Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop: An Interview with the Editors of The BreakBeat Poets

At the Gawker Review of Books, David Drake considers hip-hop's revolutionizing of poetry, drawing in the BreakBeat Poets, who were, incidentally, the subject of an April 2015 special issue of Poetry! The idea is that "hip-hop has been drastically underrated, considering how radically it has influenced American poetics."

Drake speaks to the editors of the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Nate Marshall, Kevin Coval, and Quraysh Ali Lansana: "One of the things that is interesting about the book [is that many are speaking to] what hip-hop is for them in their moment. And then there’s the larger greater thread, about what hip-hop is period..."

Some excerpts from this noteworthy and thorough conversation, which ranges from the grammar of sampling to music to police brutality to academia:

What are the different communities you were drawing on? I know in Chicago there are certain poets’ groups—were there primary groups or organizations that were sourced?

Quyrash Ali Lansana: I don’t know if we saw it that way, in terms of organizations or groups. Certainly more of an aesthetic or message-likeness, or—but we did want to make sure there were a significant number of women in the book. That there were a significant number of folks from the LGBTQA community, that that voice was represented. But I don’t know that we thought we’re going to go to Mark Smith and make sure there are poetry slammers in here or anything like that, that wasn’t what we were thinking.

Nate Marhall: There are groups that you definitely see strains of. YCA [Young Chicago Authors] is well represented; groups like Urban Word [NYC] are well represented. Folks who came through Brave New Voices are well represented.

Kevin: Which are some of the youth poetry groups we’re all a part of, as educators and mentors.

Nate: Like Cave Canem, which is the African American Poets workshop, that is very well represented. But I don’t think that was by design.

Kevin: I think that’s because the networks that we’re a part of have people that are a part of various communities, and those communities in part are where people have sought refuge and cipher space with one another, because of the necessity to build community over the word. And I think these communities form because of the desire to further the aesthetic innovations of this moment and this culture. I think the interesting thing is that the oldest person in the book is born in 1961. The youngest poets in the book are Quraysh’s sons, who are born in ‘97 and ‘99, and so it spans four generations of hip-hop cultural practitioners, which is I think a unique thing. And the three of us are also of maybe three different generations within both the poetic and hip-hop cultural practice end of things too. And so our networks are based on when we came up, and also who our peers are. Even though we’re all peers, Nate’s network looks a little differently than Quraysh’s, and vice versa.

[...]

You mentioned the academy and their interpretation of poetry, one that doesn’t see the same connection between music and this art. There’s someone in this book who was born in ‘99, and I imagine someone in the academy might be resistant to [accepting] something like that. What are your aesthetic standards? I’m curious what you’re looking for in this art—is it difficult—if you make too democratic of an argument for inclusion?

Kevin: How old was Nas when he wrote Illmatic? Hip-hop culture itself is innovated by teenagers of color from a community that has been systematically disenfranchised, and so part of what we’re saying is not only is the old guard and the old aesthetic and the way that they’ve taught poetry problematic, but they’ve deadened poetry to four, five, many generations of what it should be. The way the academy has taught poetry has made all of us hate poetry.

Quraysh: In many ways. We don’t want to make a blanket, sweeping generalization.

Kevin: I would like to.

Quraysh: Hey, I’m of the academy.

Kevin: And I teach too!

Nate: But in all these artistic spaces, like Beethoven was playing shit at five and six. He was a prodigy. Langston Hughes, the shit that put him on, he wrote when he was like seventeen.

Kevin: Gwendolyn Brooks got published when she was, what, 16?

Nate: She was 13 or 14 putting shit in the [Chicago] Defender! This is actually not new. That’s the thing that I stay trying to point out about what we’re doing. It is very new, and also not new at all. The connection between poetry and music? The Sonnet is a fucking musical form! The reason why shit was in Iambic Pentameter for hundreds of years was because that was a fucking musical form! Before that it was common meter, which is what the church music was in. That’s the thing about the academy, right? They’re often so entrenched in the idea that we have to codify knowledge and hold it—they’re built to hold resources, that they don’t know how to acknowledge when the same thing is happening elsewhere.

Read it all at Gawker.