Art, Artifice, and Artifact

“Word as rhythm,” writes Quraysh Ali Lansana, describing the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 classic “Rapper’s Delight.” “Word as beat. Word in conversation with rhythm. Word as art, artifice, and artifact.”

Words play all of those roles in the April 2015 Poetry, which provides samples of a “new American poetry in the age of hip-hop.” Many of the poems—which will appear in the anthology The BreakBeat Poets, out this month—toy gleefully with sound: “That ain’t your fame to claim,” writes t’ai freedom ford. “Make a name up,” writes francine j. harris, “to shake the blame up.”

Some poets describe music even as they make it. In “Turning the Tables,” Joel Dias-Porter depicts playing a record: first lower the needle, he writes, and

then cultivate
the sweet beats
blooming in the valley
of the groove

Dias-Porter’s homonyms, double-meanings, and general acoustic hijinks let him tell two stories at once: he portrays not only playing a record but also planting food. “Cultivate” means “encourage” but also “grow”; “sweet beats” suggests “cool music” but also “sweet beets.” “Blooming” is just a hair’s-breadth from “booming,” and “groove” from “grove.” Why might these images overlap? Perhaps playing music is similar to growing food: each act provides different kinds of sustenance.

Poetry, of course, provides sustenance too, and Dias-Porter demands we attend to his sonic subtleties just as we would focus on a turntable’s music. And in batting us from one interpretation to the other, he’s constantly turning the table on us.

Music plays in Nate Marshall’s “on caskets,” too, but to a far more somber effect. Many contributors to this issue ponder the racism and bloodshed that afflict urban communities of color; they describe—to quote Kush Thompson—the places “where little boys bike across curfew and into eulogy.” Several also memorialize black artists, some (like the Notorious B.I.G.) killed by violence. Marshall makes a similar gesture:

i can’t think of a black rapper who hasn’t
contemplated their own death on record.
ready to die, life after death, death is certain,
do or die, get rich or die tryin’, death certificate.

this is natural.
all my verses mention
boxes or holes.

These verses certainly do: there’s the “nice box” he hopes to buy for himself; the casket his grandmother would be buried in; the coffins his father would stand beside. Marshall also indicates the limited expectations and rights reserved for black people; perhaps the “boxes” also stand in, symbolically, for those constraints.

And in addition to describing the literal holes used for burial, Marshall hints at a multiplicity of other holes—the metaphorical gaps left by the deceased; the sense of loss experienced by slaves who weren’t permitted to bury their dead (and that restriction, of course, was the least of it).

Perhaps most resoundingly, the poem suggests the holes left by gunshot wounds. It  concludes:

once we lay this brother
down in the ground
we got work to do.

when i was a young boy
at the age of five
my mama said i gon’ be
the greatest man alive.

these children don’t
expect to live past 30.
they come to these funerals
& they represent. 
they put themselves in
the place of the person
in the casket.

Marshall’s italics signify that these words are not his—instead, they are found poetry, borrowed from other sources. He takes his first stanza from a PBS interview with Ameena Matthews, a “Violence Interrupter” who works on the south side of Chicago, and his third from Spencer Leak, who directs a funeral home in that area. His second stanza comes from the song “Mannish Boy,” by the twentieth-century Chicago blues master Muddy Waters.

What’s the effect of this juxtaposition? Unlike the contemporary quotations, the Waters lines boast rhythm and playful rhyme (“a young boy” / “i gon’ be”) that come to feel tragic in context: the word “alive” takes on a terrible irony. The poetic qualities of his music, for their part, invite us to seek such subtleties in Leak’s and Matthews’s speech. “They come to these funerals / & they represent,” Leak says; they “represent” not just by displaying gang affiliations but also by standing in for a terrible trend, the one that landed an acquaintance in a casket in the first place. The formulation “put themselves in / the place” is telling, too: in addition to suggesting empathy with the dead—and, more grimly, the anticipation of joining them—it calls to mind “putting people in their place,” degrading and controlling them. And that impulse is exactly where these problems begin.

In Fatimah Asghar’s poem, “Pluto Shits on the Universe,” the rogue dwarf planet announces a cosmic rejection of such degradation and control. Long held to be the ninth planet from the sun, Pluto wandered unexpectedly within the solar system and eventually lost its planet status. But in this poem, Pluto clarifies that it has no interest whatsoever in what the “system” thinks:

You tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.