Hip-Hop Bards

“Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture” by Dana Gioia, in The Hudson Review (Spring 2003) 684 Park Ave., New York, N.Y. 10021.

Stepping out of the cloisters of English departments and literary journals for the first time in more than half a century, poetry is everywhere, according to Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. And whom do we have to thank for this renaissance: a recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize? An august literary critic? Guess again. A DJ named Cool Herc? Well, maybe.

Whether or not Cool Herc was the originator of hip-hop is a murky topic. It’s clear, however, that the Bronx’s gift to the world popularized rhyme and meter, making syllabic counts and verbal acrobatics a force in popular culture. Moreover, hip-hop, along with its close cousin, the poetry slam, and its rural neighbor, cowboy poetry, has created an appetite for oral poetry reminiscent of that in antiquity.

By the 1970s, the decade that witnessed the birth of hip-hop, many dues-paying members of the literati saw rhyme and narrative verse as old hat, while free verse and “concrete poetry,” in which the form of the words on the printed page is all-important, were à la mode. Rooted in the traditions of print culture, literary poetry still relied on variations of a 15th-century technology, movable type, for its preservation and dissemination. By contrast, the new popular poetry uses modern-day media such as radio, CDs, video, and the Internet, along with stratagems borrowed from the entertainment industry, to attract a general audience that is less and less inclined to devote time to reading.

Cowboy poetry, which originated in the oral verses of frontier folk, was revived after a 1985 convocation of poets by the folklorist Hal Cannon in Elko, Nevada. Born around the same time, poetry slams—whose creation some attribute to Marc Smith, a poet who hosted events at a Chicago bar called the Green Mill—are now featured at bars and cafés around the country. And last year, Rus­sell Simons, foun­der of Def Jam Records, brought the phenomenon to Broadway. Po­etry slams are competitive events, usually judged by a panel or audience. As in hip-hop freestyle competitions, the performer’s charisma is an important factor along with the compositions, which are sometimes improvised. In a break from traditional, literary poetry readings, which tend to celebrate a poet’s past written accomplishments, “much of the new oral poetry is never written down.”

“Today,” writes Gioia, “for the first time in the history of Amer­ican literature, it would be difficult for a new poet to build and sustain a significant reputation on print alone.” With so many books flooding the market, poets and writers of all stripes are banking on their media savvy to attract readers. For Gioia, the demands of the audio-visual culture aren’t necessarily a bad thing. While much of the new popular poetry may be found wanting in intellectual and aesthetic heft when compared with the can­on­ical texts of literary poetry, it may well turn out to be as important a source of inspiration as cinema, another form that was often maligned in its early years.