Sylvia Plath—original hip-hop poet

I know that a primary root of hip-hop is Jamaican toasters delivering rhymes and declamations over portable sound systems in the 1960s, and that a version of this was introduced to the Bronx by the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc, an early pioneer of hip-hop. I also realize that the Last Poets are important figures in the genre’s birth. More generally, hip-hop is part of the African-diaspora derived “signifyin’” practices Henry Louis Gates, Jr., so famously wrote about. This is all very true. But I’d like to make the case that Sylvia Plath is one of the original hip-hop poets.

Plath occupies a strange position in the poetry world, or at least in the various ones with which I’ve been affiliated. She’s absolutely ubiquitous and yet almost completely absent. Is she among the most popular post-World War II poets among people who don’t write poetry? If so, that’s really saying something. Excluding Allen Ginsberg, almost any other poet I can think of who approaches Plath’s fame and number of books sold would still mostly be read by other poets (I encourage Harriet readers to correct me—and, no, Billy Collins doesn’t count). This partly may be because poetry is a young person’s sport (which helps explain Ginsberg's popularity), and Plath appeals to the anguish of adolescence and post-adolescence (though her work is obviously much more). In this sense, it’s nearly impossible to believe that she was born after Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, and Derek Walcott—none of whom, I imagine, are avidly read by lots of 17 year olds.
There aren’t many poets I discovered in high school whom I still continue to read. Plath is one of them (Snyder is another). That’s because however much I may fade in and out over the years with the work's content (Daddy issues? Sure, we all have them at times. Collapsed relationships and marriages? Check. Tip of finger sliced with paring knife? Yep.), her language is so chewy (so orally fixated, really) and full of savory rhymes, off-rhymes, alliteration, consonance, etc.—the subtlety as well as explicitness of which might cause even Jay-Z (or Jean Grae) to take notice.
from “Lady Lazarus”:
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
from “Elm” (one of the first “serious” poems I ever read and then copied into a notebook):
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
And of course “Daddy”:
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
For fun, here’s a cluster of lines from Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”:
H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A
Fo’ sheezy my neezy keep my arms so freezy
Can’t leave rap alone the game needs me
Haters want me clapped and chromed it ain’t easy
Cops wanna knock me, D.A. wanna box me in
But somehow, I beat them charges like Rocky
Contemporary poetry has much to learn from hip-hop, the single most innovative development in poetry during the past two decades, outstripping anything produced by what’s left of the poetry avant-garde. But, then, hip-hop may have something to learn from Sylvia Plath—tortured poet of the post-War white middle class, i.e., one of hip-hop’s fabled major constituencies. I could wax poetic about how the materiality of language in Plath’s work reflects the obduracy of death and embeds her drive toward annihilation, but it’s also possible that Plath knew the most interesting poets need to have good flow.