Customer Reviews

From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900-2002

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Along with Gioia and Kennedy's "An Introduction to Poetry," "From Totems to Hip Hop" is the best poetry anthology I have encountered. It features accessible yet beautiful work from a great range of poetic voices--from long canonized voices like TS Eliot and Robert Frost to gifted rappers like 2Pac or the members of Dead Prez--arranged in very useful categories, such as "Nature and Place," "Men & Women," "Family," "Politics," "Heroes ..." and "Manifestos." Editor Ishmael Reed, whose literary and extra-literary efforts have been devoted to rethinking things such as "the American literary canon" through a multiculturalist lens--the man who once wrote "I've published writers I've had fistfights with. As long as they can write"--has presented a truly democratic collection of twentieth and twenty-first century poetics. Reed does not practice hero worship here either. He places a poem by Joan Self (the rich and rhythmic "Quill Holler Waller"), a former student of his at UC Berkeley, right next to Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know." Reed also includes one of my favorite, neglected Langston Hughes poems, "Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria," as well as the lyrics for Leiber & Stoller's "Searchin'" and poems by underrepresented "black Beat" poets Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman (interestingly enough, no Allen Ginsberg poems are in this collection). If this book starts entering high school and college classrooms, as it should, perhaps poetry will leave its throne in the academy and return to the public discourse.

I'm using this anthology for the poetry seminar I teach at a private high school in the Bay Area. I'm finding it to be the best anthology thus far for this generation (I'd use it for college students as well). The previous reviewer has offered a very comprehensive overview, so I'll just echo the sentiments expressed there. This text makes poetry accessible without dumbing it down. His introduction is also very provocative in terms of pointing out the potential racist, classist, and sexist implications of teaching only the "cannon". My students are thrilled to see a text that contains Frost AND Tupac. I'm using this anthology with Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (a more academic, but radically exciting approach to poetry), and I think that these two texts together make the ideal combination (with supplimentary handouts of other poet's poetry as well).