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In 1991, Elvis Mitchell, National Public Radio’s Weekend entertainment reporter, interviewed Spike Lee for Playboy magazine. “Lee,” Mitchell informed his readers, “has made my life miserable for the past couple of months”: [I]nvariably, in phone-tag intramurals preceding our meetings, every message Lee left on my answering machine began with those deathless words, followed by his trademark cackle. The “deathless words” that unnerved Mitchell were not Lee’s own. Gleefully the filmmaker quoted a canonical hip-hop insult, the opening lines of Public Enemy’s celebrated stanza from “Fight the Power,” rapped by Chuck D and made internationally famous by Lee’s film, “Do the Right Thing”:
About David Caplan
David Caplan is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism, most recently, In the World He Created According to His Will (University of Georgia Press / VQR Poetry Series 2010). His current projects include Rhyme’s Challenge (under contract to Oxford University Press) and another poetry collection. An Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University, this fall he will serve as a Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liège. He is co-editor of this poetry issue and a Contributing Editor to VQR.
Also By This Author
- American Poetry and Poetry Criticism Now
- Into My Garden
- God Knows English
- Only the Hebrew
- The Mistake
- Bound
- Alien Fire
- Nittel Nacht
- Ohel
- Chassidus by Telephone
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