Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Poetry reading to illustrate, enhance, and enliven the papers presented at EVS Panel 1 -- The Evocation of Experience: Poetry and Eric Voegelin's Theory of Symbolization

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The poetry slam environment is the location of a joining of the political and the personal. In this paper, the author explores the personal and political expression of identity in slam poetry competitions and slam poetry. Issues of identity and performance are explored. The slam location is posited as site of political and personal musing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper I examine "A Lower East Side Poem" as a poetic last will and testament, a rhetorical act that is a three-pronged petition: (1) to request that the author’s “ashes be scattered” throughout the neighborhood he called home, (2) to cross a metaphysical border between life and death by persuading audiences to keep him alive or present through memory even after his remains are dispersed and he is physically absent and (3) to traverse physical (US/Puerto Rico) borders by asking that the Nuyorican community persist, expand, survive and thrive.

I begin with a brief biographical sketch of the author and a discussion of relevant historical-contextual information about his cultural background, neighborhood and immediate rhetorical problem. I continue with a close textual analysis of "A Lower East Side Poem" to determine the inner workings that make it function persuasively. I conclude by evaluating Piñero’s poem according to criteria consistent with that perspective. My analysis reveals how the author makes meaning—by defining personal and cultural identity in a hybrid fashion through, what I call, a "rhetoric of passing" that seeks to translate presenence into absence through memory. Additionally, I suggest that critical attention to this Nuyorican poem not only adds a previously marginalized voice to rhetoric's canon but also offers opportunities for: (1) attending to the material conditions and structural inequalities that come to define the situations in which such work is invented, (2) considering the legacy of "passing" the poem leaves for contemporary writers, scholars, and audiences and, (3) addressing, remembering, imagining and joining in the process of constructing a personal, national or transnational identity.

Ultimately, I find that the poem works to establish identity by embracing continuous movement in the realms of language, of space and place and time. So before answering the question of who am I, one must first answer the questions: Where am I? When am I? What am I? As such, Piñero addresses many social pressures and diasporic concerns between Puerto Rico and New York/United States as well as the interchanges between various racial and ethnic groups in each location. For Piñero identity construction becomes a process of passing from one language/space/time/place to another, a forensic-epideictic exercise. This requires an understanding of motives and an honest accounting for one’s life. It constructs memories about past events and deliberates about the future. It creates an image to leave in the mind of the audience. It involves naming involuntary and voluntary actions and determining one’s own standards of justice and injustice. Finally, it extends beyond any single rhetor and exists as an invitation to connect with the shifting identities, cultures, lives and philosophies of populations within and without the United States.

Publication Type: Poetry
Abstract: If a Goddess were somehow to land in contemporary America, what might her life be like? Certainly she would find a diminishment of the power she held in her heyday, but if divinity were manifested in the ordinary details of women's lives, she might nevertheless find space to exist. In this poem sequence, the Goddess struggles to reconcile her isolation and loss of authority with her sure knowledge of the innate divinity within every woman—and to somehow hang onto her sense of humor in the process.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The idea of America as an ongoing project, a work in progress whose greatness remains to be achieved, has been a recurrent way of thinking about the American experiment. Drawing on a lineage that runs from Emerson and Whitman to James Baldwin, Richard Rorty has placed this ideal of collective self-transformation at the center of his pragmatist project. Fostering the "Emersonian combination of self-reliance and patriotism found in James and Dewey" will enable us, in a phrase he borrows from Baldwin, to "achieve our country" and realize the enduring promise of America's highest ideals. In this paper I examine Rorty's conception of "Emersonian self-creation on a communal scale" and the key issues it raises for political theorists, including how to balance the tension that makes democratic collective self-renewal possible between a diversity of individual perspectives and a strong communal bond, the question of the degree of connectedness of the social critic, how a democracy should best deal with a past about which it cannot be proud, and the relation of self-criticism to social criticism. I argue that the sentiment that binds Whitman to his country, like Baldwin, is love, not, pace Rorty, pride. Only the mode of a lover's chastisement enables us to criticize America's failures while remaining committed to the project of achieving a better future, and to avoid simply accepting or rejecting "America."