Maybe You should be an Emcee:
Black Poetry as Has-Been Protest

       Contemporary poetry is known more by contempt than rarity. Like a homeless man nodded off on the front steps of your apartment, poetry can elicit unspecific feeling of guilt and furtive looks for alternate routes. Contemporary poetry rarely inspires action that isn’t evasive. This has not always been the case, however.

       In the 1960s and 1970s, poets in and around the Black Arts Movement such as Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, and Etheridge Knight brought poetry directly to the people in hopes of motivating intellectual and cultural action. And it worked. Brooks’s emphasis on workshops for youths and prisoners, Jordan’s Poetry for the People movement, and Knight’s Free People’s Poetry Workshops all directed action through poetic immersion.

       Maybe it is because black folks have always been the metaphoric homeless on everybody’s step that these poets were effectively able to use poetry as a vehicle to encourage cultural engagement. Maybe it is because their words and actions said what needed to be said loudly—defining themselves as cultural or historical truth-sayers in the same way Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Countee Cullen did during the Harlem Renaissance.

       Even with all of this cultural signifying, there is also the inherent need for poets to prove artistic mettle. The great Nigerian writer Ben Okri said it is the poet who:

             ...needs to be up at night, while the world sleeps…
             needs to exist in dark places, where spiders forge their webs in
             silence; near the gutters, where the underside of our dreams
             fester. Poets need to live where others don’t care to look…
             because if they don’t they can’t sing to us of all the secret and
             public domains of our lives.#1

       Okri endows the poet with a near-mythological ability and responsibility. For him, it is up to the poet to be truthful and not turn away from the reality of living. In that sense, he sees poets in much the same way as Jay Wright or Yusef Komunyakaa see poets: as truth-seekers and truth-tellers, as givers and as ferrymen.

       It is though linguistic risks and language reevaluations that these poets are able to find and dispense truth. Collections of poems like Wright’s Double Invention of Komo and Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary have helped to shake up some of the concrete-weighted free verse that serves as baseline for contemporary poetry. But their influence doesn’t extend outside the poetic community in the way Brooks or Knight were able to.

       This is, in part, due to the simple fact that there is another verbal art form already speaking to the people: rap music. Rap, possibly the most essential derivation of poetry, has single-handedly changed the role (and definition) of African-American culture contemporarily. By its verbose nature, rap has also unwittingly challenged the position of the poet. Wordsmiths whose sole responsibility was “sing[ing] to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives” have to compete with beats and the recently Oxford-ized “bling bling” to be heard.

       Realistically, why listen to or read a poet when you can listen to Dave and Postindous from De La Soul, whose eloquence and steel rival any poet’s? “Stakes is High” uses metaphor and imagery as gracefully as Robert Hayden or Rita Dove:

             Neighborhoods are now hoods ‘cause nobody’s neighbors
             Just animals surviving with that animal behavior
             Under I who be rhyming from dark to light sky
             Experiments when needles and skin connect
             No wonder where we live is called the projects…#2

       An African-American poet has the gift of iambs and other assorted metrics. That same poet has the grab bag of imagery and cultural discontent. The right combination of these creates something that can roust that misconceived drunk from the steps. But the same thing can be said for an emcee. So what, then, separates a poet from the emcee?

       The fact of the matter is emcees are able to fulfill the traditional roles of poets easily. There is no confusion about the point or purpose of an emcee’s words. The questions of art or not art don’t apply. There are simply words over beats and that combination has proved to be much more effective than words or beats alone. In the late 1980s, Public Enemy energized social consciousness in African Americans in a way not seen since the Black Arts movement. Equally as important, however, is the fact that they also charged up adolescent white males—then and now, the primary audience and financial foundation of rap.

       No matter how much credence writers give to line breaks and parallelism in imagery, a bad emcee can reach 100 times as many people as the most effervescent poet. And that’s without imagery or anything that doesn’t shine and spin in his video. Once heard, the shiny, spinny emcee will be given a dedicated ear, even if he doesn’t deserve it artistically. The emcee will be both quoted and broadcast from tricked out Toyotas and Hondas in suburbs all over America. His tee shirts will be sported with baggy jeans and squeaky white sneakers. And no matter what his message is (or isn’t), few people under the age of parents will be discomforted by his words.

       Conversely, former New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka caused all sorts of discomfort with his poetic suggestions that Israel had prior knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was, in fact, so discomforting that the New Jersey Senate eliminated the position of state Poet Laureate in July of 2003. To be heard, Baraka had to say something as loud as:

             Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
             Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
             To stay home that day
             Why did Sharon stay away?#3

       Simply put, Baraka had to say this to get people to even be aware of the fact that New Jersey had a Poet Laureate. Forget Baraka’s decades of complaint and protest: this story only became a story because he read the accusatory poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” at one of the largest poetry venues in America, The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Baraka read the same poem several other times before that festival without it being acknowledged or him being booted from his post as Poet Laureate.

       Contrast the political save-face that Baraka endured with the fervor bubbling around recent Time Magazine cover boy Kanye West, who very emotionally criticized the Bush Administration for its poor response to Hurricane Katrina. When he asserted, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” he got more airtime and press the next week in the major American media than the horrors of Darfur had in the previous year on NBC and CBS combined.#4

       The point of my comparison is not whether West and/or Baraka deserved what they got. The point is that, while admittedly working from very volatile subject matter, Baraka got canned and few people outside of the cloistered world of academic and processional poetry paid attention to his actual words or the subsequent pink slip. Conversely Kayne West, a decidedly less accomplished artist and wordsmith, said his piece and was a fixture on the news for weeks. Much of the coverage was “objective” and he didn’t get fired (if it is even possible to fire an emcee). Instead, people listened and reacted. West became the embodiment of Okri’s Poet, “. . .liv[ing] where others don’t care to look.”

       Even still, it may be unfair to utilize these two poignant moments of free speech to eulogize American poetry. But they are two very public examples that demonstrate the disparity in the volumes of the voices of contemporary poets and emcees. They also lend credence to one of the many excellent points August Kleinzahler makes in his essay, “No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please.” When trying to explain the lack of interest generated by American poetry, Kleinzahler says:

             Do you suppose for a moment that a spirited youngster with a
             brilliant, original mind and gifted up the yin-yang is going to
             sit still for two years of creative writing poetry workshops
             presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity, all the
             while critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of
             the same?#5

       Whether or not academia staking claim to poetry has put the art in a booster seat is a different issue because it doesn’t matter what degree of culture or significance is involved. Contemporary poetry lost the artistic showdown with rap as soon as LL Cool J shouted, “. . .and you know I can’t live without my radio.”

       Because Americans can’t live without their radios. Or their cars, or their beats and poetry has not made itself conducive to any of these essential facets of American life. A poet reading with the anti-trochee lilt at the end of each lines, staring at the ceiling with a New and Selected in the clutch doesn’t even make an evening out enjoyable, let alone a drive to the store or visit to the laundry mat.

       Some poets suggest that art isn’t entertainment and that the audience’s enjoyment isn’t the point—the art is. And that philosophy has served as mantra for yarn-based conceptual artists all over America for years. In the world of theories, they might be right. But in the world of “produce and be seen or find yourself some other steps to pass out on,” the audience becomes the point. If they don’t buy what you’re selling, you’re on time-out or out of stock. Or you’ve become, as my friend Ruth Ellen Kocher says, in the running to be the obscure poet future PhD students will write their dissertations about.

       Realistically, most poets are obscure, no matter what university they teach at. But if there isn’t some flex or change, poets as literary constructs might find themselves even more has-been than that—protesting tenure and chump-change award grants in the already manacled vacuum of other poets. The same way horses protested the horseless carriage: wordlessly.

       1. “While the World Sleeps,” A Way of Being Free (1998), Ben Okri.
       2. “Stakes is High,” from the album Stakes is High (1996), De La Soul.
       3. “Somebody Blew Up America,” from Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems (2004), Amiri Baraka.
       4. For more information on the media coverage (or lack thereof) of Darfur, see Nat Hentnoff’s excellent piece, “Media Blackout on Darfur” from The Washington Times, September 26, 2005
       5. “No Antonin Artaud with The Flapjacks, Please,” Poetry, April 2004.