Poetry & Us
Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people -Adrian Mitchell
I recently asked followers on both Twitter and Facebook what it is that puts them off reading poetry and to my astonishment I was flooded with a mixture of disparate but seemingly relative responses. Some claimed they felt alienated from the message contained within the poetry itself – the recurring word being ‘inaccessible’. Others professed poetry was far too ambiguous and abstract to warrant their full time and concentration, and a handful of people reverted back to old school days recalling laborious English lessons where discussing Shakespeare’s incomprehensible plays had become the drag of every new week.
Anything that is unsuccessfully introduced to us from young stands the risk of being misconstrued and tainted with a perpetual stigma. Many of us carry this conception forward into adulthood gripping tight our unyielding reference, which if less favoured will see to it that we lose all affiliation with the subject. Poetry is one of those subjects that people automatically close up to. They become reluctant to breathe in its air as recollections of nonsensical stanzas come swarming back, exams that would demand an answer or an interpretation for something that the analytical mind failed to organise and follow coherently.
As a person who now reads, writes and performs poetry I will be the first to confess that I too once fell into that aforementioned category. I see now that my schooling years played a somewhat detrimental role in my relationship with creativity and with the arts in general. I was hurled into the world at eighteen with a rather myopic view on poetry, one that in fact only managed to be salvaged by music and hip-hop. I remember sitting in my room totally immersed in words and sounds. I would study piously the craftsmanship contained within a piece of music, the duality between lyric and beat, style and form. Like most boys of my age I felt that ebullient blast disseminate across my entire being each time I made the connection with a set of precocious lyrics. I was forever mesmerised by the wit, boasting bravado and heroism of rappers, convulsing hysterically whilst releasing an onslaught of exuberated yelps whenever something had found it’s way into me. It was a connection, an understanding and an overwhelming fulfilment of belonging that adjoined me to the art form.
As the capricious modes of hip hop fluctuated between the traditional and the ‘friendly’ I began to feel my passion slowly wane. Reaching my twenties I was no longer satisfied by the stream of generic radio-friendly hooks and bars that White owned record labels were churning out. Predictable and unimaginative beats were excessively being combined with watered down lyrics which over time was becoming the formula that was presenting itself as the norm for this facile figure of expression. The limitations of this new wave of pop-rap could no longer serve my poetic needs (although at the time I failed to see them as poetic) and so I started to look elsewhere for that connection my spirit craved. It was here that I found poetry. I recall drifting in and out of London libraries dipping into random poetry anthologies with the same heated zeal I would previously adopt in record shops. It took time and patience but within the poetry of Adrian Mitchell, Langston Hughes, Benjamin Zephaniah, Rumi and Shakespeare I began to rekindle that membership I felt was lost, except on the page it found me as an avalanche does the ground.
I discovered the space contained within page poetry was something of the infinite. As I read and re-read the experience would grow and progress until it sat in my mind as a multifaceted stream of words and images. Each reading was different yet it was the depth and richness of the language that engrossed me. The breadth of articulacy was surely sending my imagination into a place it never before had the pleasure to visit, it was excitement coupled with a resounding peace plus that indomitable satisfaction that comes when your soul feels connected to someone else’s art. I had found my new hip-hop, and the study was to an extent unbidden as I would pull out poets from library shelves spending hours venturing around their work, hurting my brain with the overload until eventually I found the key to the language.
Granted some poetry is more accessible than others yet that shouldn’t deter people from trying to engage. If we were actually made aware of the innumerable parallels between rap music and what academics and elitists have come to claim as being page poetry, I’m sure the interest in the art would be far greater – typically they are the same voice just placed in different rooms. The themes explored in most poetry consist of love, loss, inequality, protest and hardship not to mention that page poetry is also an antiquated call of social commentary, much like hip-hop dating back to the African griots. Ultimately the discussion finds its roots in a certain illogical relevance yet what page poetry demands is an attentiveness and a focus from its reader, whereas traditional hip hop presents itself as the finished article, by that I mean the rapper has taken his/her deep dive and resurfaced with a pearl for everyone to see and applaud. Page poetry requires the reader to dive with the poet, swimming together amidst the ambiguous mesh of ideas whilst being granted the freedom to add a more personal touch to their final interpretation of the piece.
My overall contention on the subject is that we have been aggressively programmed from young to always focus on the right and the wrong. During infancy there was a superfluous drive of energy invested by parents and teachers on convincing us that there always has to be a right and wrong to things. Poetry can be good as it can be bad but it can never be right or wrong – this is the gift that art gives humanity. As I discuss these ideas more regularly I find people are intimidated somewhat by it’s gaping size, meaning the limitless ways in which it can be interpreted. Creativity to an extent is managing to conserve the child within us from the clutches of such a rigid and unnatural society, and then once we elicit that infinite being we can apply its consciousness to art and so begin to unveil its true meanings. Academics refer to this as divergent thinking however an artist will tell you that every perception is alterable and each side has its own shape, colour and voice.
If you are already familiar with hip hop music, singers, religious dogmas, dance, drama and art then I would say you are already half way inside the realm of poetry. I often feel that once I’m able to relate/connect with a poem I can say part of this was written for me.
For anybody who wants to try and rid themselves of the stigma acquired courtesy of Britain’s model of education I would recommend reading any of the work(s) by Adrian Mitchell, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, Charles Bukowski, Theodore Roethke, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, W.B. Yeats, E.E Cummings, Lorca, Octavo Paz and Arthur Rimbaud. Within these great luminaries I found an underlining resonance that echoed precisely in the songs of Tupac, Nas, DMX, Notorious BIG, Jay Z, Eminem, Bone Thugs & Harmony, Wu Tang and Ice Cube all the way through to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix. I have always held the belief that poetry much like all other forms of art finds itself in the transcendental connection contained between the artist and the recipient, yet more so I find it to be a silent marriage that once consecrated becomes almost impossible to forsake.
