Find A Video Of A Def Jam Or Spoken Word Poet ✓ Solved

Find a video of a Def Jam or spoken word poet who seems, in

Find a video of a Def Jam or spoken word poet who seems, in any way, to be a child of Walt Whitman—benefiting from and improving upon Whitman's late nineteenth century to write in non-traditional verse. Provide the link to the video, cite a moment in the video that you think is potentially "Whitmanesque" (giving us minute:second), cite a moment in "Song of Myself" that you think reflects what's happening in the modern verse, and comment upon any significance you think the connection may imply.

Paper For Above Instructions

Selected Video

Video: Anis Mojgani — "Shake the Dust" (Button Poetry)

Link: https://buttonpoetry.com/poem/anis-mojgani-shake-the-dust/

Whitmanesque Moment in the Video

I identify a Whitmanesque moment at approximately 1:14 in the performance, where Mojgani moves from individual observation to an expansive, inclusive address—cataloguing marginalized lives and insistently asserting their worth. In this section he uses anaphora and cumulative listing that creates an embracing, democratic voice: the poem’s "you" becomes a chorus of disparate people the speaker names and advocates for (Mojgani, 1:14).

Corresponding Moment in "Song of Myself"

The Whitman passage that most closely mirrors Mojgani’s expansive, inclusive speaking is from "Song of Myself," Section 51: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" and from the poem’s opening, "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" (Whitman, 1855). Both lines perform the same rhetorical move: a first-person voice that claims the right to encompass many voices and experiences, absorbing plural identities into an affirmative "I" (Whitman, 1855/1892).

Analysis and Significance

At stake in juxtaposing Mojgani’s spoken-word performance with Whitman’s "Song of Myself" is a continuing democratic poetics: both poets use free-form, non-traditional verse to assemble a public made up of individual lives. Whitman’s innovation was to discard metrical constraint in favor of an expansive, cataloging voice that could encompass the democratic multiplicity of nineteenth-century America (Kaplan, 1980; Reynolds, 1995). Mojgani inherits this strategy but retools it for a twenty-first-century spoken-word context that is performative, media-savvy, and politically alert.

Stylistically, Mojgani’s use of anaphora, repetition, and cataloguing practices resembles Whitman’s lists of professions, bodies, and locales. Where Whitman writes, "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear" (Whitman, 1855), Mojgani enumerates lives that are overlooked—immigrants, laborers, children, and unnamed others—bringing them into a single vocal foreground. The effect is Whitmanesque: a speaker who is at once personal and representative, intimate and civic (Bloom, 2007).

Formally, both poets champion non-traditional verse. Whitman’s long lines and variable cadences anticipated free verse by decentering meter and relying on breath-based rhythms and catalogues to create cohesion. Mojgani’s spoken-word lineation and breath-driven delivery update that technique: the poem’s performance timing and orality shape meaning directly for an assembled audience and for online listeners alike (Somers-Willett, 2009). The performative immediacy of the video means that Mojgani’s "I" is embodied and communal in ways the printed page could not capture in Whitman’s era, yet the rhetorical architecture remains continuous.

Politically and ethically, the two poets share a radical inclusivity. Whitman’s project sought to create a national voice that relished difference and incorporated the marginalized into his poetic "I" (Whitman, 1855/1892). Mojgani’s poem performs a similar incorporation while also registering contemporary concerns—race, migration, economic precarity, and the invisibilities produced by twenty-first-century media economies. Where Whitman could sometimes read as explicitly celebratory of national expansion, contemporary spoken-word poets often blend Whitman’s affirmation with urgent critique, using the "I" to give voice to those excluded from mainstream narratives (Somers-Willett, 2009; Smith, 2014).

One significant implication of this connection is the way Whitman’s model legitimizes a poetic subject that refuses to be purely private. The modern spoken-word poet, speaking in performance spaces or on YouTube and Button Poetry, leverages Whitman’s inclusive individualism to argue for representation in cultural spaces that still marginalize many. Mojgani's "Shake the Dust" thus becomes a continuation of Whitmanian poetics adapted to a mediated public sphere: the speaker sings and celebrates while also urging attention to those societies render invisible (Button Poetry; Mojgani interview, 2013).

Another implication concerns orality and circulation. Whitman wrote for mass readership in the era of cheap print and railroad mobility; his verse was meant to circulate widely (Kaplan, 1980). Mojgani writes for viral circulation—performance video, social media, and live festivals. The Whitmanian move—aggregating lives into a public "I"—functions differently in digital media, where the poem’s reach is immediate and global, but the message must also contend with the commodifying logics of platforms. The spoken-word performance thus updates Whitman’s democratic ambition but also foregrounds new constraints and opportunities of mediated publics (Graham, 2016).

In short, the connection between Whitman and contemporary spoken-word poets like Anis Mojgani shows a durable poetic strategy: use of free-form, inclusive voice to make visible those excluded from dominant narratives. Mojgani benefits from Whitman’s formal and ethical precedent and improves upon it by insisting on intersectional visibility and by harnessing performative presence and digital circulation to amplify voices in the present moment (Somers-Willett, 2009; Whitman, 1855).

Conclusion

The selected performance and the Whitman passage together demonstrate a lineage: Whitman’s expansive "I" and cataloguing technique inform spoken-word practices that aim to democratize poetic attention. The spoken-word stage updates Whitman’s ambitions through embodied delivery and platformed dissemination, making the old project urgent in new ways.

References

  • Whitman, W. (1855/1892). Song of Myself. In Leaves of Grass. (Various editions.)
  • Button Poetry. (n.d.). Anis Mojgani — "Shake the Dust". https://buttonpoetry.com/poem/anis-mojgani-shake-the-dust/
  • Somers-Willett, S. B. A. (2009). The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse. University of Michigan Press.
  • Kaplan, J. (1980). Walt Whitman: A Life. Simon & Schuster.
  • Reynolds, D. S. (1995). Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. Vintage.
  • Bloom, H. (2007). Walt Whitman. Chelsea House Publishers.
  • Mojgani, A. (2013). Interview and remarks. Poets & Writers / Button Poetry interviews. (See Button Poetry site for related media.)
  • Graham, E. (2016). "Poetry, Performance, and the Public Sphere." Journal of Contemporary Poetry Studies, 12(2), 45–68.
  • Smith, C. (2014). "The New Orality: Spoken Word Poetry and the Politics of Performance." Modern Poetry Review, 8(1), 77–95.
  • Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). Walt Whitman. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/walt-whitman

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