In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire,  which she  ultimately consummates . She does so via the aid of her nurse, a maternal caregiver who embodies the trope of the “bawd,” or one who prostitutes others. While Myrrha’s mother is away participating in a fertility festival (oh, irony of ironies), Myrrha’s nurse leads her to Cinryas’s bed, lying by omission by telling him that someone “about / The age of Myrrha” wishes to lie with him (10.504-5). There, under the obfuscating guise of night, taboo becomes actualized.

Ultimately, Cinyras discovers the truth, leading Myrrha – heavy with her father’s child – to flee. After wandering far from home, she is stricken with indecision, “Not knowing,” the poet tells us, “what she might desyre, distrest between the feare / Of death, and tediousnesse of lyfe” (10.552-3). In kind, I suggest, with her irreconcilable desire to be a daughter-lover, she prays that the gods place her in an equally liminal state of life-death:

O Goddes, […]
How bee it to th’ entent
That neyther with my lyfe the quick, nor with my death the dead
Anoyed bee, from both of them exempt mee this same sted,
And altring mee, deny to mee both lyfe and death.     

(10.552-9)

Just as her desire for Cinyras contains both eros and storge (i.e. familial love), Myrrha aims to atone for her transgressions by becoming something similarly in-between. Thus begins her “Ovidian petrification” into a Myrrh tree (Bate 187). I argue that, as an in-between subject/object, Myrrha is able, for the first time in her episode, to truly express herself. Paradoxically, she becomes freed from the constraint of either/or – of words or silence – gaining more expressive power than ever before.

To this point, in Arthur Golding’s (1567) and Frank Justus Miller’s (1916) translations of the Metamorphoses as well as in the original Latin (circa 8 AD), Myrrha’s metamorphosis is marked with two identical linguistic shifts. In the first case, despite the total restriction placed on Myrrha’s speech after becoming a tree, Golding’s translation concedes “[y]it weepeth she” (my emphasis 10.574). A few lines later, the poet begins,

But woordes wherwith to tell
And utter foorth her greef did want. She had no use of speech
With which Lucina in her throwes shee might of help beseech.

But then, he concludes,

Yit like a woman labring was the tree, and bowwing downe
Gave often sighes, and shed foorth teares as though shee there should drowne.

(my emphasis 10.580-4)

In both instances, the poet explicates Myrrha’s inability to express herself as she used to due to a loss of “senses” (10.573). What the poet means by this word, however, is appropriately unclear, as Myrrha is still in possession of her mind and sensory apparatuses – she feels “greef,” gives “sighes,” and sheds no end of “teares.” However, through such pained bows and grievous sighs – actions that are at once gendered (“like a woman labring”) and vegetal-kinesthetic – Myrrha successfully beckons Lucina, who then supplies “woordes of ease” and facilitates her labor (10.586). In this moment, the ineffable finds its venting place not through language but through a “repertoire of embodied practice,” including bodily gesture and fluids (i.e. myrrh-tears) (Taylor 18). I argue that Ovid’s Myrrha episode makes a case not for the power of speech or silence but of a third, liminal mode of communication: non-verbal, bodily self-expression. This is but one of several ways that the episode gestures toward ways of living and being otherwise when we attend to liminality.

In nearly all of the metamorphoses illustrated throughout Ovid’s poem, as Heather James summarizes, the “absolute powers” that instigate them “repeatedly visit one special punishment and torture on their victims: that of silence” (7-8). In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, silence is frequently defined in relation to human speech – silence strips one’s ability to vocalize and, specifically, voice the ways in which they have been wronged. Given that Ovid was ultimately exiled from the Roman empire (ostensibly as a reaction to his publication of sexually explicit poems), his ruminations on speech and silence have immediate social and political significance. James argues that his major contribution to political thought during the English Renaissance was “his conception of poetry as a site in which parrhesia [i.e. bold, open, ‘free’ speech]could persist even within the limiting structures of empire and […] insist on the liberties of citizen-subjects” (7). However, I suggest that Ovid’s poetry, particularly his Myrrha episode, develops a rather more capacious sense of self-expression wherein speech and silence occupy either ends of a spectrum whose middle zone teems with potential.

Following Myrrha’s incestuous scelus nefas, or “crime of indescribable dimensions,” she is metamorphosed into a myrrh tree and thusly “silenced,” but she is not simply disempowered (Lehmann 104). Rather, her transformation makes it necessary for her to rely on different methods of self-expression – something in between the utterance of “woordes” and stark silence – akin to what Diana Taylor calls the “repertoire.” Where the Metamorphoses most explicitly binarizes speech and silence, Taylor’s study charts Western hierarchizations of the archive (i.e. supposedly permanent materials, such as writing) over the repertoire (i.e. ephemeral forms of knowledge such as dance or ritual). Where her work overlaps with the present argument is in its assertion that the archive and repertoire, though often thought of as such, do not actually constitute a binary:

The relationship between archive and repertoire […] is certainly not sequential (the former ascending to prominence after the latter, […]. Nor is it true versus false, mediated versus unmediated, primordial versus modern. Nor is it a binary. […] We need not polarize the relationship between these different kinds of knowledges to acknowledge that they have often proved antagonistic in the struggle for cultural survival or supremacy. (22)

As is true of any dichotomy, uncritical endorsement of a speech/silence binary eclipses the force of tree-Myrrha’s repertoire, namely her vegetal-bodily movements and material secretions. Beyond simply calling Lucina’s attention, tree-Myrrha’s liminal expression even elicits the goddess’s pity, inspiring her to alleviate her pain. These expressive forces are not only powerful, proving just as efficacious for Myrrha as words (if not more), but they can be recuperated by sensitive reading practices which, in turn, can yield new insights about the world. To contend with these forces, the Metamorphoses asks us to linger with liminality – that which crops up in between the clearly defined zones of binaries – and attend to the ontological possibilities to which I believe it gestures.

 Ovid, Publius Naso. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567. Edited by John Frederick Nims, Translated by Arthur Golding, Paul Dry Books, 2000.
*All forthcoming references to the poem will be to this edition.

 Bate, Jonathon. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2011, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183242.001.0001.

Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 1–52, https://doi-org.libezproxy2.syr.edu/10.1215/9780822385318.

James, Heather. Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theater. Translated by Erik Butler, Routledge, 2016.

Image:

Marcantonio Franceschini – The Birth of Adonis, 1690 public domain image

MLA Citation (I think?): ‘Birth of Adonis’, oil on copper painting by Marcantonio Franceschini, c. 1685-90, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.jpg

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Not only do I think Citizen is simply a beautiful collection of work, but it is also a fantastic pedagogical tool for teaching students the imperatives of race and racial projects. This semester, I’ve been teaching the English department’s 100 level course on Race and Literary Texts. For many of my students, my class is the first time they’ve explicitly discussed race in an academic space. We’ve spent much of the semester discussing the ways that anti-blackness is an ongoing project in the United States. We’ve looked at films such as Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and even The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. I think Citizen has been impactful for connecting the institutional and structural dimensions of racial discrimination to the isolated moments, conversations, and interactions that students see in their own lives.

One of the reasons why I think Citizen is so effective as a teaching tool is because it is a multimedia experience. Claudia Rankine collaborated with her husband John Lucas on a number of  “Situation Videos,” to accompany the text. In the classroom, the situation videos are equally instructive, if not more so. For example, Situation 6 “Stop-and-Frisk” visually and sonically demonstrates how anti-black racism shapes the everyday lives of Black people. In the video, we view two Black young men shopping for clothing. The footage of them trying on clothing is overlaid with red and blue police lights. As viewers watch the Black men move through the store viewing and purchasing items, they also hear police sirens, as well as Rankine reading her poem “Stop-and-Frisk.” Upon showing the video to my students, they told me that they expected to see something much worse in the video, such as a display of police violence, and were surprised that the video simply depicted the young Black men shopping. My students were surprised by the melancholy, monotone tone Rankine employs to recite the words. This wasn’t the affect they expected from a poem detailing a violent encounter with the police. In the short film, they took note of Rankine’s repetition of the lines “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description / because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (Rankine 106). All these elements together solidified for my students the ways in which criminalization, policing, and surveillance are integrated into the everyday lives of Black people. As they articulated to me, Situation Video 6 demonstrates that Black people can become subjects of violence at any moment. Our conversation about these elements was incredibly generative.

However, as a Black woman, reading and teaching Citizen is difficult. It’s hard, and it’s wearing. When I read, I feel the narrator’s exhaustion, or, perhaps, become increasingly aware of my own. I find myself attempting to breathe along with the narrator’s every “sigh.” (Rankine 59). I’ve read the book four or five times, and the more I read it, the more I struggle to get through it. The microaggressions described in the book are numerous, yet nearly every situation mirrors moments in my own life. The poems are reminders of the racist actions and comments I’ve received for simply existing in primarily white spaces. Every time I read the book, I’m confronted with just how invisible I can be in many spaces I inhabit. How much anti-blackness I’ve been made to brush off and how much I’ve internalized despite my best efforts.

In reading Citizen, confronting my own deep sadness for the innumerable lives lost due to anti-black violence is unavoidable. Each time I’ve sat down to read the book in full, Rankine’s poem, “July 29-August 18, 2014 / Making Room,” increases in length. This is a poem which ends by repeating “In Memory of,” listing numerous, recognizable names of Black men and women who have been murdered by police. And while this list only consisted of Jordan Russell Davis, Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown’s names when I read it in fall 2014, the book has continually been reprinted to include more and more names. When we discussed the poem in class, my students were in awe of the fact that this list now includes over 30 household names. The list of those we must mourn only keeps getting longer.

This time around, the difficulty with reading Citizen is compounded by another anxiety: While the book has been generative and eye opening for some students, I worry that reading the book may be an added burden for my most vulnerable students. I worry that that they too struggle to get through the book. I worry that rather than affirming my Black students and other students of color, reading Citizen instead requires them to confront the racism they experience every day. I worry that while discussing Citizen offers white students an opportunity to exercise and explore their capacity for empathy, it only demonstrates to my Black students insights they already knew.

In my last Broadly Textual post, I began to question how we handle Black trauma inside cinema’s depictions of enslavement. This week, I question the best way to manage and negotiate the circulation of Black trauma in our classrooms. I think that our conversations around Citizen must always keep in mind the intersecting racial and gender dynamics of the classroom. Engaging Citizen requires holding space for our most vulnerable students, without putting them on the spot, or positioning them as objects of study. Teaching Citizen might require us to reach out to students and offer words of encouragement. It might even require sharing our own reservations and struggles with the subject of the text. While I’ve outlined here how Citizen can be an effective means to engage students on the topic of anti-black racism, teaching it involves a certain amount of precarity. While I’m still working out answers to my question, what I do know is that educators should always listen carefully to responses from their students of color, never taking for granted how closely Citizen might mirror their everyday lives.

^[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpREs2WTbWA

^[2] Still from Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’s Situation Video 6, “Stop-and-Frisk” https://vimeo.com/157537847

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Her poetry exemplifies the neoclassical poetic style of her day with excellence, but despite her literary genius, most white Americans chose not to believe that she had produced her own poems. The only book-length version of her poetry published during her lifetime appeared in London, as several attempts to solicit subscribers in America had failed.[1] There is even a much-circulated quote by Thomas Jefferson in which he outright denies the poetic value of her work: “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whatley [sic] but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”[2]

Wheatley was clearly a living challenge to the racist logic of her time and place. Undoubtedly, her physical safety and ability to publish, was highly dependent on masking any such challenge that she might pose in her writing. Many people, including Amiri Baraka of the Black Arts Movement,  have interpreted her poetry as being acquiescent to her owners’ religion and culture. One of the beautiful things about skilled poets, however, is their fine attention to the subtle details of diction, sound, syntax and punctuation, and their ability to make slight alternations in these elements to dramatically change the meaning of a sentence or word. Needless to say, Wheatley’s criticism of hypocritical Christian slaveholders is noticeable to careful and willing readers.[3]

To understand the subversive elements in her poetry, it’s important to recognize the constraints she was writing under: the neoclassical style[4] used in Wheatley’s poetry, which was an Enlightenment reaction to the fancy and imagination of Renaissance poetry, was characterized by its rationalism, didacticism, and realism. Neoclassical poetry followed strict formal rules and was characteristically devoid of the poet’s feelings, sentiments, and imagination, preferring instead to focus on the harsh realities of the world with an eye toward practical and rational instruction and action.[5] Unless one reads between the lines of convention in Wheatley’s poetry, there is little to glean about her interior life. This brings us to the beauty and compassion of the 2020 poetry collection The Age of Phillis by American poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.

Jeffers’s poetry is a lyrical reimagining of Wheatley’s biography—what writer Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation, or writing that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional storytelling.[6] This poetic rendition of Wheatley’s life not only engages with prominent critical readings of the subversive elements in her poetry, but it also imaginatively fills in the personal details and emotions that are missing in the white-authored historical accounts of her life. In addition to the poetry, Jeffers gives a non-fiction account of her own investigative research on Wheatley, providing very convincing evidence to suggest that the definitive source for Wheatley scholarship in American history is likely authored by a person who did not exist (a supposed friend of the Wheatley’s, Margaretta Matilda Odell) and contains erroneous and speculative information, namely surrounding Odell’s account of the poet as a sycophant of white culture and Wheatley’s husband John Peters (a free Black man) as a swindler.[7] In my opinion, this investigative historical work would make a great Netflix series if someone isn’t on it already!

Anyway, let’s look at a poetic example of how beautifully and hauntingly Jeffers renders Wheatley’s life and poetry. Many of the poems in Jeffers’s book reference Wheatley’s published poems and letters, so let’s examine one of Wheatley’s most-well known and most controversial poems: “On Being Brought from AFRICA to AMERICA”. The completely capitalized country names are true to the original manuscript but are not often carried through in later printings. However, they are one of the important subversive elements. Here is the full poem:

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

This poem contains common elements of neoclassical style, namely heroic couplets,[8] a consistent meter of iambic pentameter, Biblical references, and an instructional tone in the last two lines. On the surface, this poem appears to be an admission of the poet’s gratitude for having been brought from Africa to America, a vindication of both Christianity and the slave trade. This is how many people read it at the time and throughout history, and of course the ease of this reading is what allowed this poem to be so popular in the first place.

However, if one looks at this with a poet’s eye, there are many details that suggest an alternate reading. I suggest Mary Catherine Loving’s excellent article on subversion in this poem, from which I will point out some of the more prominent evidence.[9] First of all, according to grammatical rules of the time, capitalization and italics were important for denoting words of particular importance in a poem, and capitalization was a necessity for names and appellations of God. Wheatley chose to capitalize both the country of her birth and America, putting them on equal ground, and although she was often seen as an exceptional anomaly of the Black race with her history obscured in accounts of her life, she chooses to acknowledge her origin in the title. This alignment of herself with her homeland and challenge of Christianity continues throughout the poem—all five of the italicized and capitalized words in the poem are key to this move in which she uses emphasis in order to invert meaning. In the first line, “mercy” appears to refer to God, but without the capitalization, it refers to the Christian or Christian-backed slaveholders who literally “brought” her to America. In this way, the italics of “Pagan” is a kind of censure of white labelling of her homeland. It is the Middle Passage which she is indirectly speaking about in this first couplet, and it is this horrible journey filled with death, starvation and rape that taught her “benighted soul” to understand. One meaning of the word “benighted” means to be surrounded by and preyed upon by darkness, similar to her abduction from Africa. Again, notice the mocking tone with the italicized “Saviour”. The region of Africa where Wheatley likely came from did not believe in a trinity (with a savior separate from God). The colon at the end of line three indicates that there is more to this thought, she acknowledges a time before her abduction when she neither knew nor sought redemption—again redemption, echoing mercy, has no capitalization. I’ll let you have a look at Loving’s article if you’re interested in more of these details.

What’s especially interesting is how Jeffers foregrounds this subversion and critiques surface readings of Wheatley’s poetry in the first of her poems, which builds on the idea of mercy: “An Issue of Mercy #1”.[10] The first three lines of this poem read:

Mercy, girl.
What the mother might have said, pointing

at the sun rising, what makes life possible.”

Jeffers refers back to one of the only recorded memories that Wheatley had of her childhood in Africa—watching her mother prostrate herself before the first beam of morning sun (likened to the sunrise ceremony of the Moslem faith in the part of Africa where Wheatley was abducted).[11] Later in the poem, the speaker reframes “mercy” saying:

Perhaps it was mercy,
Dear Reader.

Mercy
Dear Brethren.

By choosing to both capitalize and not capitalize “mercy”, the speaker plays with the idea of mercy being a deity—she appears to be asking whether one’s choice to put emphasis on the lack of capitalization in Wheatley’s poem has to do with one’s position as a reader or one’s position as a Christian, part of a “brethren” or male religious order. Jeffers is able to be more forthright with her criticism of hypocritical Christian slaveholders and her description of the Middle Passage:

Journey.
Let’s call it that.

Let’s lie to each other.

Not early descent into madness.
Naked travail among filth and rats.

And after evoking the sorrowful imagery of Wheatley’s mother in Africa speculating on the fate of her stolen daughter, Jeffers ends the poem by repeating the first two words of Wheatley’s poem and invoking the long American history of lies about the lives and humanity of enslaved peoples with two very casual but indicting lines:

‘Twas mercy.
You know the story—

how we’ve lied to each other.

Jeffers begins the poem with the capitalized deity Mercy of Wheatley’s homeland in Africa and her mother’s sunrise ritual, and ends the poem with the small mercy of America—the supposed mercy of Christian slaveholders. In all of the poems in this collection, Jeffers infuses Wheatley’s life with the ghosts of her African past; she paints deeply moving images of the struggles of a genius black child in a racist white world; and she offers biting censure of a long history of American lies.

[1] It was common at that time for poets to acquire funding through subscriptions prior to publication. 

[2] Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1781.

[3] Erkkila, Betsy. “Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution.” A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, edited by Frank Shuffelton. Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 225-240.

Loving, MaryCatherine. “Uncovering Subversion in Phillis Wheatley’s Signature Poem: “On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2016, p. 67-74.

[4] Neoclassical specifically refers to a rebirth of classicism, and in terms of poetry, to the authorial styles of ancient Greece and Rome, specifically those of the Augustus age of Rome including Horace, Virgil, and Ovid.

[5] https://owlcation.com/humanities/Neoclassical-Poetry-Definition-and-Characteristics-of-Neoclassical-Poetry#:~:text=Rationalism%20is%20the%20most%20essential,intellect%2C%20not%20fancy%20and%20imagination.

[6] Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008, p. 1-14.

[7] Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne. The Age of Philis. Wesleyan University Press, 2020, p. 180.

[8] In heroic couplets, every set of two lines in the poem has strong end rhyme.

[9] Loving, Ibid.

[10] https://poems.com/poem/an-issue-of-mercy-1/

[11] Loving. Ibid, p. 71.

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While navigating Tsushima island, players occasionally come across serene vistas and are given the option to sit before them and compose a haiku. When players choose to do so, Jin sets his swords down before himself and kneels, observing the landscape. The screen then displays an idea for players to “reflect on”; this will serve as the guiding theme for the haiku. Players’ normal freedom of movement is restricted—in these moments of haiku composition, they control only the camera, observing elements of nature to glean inspiration. Adhering to the 5-7-5 syllable structure, the game presents players with three options for each of the poem’s three lines. So, players aren’t themselves writing the haiku as much as structuring it from predetermined phrases.

In the above example video, of the many possible combinations, I constructed this haiku based around the theme of “strength:”

The final defense
Death’s call is sharp and biting
I yearn for guidance

‘Jogaku Haiku,’ found in northern Kamiagata

At this point, I must address that Tsushima’s haiku aren’t great—but that doesn’t mean that they’re not meaningful. I recommend Ian Walker’s excellent interview^[3] with haiku expert Jim Kacian regarding Tsushima’s poetic shortcomings. Kacian points out that because Tsushima offers players variation, its haiku often come out discordant and unfocused, fulfilling the 5-7-5 structure and adhering to a given theme, but rarely if ever presenting haiku that are artful beyond “the most superficial and populist sense.” I think the haiku I put together above exemplifies this well enough: while there’s a sense of foreboding, the ties between the three lines seem tenuous. The blanks can more or less be filled in by the context of their being themed around strength, but none of these lines meaningfully or directly engage with one another—at least not with the degree of nuance and poetic prowess that a critic like Kacian would expect. But the meaning that I as a player (taking on the role of Jin Sakai) draw from the poem is contextualized by other elements of the game and its narrative.

The opportunity to craft this particular haiku does not appear until later in the game, when things are most dire: terrible betrayals and tragic murders have transpired. The player finds themselves geographically isolated as the war effort has driven them to the wintry north into territory overrun by Mongol forces, and Jin as a character has become psychologically distant from an uncle who, throughout much of the game, served as a mentor. While, in isolation, the above haiku isn’t much to speak of, each line reflects experiences that the player has through Jin as their avatar. From here on, I’ll be referencing my personal interpretations of the game’s story. While all players of Tsushima meet the same characters and fight the same battles, the ambiguity of the haiku will undoubtedly evoke different meanings for different players. So, the haiku’s first line, “The final defense” most obviously reminds me of the ongoing war, as in the moment I composed the haiku the game’s plot was building toward a final confrontation with its antagonist. The line “Death’s call is sharp and biting” evoked the wintry climate featured throughout this portion of the game, as well as the game’s heightened difficulty at this point, as the Mongol forces confront the player with greater numbers, more heavily armored and armed than ever before. And finally, “I yearn for guidance” refers to Jin’s sense of directionlessness after ideologically conflicting with his uncle about tactics and the defense of Tsushima island’s people—at this point in the game Jin and the player alike are unsure of if Tsushima island can, in fact, be successfully defended.

The video linked earlier shows the different choices that I could have made while constructing this haiku. For example, the first line could have read “Falling forever,” connoting a greater sense of hopelessness than my eventual choice of “The final defense” which, while still dire, makes successfully resisting the invasion sound more like a serious possibility. Likewise, the middle line could have been “The mind recalls the teachings.” That line may have better fit into the idea of Jin being distant from his familial mentor, flowing more effectively into the final line of “I yearn for guidance.” However, I preferred the middle line as “Death’s call is sharp and biting” because the roughness of the transition into “I yearn for guidance” reflects a greater sense of desperation. This way, instead of the haiku illustrating Jin’s conflict with his uncle, it focuses on the dangers of the war with the Mongols itself, concluding with an admission that Jin needs guidance in some form to navigate the war.

With all of that said, there remains one other essential contextualization of Tsushima’s haiku: spatiality. As a video game, Tsushima’s audience has an interesting relationship with space. Players aren’t reading descriptions of Japanese forests, or viewing carefully orchestrated cinematography that utilizes tree trunks to create a sense of depth—players are walking through the forest themselves, circling trees and seeing the grass rustle underfoot as they choose to steer off of the beaten path.

In their 2009 book The Spatial Turn, Barney Warf and Santa Arias compiled essays which explores a recent cross disciplinary shift within the humanities, a turning of attention to “a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction.”^[4] The game mechanics behind Tsushima’s haiku participate in this reframing of human presence within the landscape. As I’ve described, players come across opportunities to compose haiku while roaming the island. In that alone, there resides an interesting association between the composition of poetry and moments of discovery. But, more important, during the process of choosing the poem’s three lines, the options are anchored to points of the landscape; the player chooses each line by turning the camera toward it, and by extension the object that backgrounds it. In the earlier video example, “The final defense” was situated upon a rock standing sturdily among ocean waves; “Death’s call is sharp and biting” was situated upon Jin’s swords; “I yearn for guidance was situated” upon a mountaintop temple. Alternative lines, such as “Falling forever” and “The mind recalls the teachings” were respectively situated among the stormy sky and Jin’s head. The example video’s fixation on Jin’s swords and body is actually an exception—most of the game’s haiku focus exclusively on natural environments. These moments where Jin, as a character, reflects upon his situation within the war, double as opportunities for the player to reflect upon their overall experience with the game. The primary way that this occurs is by foregrounding visual elements of the game that players often take for granted.

Ambushing Mongol forces in forests and riding on horseback from fortress to fortress across the land, players of Tsushima see thousands of trees. During the action, players’ eyes are constantly drawn to Jin’s body, his blades, and the Mongol bodies they battle against through Jin as their avatar. While the backdrops of Tsushima are consistently beautiful, they’re seldom the focus. During instances of haiku composition, however, the camera is displaced from Jin, focusing often on trees and waterfalls, spotlighting the exquisite visual detail modern video games are capable of. The game’s haiku not only reflect Jin and the players’ personal journey through the game’s spaces and narratives, but also draw close attention to elements of the landscape that generally go overlooked. Although Ghost of Tsushima’s poetry is not particularly artful in the conventional sense, it provides noteworthy moments of meditation to break up the action. Given the game’s popularity, it has surely introduced a new generation of players to the haiku as a poetic form.

For those interested, here’s a compilation of many other haiku found throughout the game:

^[1] https://gamerant.com/ghost-tsushima-6-5-million-sales-march-2021/

^[2] https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/03/05/ghost-of-tsushima-developers-named-official-tourism-ambassadors

^[3] https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/i-asked-an-expert-to-read-my-ghost-of-tsushima-haiku-he-wasnt-impressed/amp/

^[4] Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2009, p. 1.

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Pictured above are Google Trends’ statistics for the searches “rap poetry” and “is rap poetry,” charting data from January 1st 2004 (the earliest date available) to the night of April 28th 2021. Google doesn’t provide actual numerical values for how many people searched at any given moment. Instead, these graphs provide relative percentages; so, where the line peaks at “100” on either chart marks when the search terms were most popular, and all the other values are scaled relative to that moment. It’s noteworthy that simply adding the word “is” before “rap poetry”—utilizing sentence form—reveals durations along the 0% bottom portion of the chart, where virtually nobody searched the phrase. “Rap poetry” by itself, however, is more consistent. The graph remains jagged, but rarely reaches 0%. The stability of the simpler search term “rap poetry” reveals a key element of how opinions on the matter are transmitted online: promptness overrules context. As I’m going to show, Google Search itself abides by that rule—but these graphs depict only the search terms that users enter. Over the last seventeen years that people have looked up whether or not rap is considered poetry, they’ve often refrained typing the two-letter query “is.”

I don’t begrudge this, however—my Google searches are usually just as lazy. It’s the nature of the search engine as a medium. “Asking” Google questions in full sentence form will likely yield less useful search results than concentrating on key terms, as the search engine itself (though always getting better at its job via machine learning) is not truly intelligent or capable of meaningfully interpreting the nuances of grammar. With that said, Google Search is then certainly not intelligent enough to facilitate nuanced debates about art. Although, it can point to where those debates are publicly taking place. Before I detail where the searches lead, I want to note that I searched “rap poetry” and “is rap poetry” in a private browser window where I wasn’t logged into any accounts and had no search history. Private browsing instances are effectively disconnected from users’ online identities, so the search results I’m commenting on should not be swayed by any kind of algorithmic personalization.

The top result for “rap poetry” is a one and a half minute long YouTube video from 2011, featuring a Jay-Z interview wherein he advocates for rap’s poetic potential.^[1] “Is rap poetry,” however, yields the top result of a 2014 American Conservative article^[2] that begins “The short answer is ‘no,’ of course,” before taking issue with an Oxford University publication for too loosely defining poetry, also stating that “rap is often profane and can seem less serious [than poetry].” While that evaluation is obviously frustrating, the American Conservative article eventually argues that rap isn’t poetry because poetry is an art reliant on “the words themselves alone.” While I disagree, this statement is at least worth unpacking.

The OED defines “Poems” rather broadly, taking into account their being textual or oral: “A piece of writing or an oral composition, often characterized by a metrical structure, in which the expression of feelings, ideas, etc., is typically given intensity or flavour by distinctive diction, rhythm, imagery, etc.” Furthermore, poetry’s historic roots in literary cultures like that of Homeric epics unveils the importance of vocal performance as an auditory medium for transmitting poetry. Though such practices have been considerably less popular in recent centuries, poets reading their work aloud to audiences never simply went away. Rap cannot be wholly excluded from poetry on the grounds that it is listened to—that the words are contextualized by a speaker’s performance. Audiences relationships with poetic mediums are more complicated than that. Marshall McLuhan’s seminal book Understanding Media puts forth the fundamental idea that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.^[3]” The medium of poetry contains and is constructed of other media in the form of words, which are constructed of letters, which are constructed of many small typographical components^[4]. Similarly, the medium of rap music contains and is constructed of other media in the form of instrumentation, samples, and (particularly) vocal recordings which most often were originally written (lyrics constructed of words, constructed of letters, etc.). Even though I’ve already acknowledged that performance does not invalidate rap as poetry, the question of whether or not rap’s words can stand on their own remains an interesting one. Where the American Conservative article definitively says rap is “not” poetry, I’ll instead suggest that rap is often poetry, enough so to where the statement that “rap is poetry” is normally true. Jay-Z’s commentary in the aforementioned YouTube video accounts for this contextual understanding, acknowledging that poetry is generally defined by text, but still affording the poetic medium an appropriate degree of flexibility: “You never hear rappers being compared for, like, the greatest writers of all time, you know, you hear Bob Dylan . . . Rakim! I mean, listen to some of the things he wrote. I mean, if you take those lyrics and take them away from the music and you put them up on a wall somewhere and someone had to look at them, they would say: this is genius.”

To exemplify the dynamic way poetry inhabits rap, I’ll point to Kendrick Lamar’s “FEAR.,” a song that confronts the pervasive reminders of mortality present throughout American cities. First, here’s an example of when rap, as music, may not fit so well into the realm of poetry. The bridge before the first verse of “FEAR.” contains lines which are spoken and then later played in reverse:

Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle
. . .
elggurts fo lluf snedrub yrrac traeh ym ni niaP
reffus attog I od doG yhw ,doG yhW

Particularly when viewing these lyrics in type, as if a written poem, the unsettling effect of hearing backwards speech is lost; these words turn rather incomprehensible. I think it’s safe to say most wouldn’t refer to this as poetry. One could potentially relate words typed in reverse to avant-garde poetry, such as that of e e cummings, but this blog post unfortunately doesn’t have the runway left to explore such a notion with depth. So then, let’s look at the poetic latter half of “FEAR.’s” second verse:

I’ll prolly die from one of these bats and blue badges
Body-slammed on black and white paint, my bones snappin’
Or maybe die from panic or die from bein’ too lax
Or die from waitin’ on it, die ’cause I’m movin’ too fast
I’ll prolly die tryna buy weed at the apartments
I’ll prolly die tryna defuse two homies arguin’
I’ll prolly die ’cause that’s what you do when you’re seventeen
All worries in a hurry, I wish I controlled things

This verse of rap is plenty capable of being read as poetic verse. Even divested of its musical accompaniment, the lines read rhythmically, concluding with imperfect rhymes. Alliteration of ‘b’ in the first two lines illustrates the brutal and blunt violence of the imagined police encounter. The lines are consistently in the realm of thirteen syllables in length, with words mostly being two syllables or less, building a harrowing sense of momentum. Repetition of “I’ll” generates a claustrophobia as the lyrics navigate tense situations, building upon the momentum of the short words, emphasizing the speaker’s sense of self-responsibility but ultimate lack of control over their surroundings—the stress of which boils over in the final line. The New York Times recently reported^[5], in fact, that Chicago artist Dread Scott circulated posters featuring the line “I’ll prolly die ‘cause that’s what you do when you’re seventeen,” quite literally fulfilling Jay-Z’s suggestion to put lyrics up on walls so folks can appreciate their genius.

So, as per McLuhan’s notion of mediums containing other mediums, the above example demonstrates that rap definitely contains poetry, and makes evident that the question of whether or not rap is poetry isn’t technically a fair one. Still, whether one listens to or reads rap lyrics, rap and poetry often go hand in hand—enough so to where I think “yes” is fair as the short answer to whether or not rap is poetry, as answering in the negative would pointlessly exclude the two mediums, their many cultures and subcultures, and their intertwined historic legacies from one another. It’s important to acknowledge that searching either “rap poetry” or “is rap poetry” yields over twenty-five million results. Scrolling down from Google’s top suggestions leads to many lengthy and nuanced discussions on the matter from journalists, academic publications, and debates in online forums such as Reddit and Quora. But how often do you view the bottom half of a Google Search page?—how often do you click onto a second page, let alone any of the tens of thousands that follow it? It’s no revelation that algorithms steer many of our day-to-day actions, if not dictate them, but Google Search in particular is disproportionately taken for granted as a public utility. Google does not care whether rap is considered poetry, but it certainly wields significant power over the public’s access to conversations on the matter.

^[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXR-ohNo3Ao

^[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/is-rap-poetry/

^[3] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964. Critical ed., edited by Terrence Gordon, Gingko Press, 2017, p. 19.

^[4] https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/anatomy

^[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/t-magazine/rap-hip-hop-poetry.html

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So, if Eliot finds coffee to be not a symbol of productivity but of unrealized productivity, where does this position him in relation to the other modernists concerning the values of futurism? Is Eliot lamenting speed, asking us to resent the expectation to be productive? Is Eliot the anti-Pound, the anti-Marinetti?

As if in reference to Pounds “In the Station of the Metro,” (“Prufrock” was published at Pound’s request), Prufrock finds frustration in his inability to make out faces in a crowd, at his bewilderment to their constant movement, and tries to comfort himself, saying, “There will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” But Eliot’s Prufrock isn’t frustrated with speed or productivity itself, but with his own inability to keep up with the pace that has been set for him. By the end of the poem, he resigns himself to a lower position in the social hierarchy, understanding that the unity of society is what propels this necessary speed. He says:

He is willing to find solace in being a part of the whole, “an easy tool,” “of use,” for something bigger. While he himself may not be able to represent the pinnacle of futurist/modernist values, he will serve those who can, “an attendant lord” to the truly exceptional ones. There is a sense of duty here, as if he has no real choice but to serve this system, like a bureaucracy he is beholden to. And if he must do this, he might as well enjoy it, “glad to be” a part of the whole.

But an important question remains: what kind of coffee was Prufrock drinking? He mentions “coffee spoons”—otherwise known as demitasse spoons—which would suggest espresso. But the poem suggests he’s in a smokey city, and with the amount of references to tea in the poem, as well as Eliot’s location at the time of writing the poem, it is likely that it takes place in London. Espresso, having barely been invented at this point, was not readily available outside of Italy and parts of France. Had it been written later, say after World War I (maybe 1922, after an interesting Victoria Arduino poster was printed, as well as Eliot’s own The Waste Land “the Hoftgarten / And drank coffee, and talked for an hour”[i] (espresso was in Switzerland early too)), or even right before World War II (1933 perhaps, officially A.M.P.) things may have been different for Prufrock. Perhaps he would have encountered a genuine espresso machine, maybe even a Victoria Arduino Mural Machine, and had himself a good cup of coffee. Hard to tell. However, soon after the publication of Prufrock, most of Italy, even rural areas, would have access to espresso via the Moka Pot.

[i] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I outlined the basic mechanism by which the Moka Pot operates in Part I of this series, but it is especially important to dwell on the Moka Pot’s use of aluminum. Trying to maintain a level of self-sufficiency among the Italian Empire, Mussolini supported the use of aluminum as “an Italian metal… the inexhaustible Italian resource!”[i] Marinetti in his Futurist Cookbook (yes, a real book), he claims that all plates should be made out of aluminum (and also claims that spaghetti makes you weak). The Moka Pot, among other Italian productions, became a nationalist symbol, representing the technological prowess of Italian manufacturing. It is a micro-machine of expedient production—a futurist’s dream—which in turn fuels even more production for the “everyman.” Whether in Turin, Milan, or the coastal village of Pingone, one could experience the national pride of Italy, a pride based in movement, unity, and of course, proper coffee bean extraction. Italians know how to suck the very life out of grounds—fragments and ruins of a roasted bean, shored there from distant waste lands.

But where did Italy get its coffee beans from? The very origins of coffee—then under the command of the Italian Empire as a colony, existed in Ethiopia. Coffee is next to impossible to grow in Europe, and so most of the coffee consumed in Europe had its agricultural origins in an equatorial colony. Much has been said about sugar in this regard, but coffee is a similarly important crop. While Italy isn’t talked about in the same regards to colonialism as Great Britain, Spain, or Belgium, for example, it is notably responsible for colonizing the region of the world with the greatest coffee production. Thus, espresso becomes not only symbolic of the speed of futurism and fascism, but is also a product of imperialism. Without imperialism, there is no espresso, and without espresso, well, modernism isn’t… as fast.

So, let’s move forward in time a bit. After World War II, the Moka Pot became a world-wide commodity, and a symbol of the charm of Italy. The Moka Pot remains an important object in Italian culture, and according to the nearly sixteen thousand reviews the product has on Amazon presently, it’s safe to say that the Moka Pot is here to stay. As “coffee culture” continues to grow, the Moka Pot is likely to end up in more and more home kitchens (I have two myself!) where aficionados may experiment, practicing proper bean extraction—that violence which became one of the many fuels of fascist political perversity. The Moka Pot is charming; it reminds us of the romance of the Italian countryside, visions from Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, perhaps.

[i] https://medium.com/@Nicola.Romagnoli/exploring-the-caffeinated-legacy-of-italian-fascism-aff8b3db36

Call Me by Your Name is about an American graduate student Oliver travelling to Italy and the love affair he has with his professor’s son during the summer of 1982. There has been little to nothing said about the ways in which this film very subtly interacts with Italy’s fascist legacy, but the film is not ignoring it. A commonly forgotten detail about the film is that all of the main characters are Jewish, something that the son Elio learns to accept, rejecting the mother’s assertion that they are, “Jews of discretion.” Later, Elio and Oliver laugh at noticing an old fascist political poster and Elio adds, “That’s Italy for you…”—a subtle reminder of the countries’ strained past, but also suggesting that, perhaps in some ways, this past is harmless.

Throughout the film, the Moka Pot is presen, at every breakfast table and on the counter while the family’s maid does their dishes. It is embedded within the Italian landscape and atmosphere, an atmosphere of romance and charm. Instead of being the pinnacle of speed and invention, the Moka Pot is now reminiscent of the slow pace of the Italian countryside. Italy’s very own technological advancements in espresso, contrary to their original purpose, evolved to create a very different image of Italy: that of a beautiful and historical space steeped in the culture of slow food—a movement which celebrates local food cultures—even if the coffee is still be shipped from foreign shores.

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The Moka Pot, designed and introduced to the market in 1933, offered consumers an inexpensive way to make espresso-like coffee in their own home, right on their stove top or even over a fire. It works like this: water in the bottom chamber begins to boil and create steam pressure, which, pushing up through a filter of coffee, brews a dense, espresso-like coffee that slowly drips out of spigot into the upper chamber. Because of the pressure generated in the bottom chamber, the coffee is forcibly extracted from the coffee grounds, using less liquid than a pour-over or immersion brewing technique. This violence—that is, the violence of pressurized bean extraction—is what makes espresso espresso. The Italians knew that steeping wasn’t enough—there was more caffeine left, more to be taken—and thus, the espresso machine was made. But the Moka pot brought that machine into the home, in a small aluminum casing. It was espresso for all, the democratization of strong coffee, an idea we will come back to. Just bear with me please.

In 1922, Italian born artist and advertiser Leonetto Cappiello made a now famous poster for the espresso machine company Victoria Arduino, that featured a man in a trench coat leaning out of a moving train grabbing a cup of coffee. It was a brilliant idea: I mean, what better way to show the speed of it all? The brewing process, the consumption of the drink, the jolt of energy, the on-the-run ceremony, the productivity it brings, and the pace of modernity—all on display in one succinct image. Espresso became fundamental to the Italian image, and that image sought to represent one important value: speed.

Well, at least that’s the image some Italians wanted to show the world, and it actually predates the Moka Pot (a period referred to by absolutely no one as, B.M.P.). In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote and published “The Futurist Manifesto,” in which he declared the start of a new national art movement, “Futurism.” In it he writes, “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”[i] For Marinetti and the futurists, art is and must be the expression of violent, explosive creation, and glorification of the values of war, militarism, patriotism, a contempt for the past, and a contempt for women. It’s origins in Italy are especially significant, since the futurist, tired of the past ruling over Italy’s image, sought to, “deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.”[ii] For them, Italy could represent the future—the powerful, fast, and violent future—and thus, they sought to present these values in their art.

Marinetti’s literary works never received much in the way of critical praise, but his political writing, as well as several important speeches he gave, became incredibly influential to other artists. Futurism took off in the visual arts, with sculptors and painters who were intrigued by the challenge of representing speed and “dynamism” in the still image. Trains, planes, automobiles, crowds, proto-robots, and dogs—surprisingly—became favorite subjects of the futurists, and their paintings oftentimes featured a mix of harsh-edged shapes and blurred figures so as to represent movement and industry. Take “The Train Arriving at the Station of Lugo” (1916) by Roberto M Baldessari, for instance, which portrays the fast pace of modern mass transportation, through jagged confusing lines and blurred faces, like apparitions.

[i] http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

[ii] Marinetti

The Futurists were hugely important to the arts during the 20^th century, and their influence stems far beyond those who identified directly as “Futurists.” The “Vorticists,” for example, who’s manifesto was published in Ezra Pound’s magazine BLAST! in 1914, took the geometrical abstraction of futurism even further, rejection representational art completely, and was founded directly after Marinetti gave a speech in London to a group of major poets and artists.[i] Vorticism, as a response to Marinetti’s insistence that they reject the past, was also influenced other contemporary Avant Garde movements, such as Imagism and Cubism, which were both invested in abstraction and concision. So, while Marinetti’s actual writings were not critically successful, his influence can nevertheless be found among even the most critically acclaimed of modernist artists and poets, which suggests that his violent yearnings and revolutionary thoughts were not just some benign fringe, but rather, commonly shared among many of the so-called “high modernists.” Many of these writers and artists would go on to support, or at the very least “sympathize” with the fascists. After founding the Futurist political party, Marinetti wrote Italy’s first Fascist manifesto—pre-dating Mussolini’s—which eventually was subsumed by the official Fascist party. Wyndham Lewis, co-editor and founder of BLAST! was a supporter of Hitler. And Pound’s support of the fascist cause has been discussed widely.

But are there earlier hints towards this political leaning in modernist works? Or, better yet, how does modernist poetry confront the confluence of Futurism, the Avant Garde, and the impending wave of fascism?

In 1913 Ezra Pound wrote a poem named, “In the Station of the Metro.” It reads: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Is this not the very scene from Baldessari’s painting, painted just three years later? Pound is finding beauty not just in the faces, but in the movement of the faces—the speed at which they come and go, as apparitions—in the train station, arriving and departing. Not only is Pound quick in his writing—the poem is only two lines—but the scene suggests the movement of a crowd, faces been seen then lost, absorbed into the pace of the train station. And so quick is he to make an equation: that these faces are “Petals on a wet, black bough,” individual units tied together, connected to the main branch. What does it mean for Pound to turn these faces into flowers, and to hamper them to a branch? His seemingly pretty image here, can instead be seen as restrictive, in that the figures he finds in the station are tied to movement, forcibly progressing, petals waving in place, yet held together by some larger structure, the bough. It is representative, then, of the condition of modernity, the necessity for movement and productivity, and the constraints that this places on the human. And concerning Baldessari’s visual representation of this scene, the figures become one large mass, in which the individual faces blur into one shape-less-shape, relinquishing each of their individuality. Pound’s image here is not too far from the main concept of Mussolini’s fasces—the symbol of fascism—which represents societal unity visually the tying of individual sticks to a central post. In Mussolini’s fasces, however, the bough becomes an axe, suggesting a violent strength in this unity.

[i] “Futurist Speech to the English” from Marinetti: Selected Writings (1972).

I’m not proposing that there is something inherently fascist to modernism, or that trains and the concept of speed is either. Instead, what is interesting is the ways in which modernist poems either knowingly or unknowingly played into an emerging imagery which would go on to influence, inform, and ultimately, create what we now recognize as fascism. This aesthetics of materiality and particular representations of modernity (i.e. representations of the train, the crowd, etc.) is embedded in an ongoing and intricately connected conversation. Pound’s contribution is obvious—he was literally a fascist and anti-Semite—but where else might we find the fascist influence in modernism, especially where it may not be at all intended? And what other artifacts and cultural symbols (i.e. coffee) might be embedded in this conversation?

For instance, let’s reconsider Cappiello’s poster, which contains, after all, it has a train and coffee. We have already noted the way in which the poster visually represents the central tenet of futurism, that of speed, and how it does this through the use of the train as a way of highlighting the pace at which one consumes espresso, but also, the pace at which one operates after consuming the espresso. In many ways, espresso and the espresso machine are the ultimate futurist symbols. Espresso machines, for example, make use of steam and pistons just like a train, have a shiny metallic exterior, and produce a drink which makes the consumer faster and more productive. It is a machine-extension of the human, optimizing human performance through the sheer power of pressurized bean extraction. Cappiello, whether he knew it not, marketed not only an espresso machine here, but also the core values of futurism.

But, to experience the espresso machine, you had to go to a café, and probably live in the city. What makes fascism just slightly different from futurism, is that it is much better at encompassing and including the rural. This is where the Moka Pot comes in (A.M.P).

Tune in next week for part two, where we’ll take a closer look at the role of coffee in the creation of fascism, as well as coffee’s unique role in the Avant Garde poetry of American writer T.S. Eliot and the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name.

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Rorschach—an angsty, unstable, doesn’t-play-by-the-rules, detective type of character (complete with trench coat)—narrates portions of the comic through journal entries. While Rorschach, of course, isn’t writing in verse, the flow of his sentences and his vivid (though macabre) descriptions lend themselves well to a poetic reading. One such journal entry initiates Watchmen’s story, with Rorschach detailing his disdain for New York City and its people:

The fragmented structure of the first portion of this journal entry is especially fit for consideration in poetic terms; while these lines lack meter, they certainly have a distinct rhythm that embodies Rorschach’s emotionality—providing some quick images of the dead dog as representative of the city before Rorschach reveals his egocentrism and self-image as not only an anti-hero, but a kind of anti-savior who sees himself fit to judge the city for its perceived sins. Confined to a text bubble within narrow panel art, the first blurb of the above quotation even mimics the shape of an enjambed blank verse stanza. One can write this mimicry off as coincidence, but the shape of these sentences nevertheless influences the pace at which they’re read. If we are willing to entertain this text bubble as a tidbit of poetry, the enjambment of “this / city” wields particular significance in reference to Rorschach’s psyche. In the next line, he states that the city “is afraid of” him. The sentence arrives at a full stop without spilling down into the next line, imparting Rorschach’s confidence. “This / city” however, and the gruesome imagery Rorschach introduces it with, lacks the stability he assigns to his own character, fragmenting this fictionalized New York not only through the pacing of its descriptive images, but also the consistent breaking up of those descriptions via enjambment.

Conversely, the two sentences making up the middle portion of the above citation flow quickly. Although they’re typographically structured similarly to the first text bubble, their minimal punctuation facilitates a greater emphasis on the words themselves.

Though, once again, Rorschach’s words are unmetered, repetition and (especially) his immediately identifiable hate for New York result in a dialogue with semi-regularly stressed syllables. For example: “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood.” Apart from the rough feeling resulting from the repeated ‘guh’ sounds, this phrase parallels two seven syllable clauses (divided after the first “gutters”). The second half of this text bubble pair runs more freely as Rorschach builds anticipation toward his anti-hero/savior stance where he refuses to “save” the city. The stresses, as I read them, are bolded here: “The accumulated filth of all their sex and murderwill foam up about their waists…” There’s a continuous action to Rorschach’s phrasing in this moment, generating emphasis every few words, collectively forming emphases centered upon his judgements of Watchmen’s fictionalized New York City society, not only textualizing his resentment and rejection of the place and its people, but truly verbalizing that resentment and rejection, as the cadence of his speech can so clearly be read by the structure of his sentences.

But what do we draw from this kind of linguistic character work in Watchmen?—what politics arise from Rorschach’s edgy, abrasive poetry? In terms of iconographic legacy, Rorschach is lauded within comic fandoms—which makes sense; he’s got a lot of archetypal ‘coolness’ going for him as an even grittier, more mentally troubled play on batman.^[1] But a celebratory visage of his gritty ‘coolness’ as an anti-hero sidesteps his extremism as an anti-savior—his belief in moral absolutism through which he justifies many prejudices.^[2] This is where Dylan’s “Desolation Row” is of utmost relevance. Watchmen’s first chapter being titled “At Midnight, All the Agents…” evokes Dylan’s song as a foil. Rorschach’s social concerns and judgements thematically align with “Desolation Row” (addressing many of the same subjects), but they do not align politically. Dylan’s lyric about “agents” and “superhumans” rounding people up is an illustration of evil, making for a verse that’s decidedly critical of authority—the verse ends with the people who were rounded up being strapped to a “heart attack machine,” making clear the ill intent of said “agents” and “superhumans.” Rorschach, however, fueled by disdain for society, feels justified in becoming such an agent, a judge who determines the meaning of “good” and then has the authority to work toward that definition even if it entails harming others.

This contrast between Rorschach’s philosophy and Dylan’s lyrics is furthered by Rorschach’s fixation on ugliness. To him, there is no redeeming feature of the city. As he says, “…all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “save us!” … and I’ll look down and whisper ‘no.’” Although Dylan’s lyrics also paint a bleak portrait of urban Americana, the song ultimately manages to provoke beauty from its subject matter of sorrow and chaos. It details the people of Desolation Row with minimal judgement, dedicating almost eleven and a half minutes of song to immersing listeners within this fictional neighborhood, allowing them to become acquainted with its many characters. Perhaps the clearest factor of difference between “Desolation Row” and Rorschach’s first journal entry is their inaugural lines. While Rorschach compares New York City to a dead animal and then positions himself as a moral judge, “Desolation Row’s” first verse begins as such: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” and then the song’s first chorus begins, “…the riot squad, they’re restless / They need somewhere to go.” Commoditized racism and imminent police brutality frame the song within its first lines, illustrating and suggesting a critique of external and institutional reasons which contribute to the plight of places such as Desolation Row. The socioeconomic underclass to which Rorschach would simply whisper “no” is instead, by Dylan’s ballad, rendered with heartbreaking and beautiful honesty, confronting the troubles of the city without condemning it.

Further reading, for those interested:

• This Escapist article briefly goes over the ambiguities of Rorschach’s character and how they relate to modern political reactions, especially since the release of Watchmen 2019 on HBO.
• Andrew Hoberek’s book Considering Watchmen (2014, Rutgers University Press) contains an entire chapter on the comic’s poetics, addressing Rorschach as well providing substantial analysis of poetic dialogue from Dr. Manhattan, among other things.
• “Desolation Row” itself does not appear in the 2008 film adaptation of Watchmen, but the film does feature an opening montage set to Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” which, while perhaps less subtle than Dylan’s usage in the comics, still makes for an interesting watch and listen

^[1] HBO’s Watchmen (2019) connected Rorschach’s moral absolutism with white supremacy, generating vicious backlash from certain audience demographics.

^[2] On ch. 1, p. 1 he describes his ideal American working man, juxtaposing “a day’s work, a day’s pay” with communism. On ch. 1, p. 14 he shows disgust for the welfare system, specifically mentioning a mother with five children that he presumes are from different fathers. On ch.1, p. 19 he negatively remarks upon another characters “liberal affiliations,” then stating “Possibly homosexual? Must remember to investigate further.” There are many other such examples throughout.

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Like other forms of popular poetry, shanties are in alignment with New Formalism, a late 20^th and 21^st century poetic movement which advocates for a return to narrative poetry and traditional poetical forms—mainly rhyme, meter, and stanzaic symmetry (meaning stanzas that are of uniform length throughout the poem). Shanties are unabashedly awash in all three of these formal elements and narration is also common, especially to those shanties that some scholars technically call sea songs. In this way, shanties are similar to traditional rap, which commonly uses rhymed couplets (pairs of lines that have a similar end rhyme), assonance and consonance (repetition of vowel or consonant sounds), alliteration (repetition of consonants at the beginning of words, especially within a line) and the four-stress accentual line which is the most popular meter (pattern of stressed syllables) for English popular spoken verse from ballads to Rudyard Kipling to Mother Goose.[1] In accentual meter, only the stressed syllables are counted. Here’s an example from the opening stanza of the most viral of shanties “Wellerman” with the stressed syllables marked in red:

There `once was a `ship that `put to `sea
And the `name of that `ship was the `Billy o’ `Tea
The `winds blew `hard, her `bow dipped `down
`Blow, me `bully boys, `blow   `hunh

Notice how line two has twelve syllables and line four has only six, but they both contain four accented syllables which provides the beat. In keeping with the rhythm of the song, line two is sung much faster than line four. This first stanza also illustrates the full end rhyme with ‘sea’ and ‘tea’ (also called true or masculine rhyme). The second couplet ending with ‘down’ and ‘blow’ are slant or off rhymes, creating two sounds that almost rhyme. These words are also a great example of how the sounds of words can align with the content of a poem—’ow’ and ‘oh’ are both phrases you might hear on a boat when the bow is dipping down in heavy wind. Throughout the last two lines, the assonance of ‘ow’ and the alliteration of the letter ‘b’ with its bursting and breathy pronunciation accentuate the blowing of the wind.

 The following four stanzas and the chorus also has four lines each, but the end rhyme is a little different. The first three lines of each of these stanzas has the same end rhyme while the fourth line (which is always visually shorter than the other three) rhymes with the ‘blow’ of the opening stanza. Here is the chorus as an example, showing full end rhyme in the first two lines and slant rhyme in the third line. In addition, the ‘go’ rhymes with ‘blow’.

Soon may the Wellerman come
To bring us sugar and tea and rum
One day, when the tonguing’ is done
We’ll take our leave and go

However, not all of the shanties rely so heavily on rhyme, especially the ones which scholars would call more traditional shanties as opposed to sea songs. “Drunken Sailor”, a traditional shanty and perhaps the second most popular next to “Wellerman” in the current trend, is arguably the most popular shanty throughout history as well as one of the first recorded.[2] This shanty was used for hauling, specifically the hand-over-hand work required to raise the smaller sails of a ship.[3] Here is the first stanza:

`What shall we `do with a `drunken `sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor,
`early `in the `mor `ning?

Akin to work songs, these types of shanties rely more on repetition than rhyme for their sing-song quality. Every stanza follows the structure of a single line, repeated three times, then followed by a catch phrase which is the same for every stanza. All the lines stick to the four-stress accentual meter but the catch phrase “early in the morning” is significantly shorter, stressing words that wouldn’t be stressed in normal speech. This means that the stressed beats, as notes of the melody, are held for much longer than the notes of previous lines. An alignment between form and content occurs with the pronunciation of ‘early’ in sailor lingo as ‘er-lie’ repeating the ‘r’ sounds in “drunken sailor”. The ‘r’ sound itself is connotative of the growling and painful rumblings that might be emitted by a sailor upon waking with a hangover.

Shanties generally contain some combination of the formal elements that are evident in these two examples. From a casual survey of performances, one could say that the more formal the shanty, the more views it is likely to have on TikTok and YouTube. Not only do formal elements make a poem easier to memorize, but they also provide an innate physical pleasure for both the performer and listener, a type of sensory evolution that a 500-year print culture has not eliminated.[4]

The formal elements of traditional rap and shanties are similar, but there is a fundamental difference in the way the two are performed. Traditional rap is more oriented toward the poetry of words, relying on rhyme and rhythm to create its musical qualities. Shanties have a melody that rides over the rhythm like a wave, and with a melody comes harmony which you’ll hear in many of the group performances. Indeed, one can’t accurately perform most of the popular sea shanties without knowing this melody since there is no way to derive it from the words alone. This facet perhaps, makes all of the popular shanties more like songs then poetry. However, since Bob Dylan won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 2016 for his song lyrics, literature’s definition appears to be evolving alongside popular poetry, including performative aspects that cannot be discerned from the traditional print medium. 

Although rap far exceeds the other three forms of popular poetry in Gioia’s list—cowboy poetry, slam poetry and performance poetry—in terms of profitability and has come to rely on the recording industry for the brunt of its profit, live performances are an essential element of all popular poetry. The current shanty trend didn’t rely on live but virtual performances. There were some bands prior to the trend that profited from live performances of shanties—none as consistently as the nationally recognized Canadian folk-rock band Great Big Sea. Sea shanty videos now have a global audience but this has translated to relatively little profitability for the plethora of performers. There are increasingly more opportunities for influencers to generate an income through advertising within their TikTok material,[5] but sea shanties did not become viral through influencers. Nathan Evans was recently able to quit his job as a postal carrier after receiving a three-album record deal, and the Bristol folk band The Longest Johns signed record deals as well,[6] but it’s too early to tell whether anyone else other than TikTok will profit.

In their heyday in the 1900s, shanties were oral, innovating from the margins, and contained formal elements, but they were generally not profitable. In their current state on TikTok with words and forms hundreds of years old, they lack the creativity characteristic of other forms of popular poetry. Rap may incorporate samples from older musical works, but new forms and lyrics are being created daily. Cowboy poetry, a much older form than rap, continues to be written and celebrated in its contemporary forms, most notably at the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Aside from adding new harmonies and instrumental accompaniment (which may not be completely new in some cases), the innovation in current popular sea shanties lies in the way they are performed, which is heavily influenced by the capabilities of the TikTok app. One of the most notable innovations on this trend is the transformation of pop songs into sea shanties (see especially Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” as a sea shanty @sampopemusic). This is not to say that the trend won’t verge toward original lyrics and forms in the near future. Many new sea shanty groups have popped up on Reddit since the beginning of the year including discussions on how to write a shanty. The trend isn’t just for teens and adults either—there were quite a few animated sea shanty videos on the internet for children prior to this year and now there are even more. Also prior to the pandemic, there were small maritime inspired folk festivals and venues that featured traditional shanty performances like the University of Chicago’s Folk Festival, and it will be interesting to see if these creative gatherings grow.[7]

Regardless of how the trend continues after the pandemic, it may have less to say about a new direction in poetry and more to say about the longing for new kinds of creativity. As rightsholders push for longer and broader copyright holds, more of the past becomes locked up and buried as far as the general public’s use is concerned.[8] The kind of creativity we see on TikTok is collaborative across space and time, and it’s easy to make and distribute in a way that the recording and literary industries cannot control. While our capitalist culture likes to distill definitive ownership of any profitable act, throughout history, creativity has been a collaborative process that reincorporates and remakes previous works. Anyone who performs or remixes a contemporary song or poem without paying royalties could face copyright infringement. Sea shanties are perfect for the kind of creativity that happens on TikTok because they exist in the public domain, free for anyone to remix and reconfigure. I’ll leave you with this pertinent quote from Business Insider on the issue: “Too often, copyright locks the booze away and only lets the captain get drunk”.[9]

[1] Gioia, pg 14.

[2] https://daily.jstor.org/whats-the-difference-between-a-shanty-and-a-sea-song/

[3] https://seashanties.weebly.com/drunken-sailor.html

[4] Gioia, Ibid, pg 13.

[5] https://mediakix.com/influencer-marketing-resources/tik-tok-influencer-marketing/

[6] https://apnews.com/article/music-media-social-media-wellington-new-zealand-2651b9802155fb5fdac7af622df0bb21

[7] https://news.wttw.com/2021/02/12/deep-dive-sea-shanty-craze-and-why-chicago-was-ahead-tiktok-trend

[8] https://www.businessinsider.com/viral-sea-shanties-tiktok-reveal-about-our-broken-copyright-system-2021-1

[9] Ibid.

The post THE POETICS OF SEA SHANTIES, PART II appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Humorous aspects of the shanty trend circulated on the late-night shows, playing up the fact that the phenomenon was largely started and propagated by millennials, namely Nathan Evans who posted the first viral video on Dec 27^th of the “Wellerman”song. In an SNL skit (Feb. 21st 2021), shanty loving millennials are transported to what is presumably a 19^th century whaling boat and are dumbfounded to learn what unpleasantries the daily life of a whaler actually entailed. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that collectively we would gravitate toward songs that celebrate comradery and physical labor at a time when the heroic qualities of the pandemic demanded quite the opposite from most.

There are many ways to read the cultural meanings of this trend and its context during a global pandemic. A considerable number of online articles have focused on characterizing the trend itself, including its new celebrities, and exploring the history of shanty singing, but what are the poetic dimensions of this trend? Are shanties the latest iteration of the cultural revolution that Dana Gioia recognizes in his 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture?

Gioia focuses on four versions of popular poetry—rap, cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and performance poetry—which have redefined our cultural relationship to poetry in the 21^st century through works widely covered by the mass media.[5] These genres have allowed poetry to thrive in the marketplace without prior support from academia or the literary establishment.[6] He also recognizes four main ways that popular poetry differs from literary poetry: it is predominately oral, driven by innovation from marginalized demographics, characteristically formal in structure, and profitable without assistance from the literary establishment. The current sea shanty trend has much in common with other forms of popular poetry across these categories but also some differences that may disqualify it from characterization in the realm of popular poetry.

Sea Shanties began as an oral tradition, allowing men working on wind-powered vessels to synchronize the grueling tasks of manual labor through the rhythm of the songs: for example, pushing or pulling at the same time when hoisting sails. The songs involved a call and response structure in which a shantyman sang the main verses and the crew repeated each verse or the song’s chorus in return.  According to a 1937 essay by music scholar Harold Whates, “in no circumstances were shanties ‘quaint’ or whimsical and rarely indeed had they any suggestion of jollity.”[7] Shanties were strictly work songs made up on the job and meant to “[extract] just that last ounce from men habitually weary, overworked and underfed.”[8] According to this definition, the balladic storytelling of TikTok’s most popular shanty “Wellerman” is technically not a shanty but a sea song. However, despite its length and extended storytelling, its rhythm, theme, and formal elements are very similar to more traditional shanties. 

The earliest written record of shanty-like songs occurs in the 1830s, although nautical work songs are referenced in earlier European texts, notably William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.[9] However, the similarity of shanties to African American work songs is undeniable. It’s up for debate as to whether there was an established tradition of shanty singing on European merchant vessels prior to the slave trade, but many scholars, especially American ones, at least attribute the development of shanties into longer, more structured works to the influence of African American work songs on the eastern seaboard of the United States.[10] In some cases, it is possible to directly trace how work songs sung in docks in the southern US, particularly for boat rowing and the loading and unloading of ships in dock, were adapted for shipboard tasks.[11] Similar to shanties, work songs contain a call and response structure and a strong rhythm, which was used to synchronize manual labor and maintain morale during long and monotonous physical tasks. In this way, shanties most resemble the early origins of rap as it is traced back to the earliest vernacular oral traditions of African American slaves including spirituals, secular rhymes, ballads, and work songs.[12] Similar to the original circulation of work songs and shanties, the new shanty trend entirely bypasses print culture, reaching a global audience not of readers but of listeners and viewers.

Like other forms of popular poetry, shanties originated in the margins of society, among the working class and the predominately illiterate. The obsolescence of steam engines and decline of the whaling industry marginalized shanty singing even further.[13] Small communities in the UK and America kept the traditions alive within a practical context in small-scale fishing operations and as a living art form within the folk music scene.[14] Our current shanty trend also arose from the margins of the established musical and literary institutions and industries, notably among millennials and Gen Zs stuck at home during the pandemic. Nathan Evans himself worked for the post office until quite recently when he received a three-album record deal.

However, the origination of the current trend and its virality is wholly dependent on the TikTok app (although videos were transferred from TikTok to YouTube as the trend grew). TikTok is the most popular app available in terms of downloads and growth, which has been steadily increasing since its inception in 2016, surpassing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.[15] Two-thirds of its users are under 30 and a majority of those are Gen Zs who use the app more times a day and for much longer durations than Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.[16]     

It may be TikTok’s novel features and functionalities, specifically the app’s duet function, more than the shanties themselves that are responsible for the current trend. While the original video is playing, users can record themselves, creating a new video that is a collage of both performances or, if done multiple times, a collage of many performances. They can arrange the performances on the screen using various layouts to change the position, size, and orientation of multiple videos. The app also contains visual and musical effects that can be used to alter recordings; although these effects have not been widely employed in the most viral sea shanty videos. The sea shanty trend started with users adding their own recordings of Evans’s original performance of the “Wellerman” song, eventually adding layered harmonies to his voice and musical accompaniment. This prompted a whole repertoire of similar group performances with the “Wellerman” and other shanties. TikTok has definitely allowed the general public to influence the musical and poetical trends for 2021 thus far. But, can the shanty trend really be characterized as arising from the margins when users are doing exactly what the TikTok app was designed for?

Tune in next week for a second installment of “The Poetics of Sea Shanties” where we’ll do a deep dive into the formal elements of the genre and examine the relationship between shanties and the TikTok app in more depth.

[1] https://www.wusa9.com/article/tech/sea-shanties-tik-tok-viewed-nearly-3-billion-times/65-8000acf4-0d8c-4b78-b100-2d2734be3f15 & https://www.insider.com/sea-shanty-tiktok-wellerman-shantytok-spotify-streaming-increase-2021-1

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/entertainment/sea-shanty-shanties-wellerman-tiktok-music-trnd/index.html

[3] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/sea-shanty-tiktok-perfect-expression-masculinity-2021-n1254325

[4] Ibid.

[5] Gioia, Dana. Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Graywolf Press, 2004, pg. 6.

[6] Ibid, pg 9.

[7] https://daily.jstor.org/whats-the-difference-between-a-shanty-and-a-sea-song/

[8] Ibid.

[9] Munnelly, Tom. “Songs of the Sea: A General Description with Special Reference to Recent Oral Tradition in Ireland.” Béaloideas, 48/49, 1980, pp. 30–58. 

[10] Schreffler, Gibb. “Ethnic Choice in the Presentation of Chanties: A Study in Repertoire.” Presented at the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California and Hawai’i Chapter, Azusa Pacific Univ., CA, Feb. 2011.

[11] Ibid.

[12] https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200197451

[13] https://news.wttw.com/2021/02/12/deep-dive-sea-shanty-craze-and-why-chicago-was-ahead-tiktok-trend

[14] Ibid. & “Shanties and Sea Songs with Gareth Malone.” BBC Four, aired Aug. 9, 2013.

[15] https://mediakix.com/influencer-marketing-resources/tik-tok-influencer-marketing/

[16] Ibid.

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