Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Dated Emcees
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://chinakahodge.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://chinakahodge.com/about-2/ * https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/2016/05/08/chinaka-hodge-shines-a-harsh-true-light-on-life-in-hip-hop-with-dated-emcees/ * http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100542950&fa=author&person_id=17300#content
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016017750
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016017750
HEADING: Hodge, Chinaka
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370 __ |a Oakland (Calif.) |f New York (N.Y.) |f Los Angeles (Calif.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Poetry |a Writing |a Playwriting |a Motion picture authorship |2 lcsh
373 __ |a New York University |t 2006 |2 naf
373 __ |a University of Southern California. School of Cinematic Arts |t 2012 |2 naf
374 __ |a Poets |a Educators |a Dramatists |a Screenwriters |2 lcsh
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Mirrors in every corner, 2014, ©2014: |b title page (Chinaka Hodge) page 95 (poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter; originally from Oakland, California; BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York in 2006, MFA Writing Division at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles, California in 2012; in 2013, she was a Sundance Feature Film Lab Fellow for her scrip 700th&Int’l, her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have been featured in Newsweek, other magazines and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry)
PERSONAL EDUCATION:
New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, bachelor’s degree, 2006; University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, M.F.A. (writing for film), 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet, educator, actor, playwright, and screenwriter. Artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA, 2012; Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, program director, associate artistic director, teacher, and poet mentor; the Getback hip-hop ensemble, founding member.
AWARDS:University of Southern California, Annenberg Fellowship; San Francisco Foundation, Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent; Sundance Feature Film lab fellow for her script “700th&Int’l.,” 2013; Cave Canem’s summer retreat fellow, 2013.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems, editorials, interviews, and prose to various outlets, including Newsweek, San Francisco magazine, Believer magazine, PBS, NPR, CNN, and C-Span and for two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in Oakland, California, Chinaka Hodge is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She is a founding member of the hip-hop ensemble the Getback and has published poems, editorials, interviews, and prose in Newsweek, San Francisco magazine, and Believer magazine and for PBS, NPR, CNN, and HBO’s Def Poetry. Her first book is Dated Emcees, a collection of poetry about urban hip-hop. Hodge has received an artist-in-residence position and numerous fellowships. She has worked at Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, a literary nonprofit, as program director, associate artistic director, teacher, and poet mentor.
In Dated Emcees, Hodge explores her life coming of age as a black woman in America. She grew up with hip-hop music and comments on its influence on her interactions with other people, her romantic relationships, tender moments, humor, as well as life’s troubles and traumas, flaws, heartbreak, and melancholy. She also addresses misogyny and feminist principles related to hip-hop. “Hodge underscores the overlooked stories of women via persona poems ripe with color and sharp imagery,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly. On the Rumpus Web site, Amanda Hildebrand described the poems, saying: “If you feel lost in lovesickness, Chinaka Hodge knows where you’ve been. These are the everywoman’s love poems, for the infatuated woman, the dumped woman, the other woman.”
An observation and assessment of hip-hop’s best orators, characters, archetypes, and songs, Hodge’s poems, which experiment with lyrical expressions and meter, create a new narrative about hip-hop music, explore how the genre changed the global music scene, speak to black life, and celebrate the power and grace of the style’s music. Hodge incorporates honesty and universal concepts and presents her poems to as wide an audience as possible. “She leverages the severe weight of misfortune through innovative, unforgettable language … and unexpected imagery,” noted Diego Baez in Booklist.
Dated Emcees delivers on both puns from its title: aging rappers and romantic entanglements. In her poems to hip-hop’s famous rappers, Hodge covers Jay Z, Drake, and Mystikal and eulogizes rappers that have died, such as Tupac, Biggie, and Oscar Grant. She also talks about groupies, romance, love, infidelity, confessions, violence from police, and racial identity. Writing in the Los Angeles Review, Danny Caine praised the book, saying: “Dated Emcees successfully tracks these dualities throughout—black/white, groupie/lover, dating/dated, a black man from Oakland gunned down at a train station/a black man from Oakland becomes an award winning filmmaker. Hodges questions, puns, and probes these paradoxes in a fiery, personal voice, always locked in to the beat.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2016, Diego Baez, review of Dated Emcees, p. 11.
Publishers Weekly, May 16, 2016, review of Dated Emcees, p. 30.
ONLINE
Chinaka Hodge, http://chinakahodge.com (March 1, 2017), author profile.
KQED, https://ww2.kqed.org/ (May 8, 2016), Leilani Clark, “Chinaka Hodge Shines a Piercing Light on Life in Hip-Hop with ‘Dated Emcees,’” review of Dated Emcees.
Los Angeles Review, http://losangelesreview.org/ (March 1, 2017), Danny Caine, review of Dated Emcees.
Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org (March 1, 2017), author profile.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (September 2, 2016), Amanda Hildebrand, review of Dated Emcees.
Chinaka Hodge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chinaka Hodge
Born Oakland, California
Education New York University, MFA in Writing for Film and TV from University of Southern California
Website http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/chinaka-hodge
Chinaka Hodge is an American poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. She has received national recognition for her publications, especially her artistic work on gentrification.
Biography[edit]
Chinaka Hodge was born in Oakland, California and lived in various neighborhoods of the city throughout the course of her childhood.[1] In May 2006, Hodge graduated from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and was honored to be the student speaker at the 174th Commencement exercise. Four years later, Chinaka received USC's Annenberg Fellowship to continue her studies at its School of Cinematic Arts. She received her MFA in Writing for Film and TV in 2012. In the fall of that year, she was awarded the SF Foundation's Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent. Hodge was also a 2012 Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA. In January 2013, Hodge was a Sundance Feature Film lab Fellow for her script, "700th&Int'l." In June 2013 Chinaka began as a first year fellow at Cave Canem’s summer retreat.[2]
Work and publications[edit]
For the past ten years, Hodge has worked in various capacities at Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, a San Francisco-based literary arts non-profit. During her tenure there, Chinaka served as Program Director, Associate Artistic Director, and worked directly with Youth Speaks’ core population as a teaching artist and poet mentor.[3] She has acted in comparable capacities in New York and Los Angeles at Urban Word NYC and Get Lit: Words Ignite. Hodge is also a founding member of a collaborative hip hop ensemble, The Getback. Her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have been featured in Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, Believer Magazine, PBS, NPR, CNN, C-Span, and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Dated Emcees (City Lights, 2016), a collection of poetry about urban hip-hop.[4]
Chinaka Hodge is a poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. Originally from Oakland, California, she graduated from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May of 2006, and was honored to be the student speaker at the 174th Commencement exercise. In 2010, Chinaka received USC’s prestigious Annenberg Fellowship to continue her studies at its School of Cinematic Arts. She received her MFA in Writing for Film and TV in 2012. In the fall of that year, she received the SF Foundation’s Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent. Chinaka was also a 2012 Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA. In January 2013, Hodge was a Sundance Feature Film lab Fellow for her script, 700th&Int’l. In June of 2013 Chinaka began as a first year fellow at Cave Canem’s prestigious summer retreat.
For over a decade, Hodge has worked in various capacities at Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, the nation’s leading literary arts non-profit. During her tenure there, Chinaka served as Program Director, Associate Artistic Director, and worked directly with Youth Speaks’ core population as a teaching artist and poet mentor. She has acted in comparable capacities in New York and Los Angeles at Urban Word NYC and Get Lit: Words Ignite. When not educating or writing for the page, Chinaka rocks mics as a founding member of a collaborative Hip Hop ensemble, The Getback. Her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have been featured in Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, Believer Magazine, PBS, NPR, CNN, C-Span, and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry.
"Nobody does today's mathematics, the last night of hip hop as they know it and they don't even know it," writes Chinaka Hodge in 'Dated Emcees.'
"Nobody does today's mathematics, the last night of hip hop as they know it and they don't even know it," writes Chinaka Hodge in 'Dated Emcees.' (Author photo)
THE SPINE
Chinaka Hodge Shines a Piercing Light on Life in Hip-Hop with ‘Dated Emcees’
By Leilani Clark
MAY 8, 2016
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Chinaka Hodge’s talent seems to have no limit. She’s written an experimental play starring Daveed Diggs, the Oakland-born rapper recently nominated for a Tony for his role in Hamilton. She’s a hot-as-hell guest MC. She’s written a screenplay that earned her a fellowship at the Sundance Institute. She’s made an impact as an educator with Youth Speaks, the influential poetry nonprofit that impacts kids’ lives across the Bay Area. She’s teamed with the director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale, Creed) on a new drama series about young people affected by institutionalization. And she has a sense of humor: check out her acting role as a gun-toting criminal with an elderly lover in the Harold and Maude-gone-amok video for Atmosphere’s “Kanye West.”
On top of this already stacked resumé, Hodge is a well-received poet. Her second poetry collection, Dated Emcees, comes out in June on the City Lights imprint Sister Spit. Hodge grew up in Oakland, under the influence of hip-hop and nineties East Bay culture. In fact, she’s a founding member of collaborative hip-hop ensemble The Getback, along with Daveed Diggs and others. In this new collection of 25 poems, she examines her own life through the lens of hip-hop, modeling the book’s length on a classic double album.
unnamed
The collection’s title poem is a scathing critique of “washed-up” rappers “otherwise known as old dudes rocking old fits” and hitting on teenage girls. Hodge’s narrator goes to a party in New York, where she’s propositioned by a man “round greying in a shirt that came with the pants / and a pair of gazelles actually older than my father.” He hands her his coke-white business card, and, as it turns out, the old guy is Positive K: You might remember him from the 1992 song “I Got a Man.” You can guess how the young lady responds to his groupie treatment of a woman two decades his junior.
The poem sets the reader up for the rest of the collection’s excellent mix of humor, tragedy, and sly cultural and political allusions.
“Title track” opens with this powerhouse stanza:
no jazz men left: I date emcees,
tries to rehabilitate them,
into honest, working stiffs
i foot the bills, handle
the losses them come
loud leave softly
fall short break
daylight
gone
The opening functions as a bit of braggadocio about all the rappers the narrator has hooked up with over the years, the men of “fast dishonest / words, thoughts, childish aliases” that morph swiftly into the “lames i held / on too long / way past / time.” The voice is harsh, unforgiving, a spotlight shone on all players involved, and on the futility of playing the same games over and over, until you end up “in the studio / four am red bull / china shopping / married to / same old / acts” — a familiar scenario to anyone that has spent any amount of intimate time with musicians.
Chinaka Hodge.
Chinaka Hodge. (Author photo)
There are 24 haikus for every year of the life of Notorious B.I.G., and couplets for every year of Tupac Shakur’s life, including one for the late Afeni Shakur: “your dear mama, eschews her crackfiend fame / afeni becomes a household, recognized name.”
Other poems like “One Being the Other Woman,” “First Date with the Engaged Rapper,” and “Life is Good” speak of betrayal, the loneliness of being the second choice, or the disgust at discovering you’re the one being cheated on.
“The Ballad of Hollywood” captures the impulsive, destructive nature of anger; how a drink spilled on a prized silk shirt can lead to an explosion of violence, changing the entire course of a night out at the club. Hodge explores how violence infuses certain men with energy, offering a way to truly feel all the feels.
You got to understand, he knows it’s fleeting
but when he draws someone’s blood away
from its course and holds it in his mouth
and fist at once he tastes tomorrow
he does feel like a new man
thumps a fist against his heart
invincible
Dated Emcees hits hard from beginning to end, but “The Oscars: an epic” is truly brutal in its insight about systemic racism and the aftermath of the killings of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, and other young black men.
When they said it was fine for the boy to lay there
and the killer to walk. I was just outside of Folsom, drove
straight to his house. Waited for him to get off set.
He held me while I sobbed.
The arrests, the profiling, the random sanctioned violence: “Everyone black man I love been through it,” writes Hodge.
Ultimately, this is a book that begs to be read over and over, like a favorite album that you play morning ’til night, until you know the lyrics, secret messages, and hard-won insights as intimately as you know your own beating heart. Dated Emcees is another gem from one of Oakland’s best.
Dated Emcees
Publishers Weekly.
263.20 (May 16, 2016): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dated Emcees
Chinaka Hodge. City Lights (Consortium, dist.), $13.95 trade paper (62p) ISBN 978-0-87286725-3
Hodge, a founding member of the collaborative hip-hop ensemble the Getback, places the hip-hop tradition front and center in a debut collection
structured to mimic a double album. She relates stories from the perspective of young women immersed in hip-hop culture, using linked haiku for
Notorious BIG ("you: a manual/ a mural, pressed rock, icon,/ fightin word or curse"), couplets for Tupac Shakur, and a broken ghazal for Jordan
Davis (a black teenager who was murdered by a white man who thought his music was too loud).
Hodge's poem "Ratchet," which complicates well-worn narratives within some hip-hop tropes, finds a girl engaged with visible markers of class
in the manner of poet Ruth Forman's "Stoplight Politics." Cleverly shifting hip-hop's traditionally masculine focus, Hodge underscores the
overlooked stories of women via persona poems ripe with color and sharp imagery. The strength of her speakers' voices are particularly
noteworthy in the first-person poems, the women loving the voices of the men who surround them, but standing powerfully on their own. She also
makes reference to anonymous working mothers and notable women and girls such as Erykah Bad'u, Kelis, and Blue Ivy Carter. Hodge's
impressive sense of line control and allusions to the genre may remind readers of Ntozake Shange. Despite the dated of the title, this is a timely
collection. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Dated Emcees." Publishers Weekly, 16 May 2016, p. 30+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453506745&it=r&asid=a858081c28ee4f4e7f045a76f251c210. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486356475368 2/3
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453506745
---
Dated Emcees
Diego Baez
Booklist.
112.18 (May 15, 2016): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Dated Emcees. By Chinaka Hodge. June 2016. 60p. City lights, paper, $13.95 (9780872867024); e-book (9780872867253). 811.
The lyrical exuberance of poet and playwright Hodge has been showcased on stage and on screen, including many appearances on HBO's Def
Poetry Jam as well as in The Breakbeat Poets (2015). The double meaning of her first collection alludes to the speaker in Hodge's poems having
relationships with figureheads of hip-hop, from well-known rappers to broke-down hustlers, and having grown up during the genre's golden age.
But Hodge backs away from nostalgia and instead confronts the frustrating difficulty of coming-of-age as a black woman in America. She
leverages the severe weight of misfortune through innovative, unforgettable language ("we had a fire in the house / everything curled into
damage"), and unexpected imagery ("His thoughts are ivory that protrude from the center / of his head"). In "Drake questions the deceased,
Vegas," Hodge transports twenty-first-century R&B icon Drake to the site of Tupac's murder in Sin City, delivering a devastating homage: "if you
had been taught fame / was a fate crime against black men, / would you have still stepped in the booth?"--Diego Baez
YA: Teens will relate to Hodge's fresh and candid style, and will appreciate the throwbacks and shout-outs to classic hip-hop. DB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Baez, Diego. "Dated Emcees." Booklist, 15 May 2016, p. 11+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453913529&it=r&asid=5059e92d0135ba334d5945dd07a92378. Accessed 5 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453913529
DATED EMCEES BY CHINAKA HODGE
REVIEWED BY AMANDA HILDEBRAND
September 2nd, 2016
You may not think of hip-hop as a love story, but Chinaka Hodge will tell you differently. Poet, activist, educator, and rap artist, Hodge has gifted us with her first book, Dated Emcees, and shows how the greatest rappers are also the greatest lovers, cheaters, victors, martyrs, spitting side-by-side with us in this terrible love game. Hodge takes us through her dating history of ex-emcees and emcee-exes a poem at a time, one for each lover and lesson, bouncing between the boundaries of literature, verse, and memoir.
Dated Emcees is a book of love poems, all things considered. If you feel lost in lovesickness, Chinaka Hodge knows where you’ve been. These are the everywoman’s love poems, for the infatuated woman, the dumped woman, the other woman. Hodge lets us into her personal memories of heartbreak that may feel all too familiar, and the reader pictures themselves with her in her struggle, counting quarters for the laundry and waiting for a call back.
Hodge’s confessional anecdotes are spaced between pieces about, inspired by, and dedicated to legends of hip-hop of now and days past. Haikus for Biggie, couplets for 2Pac; an internal monologue from the mind of “Mr. Carter” on the day of Blue Ivy’s wedding; an interview between Drake and Pac that night in Vegas, the two glaringly different artists reciting together in those last moments: “oh my god/ oh my god/ if i die/ i’m a legend.” Even though there are pop culture references buried in almost every stanza, you don’t necessarily need to be well-versed in hip-hop or its surrounding culture to understand Hodge’s message; but, as Hodge alludes to, there’s a clear gap between understanding and knowing. She writes to us as if we know, and we either keep up or we don’t.
Hodge is perhaps most well-known as a spoken word poet, especially for her past appearances on the HBO show Def Poetry Jam. You can hear that influence in Dated Emcees as the poems rush to sound in your head, kicking and jerking, pumping through your chest, begging to be read aloud. Hodge writes of past loves as if they were songs, their memory reverberating and echoing forever through her story, their words tattoos in Sharpie on the binds of history books, where the people will see them. Her subjects are saints enshrined in the timeless art of hip-hop.
i date lushes faded like grandpas
who crawl sixteen bars and get twisted
they run tabs more than they spit
swallow fake beautifuls
hen and mott’s apple
juiced stuck slurs stirs
one finger skyward
blurred
(from “title track”)
Chinaka HodgeFemale emcees are strangely missing from the armada of hip-hop figures coloring the pages, despite the influence women in hip-hop have had on Hodge and her work. Perhaps she simply has never dated a female emcee; perhaps she wanted to focus specifically on masculinity in the hip-hop community. Her stories particularly speak to black female readers, as she challenges misogyny, violence, and colorism that permeate a popular culture centered on light, white, straight-haired beauty.
sth
pft
sith
pft
ha
they
aint
never
going
to make
no princess
tiana your
color.
(from “light privilege or Lili speaks”)
It’s all tied together by the theme that the past, and our ghosts from it, have direct influence on where and how we go in the future. If we watch ourselves make the same mistakes, forsake our histories, refuse to amend damaged pasts – then we’re resigned to the same heartbreak, over and over again. Hodge reminds us of the comfort that can be found in remembering pain as growth.
Chinaka Hodge will break your heart, she’ll make you angry, she’ll make you guilty; but mostly, she’ll tell you the truth. Her confessions of heartbreak in Dated Emcees will speak to those who have loved, lost, and re-found themselves in the small places between the punchlines.
BOOK REVIEW: DATED EMCEES BY CHINAKA HODGE
unnamed-e1462476777205
Dated Emcees
Poems by Chinaka Hodge
City Lights/Sister Spit, May 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0872867024
$13.95: 64 pp.
Reviewed by Danny Caine
At first glimpse, it seems as if Chinaka Hodge’s short, brazen poetry collection Dated Emcees will revolve around the conceit of its title’s puns—a book concerning emcees who are both dated, as in old, and dated, as in romantically linked. Indeed, many of the emcees mentioned in this book are both romantically entangled with the speaker, and also decidedly old-school—Jay Z and Mystikal, for instance, but also Tupac and Biggie, who both receive formally inventive eulogies early on.
But the most energetic use of “dated” as in “old” comes when Hodge’s speaker lets loose on poorly aging minor, unnamed emcees—“old uncle rap” as the collection’s title poem, its first, has it. Hodges pulls no punches making a group of aging rappers look ridiculous. The poem starts, “on a fall evening in the early aughts old uncle rap / pulls up his gut, inspects the waistband of his track / pants, catches his reflection in a dull passing train.” This is not braggadocio, it’s aging insecurity; the poem’s party setting features “an impromptu cipher of washed up / rappers, finger-dead can holders, uprocking on / inflamed knees, asking what to do with the next decade.” Soon, and inevitably, one of the aging rappers turns his eyes to the speaker to “appraise me as sex-able if perhaps groupie.” We’ve landed on a thread running throughout the collection: the haunting specter of being called groupie, the struggle and difficulty “on being the other woman,” as one poem’s title states. As the title poem concludes, one of the aging rappers approaches the speaker and hands her his business card, which says “positive k: rapper.” Coming on to the speaker, “he like why not.” She responds with the title of his classic track, here re-casted to deflate the aging rapper’s ego and the thought that he can somehow woo the eighteen-year-old speaker at this party: “i’m like / i got a man.”
While the collection gets a lot of mileage out of the brash voice of its first poem, it soon expands its breadth to include other notes as well. The other sense of “dated,” the romantic one, animates the lovely poem “first date with the engaged rapper,” which opens with a stark and simple color pallet, as
the best handholding I ever did was in utah
me. an african. a blizzard.
the contrast.
the patterns.
snow flurries. his sable cheeks.
then a black-and-white talkie.
The snow, the innocence of simple hand-holding, and the simple color pallet, plus the old-timey use of “talkie” instead of “film” or “movie,” lend the poem a feeling of sweetness that culminates in its final lines, “who are we to know such gleeful, tiny betrayal / what right do we have to touch, rich and outlawed, / who dares find blackness in the snow and call it beautiful.”
The black and white color scheme in “first date with the engaged rapper” echoes with the long poem “light privilege or Lili speaks,” which claims
to be born this light
is to direct traffic from the center
of an isocoles triangle
etched over the atlantic.
A refrain in the poem echoes the parroting repetitive ignorant stranger: “oh my god what are you mixed with.” In its back half, Dated Emcees moves beyond the fun of its title’s dual conceit and into a fierce exploration of racial and identity politics. In “Drake questions the deceased, Vegas,” Drake speaks to an absent Tupac and asks “if you had been taught fame / was a hate crime against black men, / would you have still stepped in the booth?”
The book’s vein of racial identity politics peaks in “The Oscars (an epic for Ryan Coogler).” “The Oscars” is a suite of powerful poems describing the Oakland premiere of Coogler’s film Fruitvale Station, which itself tells the story of Oscar Grant, fatally shot by an Oakland Police officer after a confrontation at an Oakland BART station. Born and raised in Oakland, Hodges spins a broad and powerful portrait of her “brothers” and “lovers,” claiming, “Everyone black man I love been through it […] This one life keep coming at like an electric train.” After introducing the speaker’s lovers and brothers, the poem brings them together for a Fruitvale Station screening in Oakland “packed, all night, with men, with low cuts, / skeptical eyes, with grudges and trust issues, / with pamphlets, with offspring, with mothers.” The film brings these men who “all came, in a single- / file line, to sing this dirge with you, to see if a demon could / be released, to test if they were still magic as they thought” to a messy catharsis. About these men, the poem concludes, “They are all Oscars.” Here, Hodges puns again, this time to devastating effect: they all could be Oscar Grant gunned down at a train station, or they all could be Oscars to award Coogler’s filmmaking achievement.
Dated Emcees successfully tracks these dualities throughout—black/white, groupie/lover, dating/dated, a black man from Oakland gunned down at a train station/a black man from Oakland becomes an award winning filmmaker. Hodges questions, puns, and probes these paradoxes in a fiery, personal voice, always locked in to the beat.