Rhyme's Challenge by Caplan David

Author:Caplan, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

4

THE INHERITORS OF HIP HOP

Reclaiming Rhyme

THE JANUARY 3, 2011, EDITION of the New Yorker featured a poem by Kevin Young, the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Curator of Literary Collections and Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. “Expecting” describes two parents as their doctor performs a sonogram. After some anxious moments, the doctor finds the fetus’s heartbeat, described as “all beat box and fuzzy feedback. You are like hearing/hip hop for the first time.”1 As Young’s arresting simile suggests, a generation of print-based poets now coming into prominence claims hip hop as a resource. It serves as a shared experience and inspiration: more than aggravating background noise, what Rafael Campo calls the “blast/of hip-hop as some teenagers drive past,” the urban landscape’s “found rhythms,”2 or the source of a few colorful slang terms. Instead, hip hop offers both material and artistic technique. Recent poems mention its performers and songs, anecdotes from the genre’s development and the artists’ lives. Epigraphs and titles quote songs.3

In interviews and in their verse, poets detail these formal choices, as well as the experiences that inspired them. “We studied master poets,” announces John Murillo as if relating a generation’s story, “Kane, not Keats;/Rakim, not Rilke. ‘Raw,’; I Ain’t No Joke,’/Our Nightingales and Orpheus.”4 Another poem in the same collection, though, complicates this neat distinction. Murillo imagines a “pilgrimage” to Keats’s grave, the fulfillment of “a poet’s simple duty… To lay/Flowers on the graves of other poets” (UJB, 58). As this reverential gesture suggests, Murillo honors masters of both art forms: Kane and Keats, Rakim and Rilke. Sometimes, the results sound incongruous, if not jarring. “I wandered lonely as Jay-Z,”5 Michael Robbins opens a poem, adding a favorite hip-hop performer to Wordsworth’s canonical line. Asked about this coupling, Robbins described the two artists’ similar “impact” on him:

I make the obvious distinction between Wordsworth and Jay-Z, but I don’t make a distinction in the impact they’ve had on my life. Each of them has provided me with what Kenneth Burke calls “equipment for living.”6

As Robbins’s comments suggest, one need not confuse Wordsworth with Jay-Z in order to value both. Instead, like many of his contemporaries, Robbins acknowledges the different resources that print-based poetry and hip hop provide, and he draws from both traditions.

While the various poets differ in emphasis and approach, a few general tendencies should be acknowledged. First, they typically share a certain generational experience. With a few exceptions, most notably Harryette Mullen (born in 1953) and D. A. Powell (b. 1963), the poets who most compellingly draw from hip hop, including Murillo (b. 1971), Major Jackson (b. 1968), Kevin Young (b. 1970), Terrance Hayes (b. 1971), Matthew Dickman (b. 1975), and Erica Dawson (b. 1979), started listening to music during the 1980s and 1990s, the era often defined as hip hop’s “golden age,” and its immediate aftermath, as landmark works such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message (released in 1982), Run-D.M.C.’s King of Rock (1985), and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation to Hold Us Back (1988) circulated through the culture.

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