There is an actual rhetoric to our present speech, something the ‘modernist’ artifice fails to notice.

            The rhetorical basis of the American language has shifted away radically from the British.

            It begins in plainstyle, the educated corollary for the frontier effect – the deconstruction to the basis of necessity. Being English middle class, it flattens the language, opening it up to the external. The final shift is African, Caribbean and other native influences introducing a force of rhythmic diversity beginning in raw syncopation.

            Hence the division between a rhythmically dead intellectual poetry and hip-hop.

            Hip-hop produces textures. Snoot ‘poetry’ clings to its denial of the Shakespearean iamb.