Seventeen Ways of Looking at Black Talk: Selling Produce in the Poetry Youth Market.
Michael C. Ford
There is a new breed of urban adventurers looking for action with a black man’s code. The hipsters absorbed (his) existentialist synapse and, for practical purposes, could be considered a white Negro.
-Norman Mailer, 1957
Young poets from large cities are inclined
more towards trendy hip-hop, skip-hop, trip-hop media exploitation
and, along with it, a bogus translation of street-corner poetry into
urban street-rap rhythm. Teen-slam poetry competitions are
nation-wide: more of an outgrowth of the international slam contest
mentality which seems, at its core, inclined to promote a concept of
not how good a poem is, but how loud it is: much of it,
interestingly, augmented, by the uniquely questionable notoriety of
alternative television success Def Poetry Jam (even, for the time
being, an installation on the maligned Broadway stage) or endless
recordings of polluted spokenword from stereotypical gangsta
post-disco hybrids. Personally speaking, I am not what you would call
a major fan of street rapping: although I admit to being impressed,
once in a while, with the rather savvy abilities of some of the more
authentic street-corner poets: no not the kinds who rattle with an
incoherent slam-jam gibberish, but those who appear to be projecting
a contiguity with obsessive city-dweller survival; along with an
understandable difficulty in comprehending how somebody can take a
microphone and just be connected to some high-tech gear performing
these multi-coordinated high-velocity rhymes-within-rhymes inner-city
street songs.
I find myself reasonably empathetic and have consensual standards
towards high school classroom kids who feel the need to infuse their
personal poetry with gang-bang cadences and homey in-the-hood metaphors.
The average age of classroom participants to
which I’m generally assigned is 17. Now, there wasn’t a
major difference about teaching l7-year old people in the more or
less isolated agri-community schools of California’s San Joaquin
Valley: and the question of whether or not the city poet is in any
way a better writer or any worse than the rural poet turns out not to
be a question at all: mainly because, as it is experienced in both
cases there are instances where white kids freely associate with
hardcore black jargon. This interestingly reveals a natural
inclination to reflect their immediate environments: and by virtue of
the nature of imaginative writing, they measure this as a means
towards self-expression.
It becomes evident that young poets (despite
what might be construed as limitations) always demonstrate a very
clear willingness to turn left brain liabilities into creative
assets: an almost intuitive desire to discover startling images, to
find a few dangerous visions of a conflicted society supporting
international policies which, sometimes, turn buildings into rubble
and human beings into Fahrenheit.
Within the construct of a special education
division of Pen Center USA (so named Pen in the Classroom) high
school students who would not otherwise benefit are discovering the
act of making more concrete, through language art experiments, their
own conceits and concerns which may often be a healthy humbling
experience. The best justification for creative writing release
time is exemplified by published authors working in cooperation with
core English teachers in Pen Center schools like Hamilton High,
Venice High and Santa Monica High Schools in Southern California.
This doesn’t always, necessarily, imply
“teaching’’ writing itself, but finding a secure place
for the wise and witty gathering of inspired young storytellers
deeming their individual attitudes of self expression: sharpening the
tools of their creative imaginations, in order to align thoughts and
feelings with their evolving perceptions: then defining their ideals
and dreams, revealing secrets to anybody who’ll listen: solving
mysteries and exploring regions of emotional landscapes.
It isn’t just my opinion that all serious students of literature
should have the experience of monitoring a creative writing workshop;
if for no other reason than to acquire an uncommon knowledge of what
surrounds us everyday, not to mention an escalating self-esteem.
The median in a sense, has robbed us of a certain innocence. Most of
the time we’re trying to figure out whether or not television
information is there, in truth, to inform or simply there to make us
more paranoid and because of this, children (the real philosophers of
our current age) today have become more sophisticated, more critical,
more cynical, more realistic than kids coming of age in the
middle-20th century.
Media blitz actually allows contemporary
adolescents to witness all the motor disturbances of these, well. . .
disturbing times: all of which brings us back to why Pen USA installs
authors of books into a classroom environment. I believe it has
everything to do with encouraging kids towards the act of writing
about things which are, essentially, frightening, dreadful,
frustrating, wretched, negative: then, somehow thorough it all,
perhaps, even, making it preferable to suicide. Further, there comes
with this an incredible responsibility: abstracting the truth, in
order to clarify it. You must understand that composing
anything relatively individualistic, whether it be in linear or
non-linear terms, is like being a jazz musician in all of its
variations: the 2-beat shuffles: barrelhouse boogies, the big band
swing charts: be-bop chord progressions, progressive orchestral
experimentation with complicated melodic textures, contrapuntal tonal
shadings and polyrhythmic patterns: it’s all there in these
selected city and county high school anthology pages celebrating the
poetic imagination. The jazz musician, like the poet, has chosen an
art form which, by its nature, does not, under ordinary circumstances
achieve either a wide or catholic mode of popularity. And, like most
of those jazzers, poets many times find themselves facing an audience
who might be too drunk, or too doped, or unappreciative, or
uneducated or just completely indifferent to take advantage of a
possible conscience-altering experience. It is sufficient that
we realize these gifted Pen in the Classroom poets would be difficult
for American literary media to ignore: that, if these musical talkers
of truth and revelation could somehow be recorded, they’d be
forever living, not only in our brutalized eyes, but in our ears.