Bedroom Rapper by Rollie Pemberton

Author:Rollie Pemberton [Pemberton, Rollie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

7

POET LAUREATE

In March 2009, on a typically blustery winter day, I was at the house I rented with my friends Nicki, Adam and Jessica off Whyte Avenue practising beatmatching with vinyl on my rickety turntables in my bedroom while watching the wisps of snow fall outside the C&E Railway Museum across the street when the doorbell rang. Local musician and filmmaker Trevor Anderson said he wanted to run something by me. I knew Trevor from playing shows with his band the Vertical Struts and doing a remix for his other group, the Wet Secrets. I invited Trevor upstairs and he told me that he wanted to nominate me for the position of poet laureate of Edmonton.

The first thing I said was “What is that?” I’d never heard of a poet laureate before. Having a poet laureate seemed like one of those things that certain cities did to prove their metropolitan status. It was like building an angular-looking Frank Gehry-inspired art museum or having an annual film festival. Trevor told me that I would be asked to write some poems and be the literary ambassador of the city. I’d represent Edmonton in my travels, similar to how I already did with my music. I was having trouble understanding how I could possibly be qualified for something like this. I looked up the outgoing poet laureate online and he was a seventy-four-year-old white man named E.D. Blodgett.

I’d performed at the occasional open mic night here and there and published poems in my high school newspaper, but I never thought of myself as a traditional poet. I idolized Leonard Cohen and appreciated how he oscillated between the artistic disciplines of poetry and music. I marvelled at the wildness of Bob Dylan’s book Tarantula and dreamed of making an experimental poetry collection like that one day. I suppose Trevor saw my lyrics as poetry before I thought of them that way. (In his nomination letter, he called me a “poet of the people.”) It was true that my songs were unabashedly Edmontonian. Maybe I could become a great artistic representative of the city.

But Upper Class was reluctant for me to apply. They thought it would distract me from my music. I had built up a strong infrastructure with international label distribution and booking agents. I had a lot of momentum following the release of Afterparty Babies and they were worried about squandering it. Like Kanye West once said, “Don’t leave while you’re hot, that’s how Ma$e screwed up.” Still, this seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The two-year appointment came with a ten-thousand-dollar honorarium that I would receive directly.

I prepared a few poems for my application and sent it in. They were called “Water, Alberta,” “Windy Cities,” and “Valley Girls.” The latter served as a tribute to the summers I’d spent hanging out in the city’s river valley, Edmonton’s most underrated landmark:

Our tall progeny may relocate

But their souls will never leave this place

Permission slips to whiskeyed alleys

My heart belongs to the girls in the

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