Insult Poetry

An Insult!

Cassidy says that "Poetry isn't what it used to be." She is referring to this:

If Ken Blackwell becomes Ohio's governor, don't look for Nikki Giovanni to be appointed the state's poet laureate.

Giovanni shocked the crowd Saturday as she read her dedicatory poem on Fountain Square by referring to Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, as a "son of a bitch" and a "political whore."

The lines in the poem are as follows:

I am not a son of a bitch like Kenny Blackwell
...
I will not use the color of my skin to cover the hatred in my heart
I am not a political whore jumping from bed to bed to see who will stroke my knee...

Actually, this is a grand old tradition in poetry. Since we're talking about honor and poems around the battle of Hastings today, here's a good chance to expand the discussion. Honor societies have very often expressed themselves poetically, as poetry is often thought to be one of the warrior arts. This is true both in Western societies and Eastern ones, Islamic and Christian and pagan. Turkish traditional "singers of tales" were the focus of Albert Lord's extraordinary work, The Singer of Tales. He traced -- convincingly, I believe -- the tradition in Turkey to Homer. Japanese samurai and monks alike wrote death poems. Chinese kings and nobles expressed praise and threats through poetics.

Honor societies both praise and damn, and the poetry follows the consciousness. You can write a poem praising a great king -- but you can also, as the bards of Ireland were said to do, write a satire so stinging that it can cause a bad king's downfall.

Viking poetry probably occupies the height (or depth, depending on your outlook) of this particular tradition. "Political whore" is rather tame by comparison to what the Vikings would say about a man in an insult poem -- so much so that there were laws specifically designed to deal with such poems, and these laws often permitted you to kill the insulter with impunity. Callimachus wrote on the subject a while ago, and Gunnora Hallakarva produced a classic piece that deals with the matter (scroll down to "insults alleging homosexuality").

Egil Skallagrimsson used poetry both to praise and curse. (You can hear some of his poetry read in the Old Norse here.) Even the gods were said to do so -- the famous Lokasena has the gods exchanging ribald insults around a feast hall.

Giovanni appears to be acting out of a similar African tradition, and we shouldn't be surprised to see one. Insult poetry is common in hip-hop, for example: people you feel have done right by you get praised to the sky, but people you feel have done wrong by you are described in terms that make them seem low sorts of animals.

Personally, I didn't think the poem she read was very good, but that is because I have little use for unstructured verse. The Viking insult poems were delivered in highly formal and artistic systems. Pretty much anyone can write poems like the one Giovanni delivered -- there is no skill. Egil Skallagrimsson would sneer, rightly, at someone who wrote so poor an insult verse.

Yet he very well might smile at some of the better hip-hop lyrics. I certainly do, on occasion.