the poetry of anger, the rhetoric of anger

Here at UM-Dearborn tonight, an explosive poetry exchange featuring Arab-American and African-American spoken word artists and poet-activists. Dubbed "Over the Counter, Under the Skin," the event at once provoked audience members and celebrated the power of words.

Anger served as the dominant motif of much of the poetry. Omari King Wise of Detroit's own 3rd Eye Open collective performed several pieces about various intersections of injustice including a raging poem addressed to Bush-Cheney about the invasion of Iraq: "Are you too right wing to do the right thing?" And riffing on the name of Saddam Hussein: "You got me so damn mad, I have to wonder who sane?" Karega Ani was the evening's standout, and, taken with his pitch perfect slam-poetry delivery and his Last Poets-esque voice, I picked up one of his CDs afterward. Ani juxtaposes neo-soul and radicalism, moving between spoken and sung words. Really engaging stuff. Definitely hope to see more of him around Detroit.

Legacy Leonard ended the night with a poem about perceived mistreatment of African-American shoppers at the hands of Arab-American shopkeepers in Detroit. An interesting cultural moment. The evening's performers: half black, half Arab. The audience (according to my *extremely* rough estimate): one-third black, one-third Arab, one-third white. The topoi: as divisive as any tackled during the whole performance. A very "Detroit" moment, too...blunt, raw, agonistic. Another reminder that the evening's version of "multiculturalism" went beyond tired tropes of one-ness. Anger as a teaching tool, as a mode of learning.

During the q-and-a, a man self-identified as an Arab-American store-owner in the city and articulated offense at what he perceived to be the poem's generalization and stereotyping. He referenced several violent crimes and explained that he never refers to the perpetrators by their race, but rather as criminals. Another moment, also uncomfortable, blunt, raw, personal. Vigorous discussion followed. No consensus, but many points-of-view stated in a public forum (and I would say a safe one, too, though I hesitate to characterize the atmosphere, as others perhaps felt differently).

In the world of rhetoric--and often in the worlds of poetics too--anger too often becomes yet another subset of emotion, a lesser motivator, a lesser (base) strategy for knowledge construction, for communication, for social change. The ineffectual step-sibling of rationality. Indeed, somebody after the event suggested to me that the anger at times gave the poetry an err of superficiality. She suggested that anger is the superficial emotion, that *pain* is the deeper emotion that the poet ought to expose.

But I say, why? At this performance--a rhetorical *and* poetic space--anger, emotion, affect all took a collective bow, becoming a prompt for reflection, a prompt for more discourse, more language, more dialogue. Why is anger a lesser starting point? Why does anger need to be seen only as the surface experience with the material world? I need to think more about the role anger plays in rhetoric. This was extremely scattered--sorry about that--but I wanted to get all of this down right away.