Word’s Worth

“Art” notwithstanding, some poets are creeps. Upon meeting my ten-year-old sister, Lisa, at an Ezra Pound conference in Orono, Maine, Allen Ginsberg asked if she’d lost her cherry yet. I’ve often wished I’d been present to smack those words out of his mouth.

For better or worse, poetry has always been as familiar as breathing to my six siblings and me. As the offspring of a loving, lifelong literary critic, Hugh Kenner, we were used to spontaneous recitations. Stray refrigerator magnet nouns and verbs would mix up with our breakfast cereal. Headlines from the daily news became haikus or, worse, free verse. I considered it perfectly normal to telephone Louis Zukofsky to discuss “similes” for a sixth-grade homework assignment. Lisa once served Basil Bunting’s sake, keeping his goblet filled as he read during that bittersweet Pound conference. In the house where we grew up, a framed William Carlos Williams typescript, signed with his painful post-stroke scrawl, hung where you could examine it while taking a leak.

Of course we watched plenty of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons. But at bedtime, while other kids might be hearing Christopher Robin’s observations on the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, my father and I would learn poems from books that I’ve chosen to hide from my own kids for the time being. The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children were two of our favorites. These were the work of Hillaire Belloc, an early twentieth-century British poet whose verse was “designed for the admonition of children between the ages of eight and fourteen years.” By the time I was seven I could spit out the whole grisly tale of “Jim,” a boy who runs away at the zoo and gets eaten by Ponto the lion:
 

Now just imagine how it feels
When first your toes and then your heels
And then by gradual degrees
Your shins and ankles, calves and knees
Are slowly eaten bit by bit.
No wonder Jim detested it!

Ponto gnawed away until only a “dainty morsel” remained, and then, “the lion, having reached his head/The miserable boy was dead!”

Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t such a leap for me to end up at VIBE magazine, where I’ve worked as an editor since 1993, the year Quincy Jones launched his journal of hip hop culture. Back when Lisa introduced me to L.L. Cool J and Kool Moe Dee, we never doubted that rap was poetry; we had always understood poems to be performances. Although lots of mindless, hurtful crap gets peddled by the corporate entertainment machine, the essence of rap is samizdat poetry. Of course that artistry is lost on many people, blinded as they are by mass-media stereotypes.

It’s an essential part of being human, this need to shape the chaos of life into language and then to fit that mosaic of words into rhythmic patterns. At the end of the day, Nas and Homer are both in the same line of work. Do we disqualify one because he rhymes over a break-beat instead of a lyre? Because one is blind while the other is merely def?

Our father taught my siblings and me that a work of art should reward prolonged attention, a test that the best hip hop passes with ease. These compositions operate on several levels at once: you can dance to the beat, let the verbal flow wash over you, or wear out your rewind button trying to penetrate the encrypted language. With the best MCs (as most serious rappers prefer to be called) there is no lack of hidden riches. Where Milton may shout out Dante and the Book of Revelation, Jay-Z alludes to The Notorious B.I.G. and Big Daddy Kane, all while taunting rival rappers, social critics, and law enforcement officials. In “Agent Orange” Pharoahe Monch pisses on the White House lawn, then lets the double entendres fly:

I threw a rock and I ran... Y’all wanna ask me who sane?
These biological gases are eating my brain
It’s a political grab bag to rape mother earth
Thirty seconds after they bagged dad for what he’s worth.

I once had the good fortune to edit Harry Allen’s “Hypertext,” an attempt to unpack all the embedded subliminal references and nuances of craftsmanship in “Niggas Bleed,” a single rap by the late Christopher Wallace, AKA The Notorious B.I.G. The final manuscript—fragments of which appeared in the March 1998 issue of VIBE—ran way past twenty thousand words. The complexity of Wallace’s rap was awe-inspiring, especially considering the fact that he wrote nothing down, recording all his rhymes “off the dome.”

Meanwhile, millions of kids around the world can recite Eminem’s latest verse by heart, although they couldn’t care less what any doctoral candidate thinks about it. “See I’m a poet to some/A regular modern-day Shakespeare,” Eminem muses on “Renegade,” a dazzling duet from Jay-Z’s landmark album The Blueprint. Because it’s not exactly cool for any MC to care about that sort of thing—let alone a white boy—he backpedals a few lines later: “I’m just a kid from the gutter/Making this butter offa these bloodsuckers.” But go through his raps and Eminem’s artistic aspirations are undeniable. Tupac Shakur, hip hop’s tragic anti-hero, struggled with a similar internal conflict. Only after his murder at age twenty-five did his legions of fans learn how much he loved acting classes and writing poetry.

Mercenary motives are reliable alibis for the preservation of icy machismo. (“Words worth a million like I’m rapping over platinum teeth,” Jay-Z once boasted.) But other MCs are willing to admit that it’s not necessarily all about the Benjamins. Check Common’s new album Be, especially “The Corner,” an ode to the urban crossroads that features the seventies proto-rap crew, The Last Poets. Some MCs actually covet critical respect. “I’m trying to show these poetry niggas that you can be poetic and into high fashion at the same time,” the Chicago-born bard Kanye West told VIBE: “These people think you need to live on a rock to be poetic. I’m actually consulting with poets as I write this album. Like the way niggas got vocal coaches, I got a poetry coach.”

Reports of the declining state of poetry have been greatly exaggerated. Much of the mail we receive at VIBE (especially the letters stamped with a prison ID) contains loose-leaf sheets of hand-written poetry. Is this what the poet Allen Grossman had in mind when he called poetry “the last recourse before despair”? Or what Lucille Clifton was getting at when she wrote:

...come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Maybe it was like that with my dear friend Catherine Barnett. We worked together for years at Art & Antiques magazine, and kept in touch after I went on to VIBE. I was aware that she had begun writing and teaching poetry, but never knew what or why until the publication of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, one of the most harrowing books I’ve ever encountered. This series of poems chronicles the death of the poet’s young nieces in a plane crash, registering the family’s disbelief, grief, and—worst of all—the moving on. The cumulative power of each carefully constructed verse is still quite overwhelming for me. In each cluster of particulars, I recognize my friend’s mind struggling to shape all the brutal details into some semblance of meaning. I think that’s what my father meant when he wrote, in this magazine, that “art is a fake but when vital has death somewhere at its roots.”

Hugh Kenner was no hip hop head. His auditory sense was severely compromised for most of his life, and those powerful hearing aids of his would have made listening to one of my favorite mixtapes a painful experience. As far as I know, his only exposure to rap lyrics came while watching the first annual VIBE Awards on TV with the closed captions turned on. Mom and Lisa sat with him as Andre 3000 enjoined the crowd to “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Dad expressed his sympathy that I had to attend this event and then died four days later of heart failure. But I still believe that he’d fully endorse my defense of the ol’ boom-bap. After all, consider his epitaph: “What thou lov’st well remains. The rest is dross.”