Low Frequencies and Poetic Innovations

THE GENRE ‘DUB POETRY’ APPEARED IN THE early 1970s. The term refers to a type of AfroCaribbean (originally Jamaican) and black British poetry which is performancebased but can be presented in different formats: a dub poem can be performed live or studio-recorded, with or without music; it can also appear without the performance, in a print version. It is in the interplay of all these different versions that the aesthetic of dub poetry is best understood. It is represented by the work of pioneering poets such as Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka, Michael “Mikey” Smith, Jean “Binta” Breeze, Lillian Allen, Yasus Afari, Levi Tafari, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Linton Kwesi Johnson (hereafter LKJ). It emerged within a Caribbean community where social injustices shaped a consciousness and a militancy expressed in a variety of artistic forms, such as literature, music, and the visual arts. In the history of its criticism, the work of an early generation of writers and critics, such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Mervyn Morris and Stewart Brown, and scholars such as Kwame Dawes and Lloyd Bradley, played an important role in developing a narrative of music’s role and place in the development of this poetry.1 In academic studies concerned specifically with dub poetry, the work of David Bousquet, Eric Doumerc, Christian Habekost, Bartosz Wójcik and more recently David Austin has advanced interesting debates on the aesthetic of dub poetry.2 Yet, in these different academic works on that poetic practice, a discussion on the impact of music on the poetics of dub poetry is still inadequate. Although dub poetry is illustrated in the work of several poets as mentioned above, the Jamaica-born, UK-raised LKJ is an important pioneer in the tradition – as reflected in his achievement in becoming the second living poet, and the only black one, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series in 2002. His poetic style shows experimentations that contributed greatly