remapping of what's here"; and thus, the poetics of exile inherent in hip-hop exist between the desire to escape from "the place where we dwell" (Gang Starr 1992) to an elsewhere called home that can only be realized in the re-mapping, re-coordination, and re-origination of "where you're at." As nodes on either side of hip-hop's profound transformation from "old school" to "gangsta rap," "The Message" (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and the album Ready to Die (1994) by The Notorious B.I.G. show how the conception of "home" offers a continuous possibility of escape when there is no escape and a refuge from danger when there seems to be no end to trouble.
Within this slivered volume, published this past year by Atelos Press, the poems have been winnow... more Within this slivered volume, published this past year by Atelos Press, the poems have been winnowed from the original fifty-six down to thirty-one, and are now presented in terse, notched lines, scored and scarred by dashes. In the lines, both speech and body are anatomized; there are vacancies and interruptions, negative space created by strong enjambments, silences and room for breath in the abrupt, syncopated rhythms. The poems record a struggle to render an underlying desire that shaped a deep longing, with all its frustration, pain, and rage. The book is an attempt to refine a self by rendering emotions that had been trapped in “intimidating blocks” of words by “releasing them from their blocks into an open form.”
And so we begin with a title that promises an end or, maybe, an end to the end: Dropping Death. W... more And so we begin with a title that promises an end or, maybe, an end to the end: Dropping Death. Will this book death-drop Death? Or will it release Death to the public like an album? Will this book “drop” Death’s secrets on you? Or will it take Donne’s “Death, thou shalt die” to the next level and simply drop the subject, leaving Death in the dust?
A common conception is that modernist poets had an affinity with new scientific approaches but li... more A common conception is that modernist poets had an affinity with new scientific approaches but little interest in the natural world. T.S. Eliot was an expatriated British banker, Ezra Pound was a cultured sophisticate (before he was a traitor institutionalized at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington D.C.), Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive, and William Carlos Williams was a doctor in the suburbs of New Jersey. As the story goes, high modernism arose from a rejection of Romanticism’s direct, emotional engagement with nature. The modernists defined themselves against Romanticism, preferring an urban and urbane imagism to the metaphysically tinged Sturm und Drang of the poet out on the heath. But noting the heady mix of dead leaves and autumn heat in the vibrant air of Eliot’s Four Quartets, or the autumn leaves and butterflies in Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” or the sea-clouds and watery radiance in Stevens’s “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” or a willow by the river in Williams’s “Willow Poem,” you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. These modernists write about nature with vivid avidity, but in ways distinct from Romantic conceptions of “the nature poem.”
Hejinian admonishes the “merely line-counting” reader that in “a proper sonnet ... something like... more Hejinian admonishes the “merely line-counting” reader that in “a proper sonnet ... something like resolution is achieved.” Sonnets remain “the summit of logicality”; in contrast, the poems in The Unfollowing “are intended to be illogical.” Hejinian’s demurrals compel us to view these poems as “against” or opposed to the very form that serves as ballast for Hejinian’s extraordinary poetic leaps. Yet, here I will argue for the idea that these poems are best understood as sonnets. The poems in this volume are profoundly engaged with the sonnet’s essential properties, one of those being its intricate logicality. Hejinian’s linguistic innovations and revelations, emotional protests and rebellions, formal insurgencies and mutinies, are best gleaned when read in terms of their radical instantiation of the sonnet form. As a sequence of sonnets, The Unfollowing enacts an artistic process that coincides with “a revolutionary practice of everyday life” (9). The Unfollowing extends the sonnet tradition, bringing it in contact with new ways of imagining self and culture, and providing other ways for the sonnet, not to mention lyric poetry more generally, to address both personal grief and cultural despair.
“The Message” (1982), hip-hop’s first anthem, ushered in a political aspect to hip-hop that remai... more “The Message” (1982), hip-hop’s first anthem, ushered in a political aspect to hip-hop that remains in the genre’s DNA. Responding to the political and social realities that eviscerated black and Latino communities in the Bronx during the 1970s, “The Message” is widely recognized for its searing poetic rendition of ghetto life. Yet, the song renders the ghetto in two distinct ways. The first part is a lyric, which displays a powerful poetic vision of the speaker’s experience “in the ghetto living second-rate”; the second part is the outro, a convention that has been used in many rap songs but rarely with such philosophical force. Dialectically opposed, the lyric presents the ghetto in a theater of sincerity; the outro re-presents it in the theater of the absurd. Taken together, this dialectical representation of the ghetto forges a trenchant ethical response to intractable social absurdities.
Melville’s centennial poem Clarel is the American epic about geography, the land, and SPACE. The ... more Melville’s centennial poem Clarel is the American epic about geography, the land, and SPACE. The poem is 18,000 lines, composed almost entirely in iambic tetrameter, most of it in rhyme. It is about a young theological student named Clarel taking a pilgrimage in the Holy Land. While Clarel debates major philosophical and religious questions with a coterie of eclectic companions, he traverses a sacred landscape and explores sites saturated with the fundamental myths upon which much of Western civilization is based. Comprised in large part of dialogic treatises that gain significance from the holy sites in which they occur, the plot of the poem may seem flimsy. But Clarel is not about what happens as much as it is about the landscape. Published in a highly limited run, the poem was barely reviewed. Neither Emerson nor Whitman mentioned Clarel. Nor did Stevens. Olson dismissed it as “that rosary of doubt” (Olson 89) where “Christ had contracted [Melville’s] vision” (86). According to him, Clarel, one of the longest poems in American literature, atrophies Melville’s imagination with its astringent religious undertones. Nevertheless, as the poem that traverses the ground of America’s literary imagination, Clarel is the kind of poem these writers seek.
In hip-hop, home is the vanishing point from which one measures the distance of one's exile. Loca... more In hip-hop, home is the vanishing point from which one measures the distance of one's exile. Locality has always been a defining feature of hip-hop's artistic expression, from the original DJs Bambaataa, Herc, and Flash carving up and remapping the South Bronx, to the revolution of gangsta rap straight outta Compton, to the reclamations of the genre to its musical and geographic roots in the Dirty South. At the same time, hip-hop is a music that moves as it "moves the crowd" (Rakim 1987). Not only by way of who and where it represents but also through its samples, appropriations, and allusions, hip-hop swaggers through a literary history that charts an experience of continuous migration beginning with the terror of forced transportation through the Middle Passage and then by the domestic exodus from the rural South to the urban North during the Great Migrations in the twentieth-century. In the context of constant migration, hip-hop's concept of "where you stay" becomes an unsettled point of arrival. When demarcated by the ghetto, this inertia forestalls continuous movement and becomes “the trap.” In contrast, the idea of home becomes an elsewhere, like the North Star or paradise, which continues to transform the conditions of struggle into the promise of possibility and reward. Nevertheless, home as a concept remains immanent. As Kevin Young (2012: 53) suggests, "[e]lsewhere is the goal of going – framed in the remapping of what's here"; and thus, the poetics of exile inherent in hip-hop exist between the desire to escape from "the place where we dwell" (Gang Starr 1992) to an elsewhere called home that can only be realized in the re-mapping, re-coordination, and re-origination of "where you're at." As nodes on either side of hip-hop's profound transformation from "old school" to "gangsta rap," "The Message" (1982) by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and the album Ready to Die (1994) by The Notorious B.I.G. show how the conception of "home" offers a continuous possibility of escape when there is no escape and a refuge from danger when there seems to be no end to trouble.
Within this slivered volume, published this past year by Atelos Press, the poems have been winnow... more Within this slivered volume, published this past year by Atelos Press, the poems have been winnowed from the original fifty-six down to thirty-one, and are now presented in terse, notched lines, scored and scarred by dashes. In the lines, both speech and body are anatomized; there are vacancies and interruptions, negative space created by strong enjambments, silences and room for breath in the abrupt, syncopated rhythms. The poems record a struggle to render an underlying desire that shaped a deep longing, with all its frustration, pain, and rage. The book is an attempt to refine a self by rendering emotions that had been trapped in “intimidating blocks” of words by “releasing them from their blocks into an open form.”
And so we begin with a title that promises an end or, maybe, an end to the end: Dropping Death. W... more And so we begin with a title that promises an end or, maybe, an end to the end: Dropping Death. Will this book death-drop Death? Or will it release Death to the public like an album? Will this book “drop” Death’s secrets on you? Or will it take Donne’s “Death, thou shalt die” to the next level and simply drop the subject, leaving Death in the dust?
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they occur, the plot of the poem may seem flimsy. But Clarel is not about what happens as much as it is about the landscape. Published in a highly limited run, the poem was barely reviewed. Neither Emerson nor Whitman mentioned Clarel. Nor did Stevens. Olson dismissed it as “that rosary of doubt” (Olson 89) where “Christ had contracted [Melville’s] vision” (86). According to him, Clarel, one of the longest poems in American literature, atrophies Melville’s imagination with its astringent religious undertones. Nevertheless, as the poem that traverses the ground of America’s literary imagination, Clarel is the kind of poem these writers seek.
Book Reviews by Tim Wood
they occur, the plot of the poem may seem flimsy. But Clarel is not about what happens as much as it is about the landscape. Published in a highly limited run, the poem was barely reviewed. Neither Emerson nor Whitman mentioned Clarel. Nor did Stevens. Olson dismissed it as “that rosary of doubt” (Olson 89) where “Christ had contracted [Melville’s] vision” (86). According to him, Clarel, one of the longest poems in American literature, atrophies Melville’s imagination with its astringent religious undertones. Nevertheless, as the poem that traverses the ground of America’s literary imagination, Clarel is the kind of poem these writers seek.