- [Narrator] During our class videos you may hear
our poets and playwrights use terms that are new to you.
We've created a list of key terms and definitions
that you can refer to at any point
during our video lectures.
This list is available on the videos and readings class page
where you can read it or download it as a PDF.
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and each of the following class videos.
If you have any questions about these terms,
we encourage you to ask your teaching team
in the weekly class discussions.
Kevin Coval is the editor of the Break Beat Poets
New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
and is the author of Schtick, L-vis Lives,
Race Music Poems, Everyday People,
Slingshots A Hip-hop Poetica,
and the play This is Modern Art
co-written with Idris Goodwin.
He is a four X HBO Def poet and has written
for a wide variety of publications including CNN.com,
Huffington Post, and Fake Shore Drive.
This Modern Art is forthcoming.
He's the founder of Louder Than a Bomb,
the Chicago Youth Poetry Festival,
and the artistic director of Young Chicago Authors.
He teaches hip-hop aesthetics
at the University of Illinois Chicago.
- Hey what's up y'all?
I'm Kevin Coval, poet and educator
and one of the founders of Louder Than a Bomb
the Chicago Youth Poetry Festival.
I've been writing for a long time,
teaching creative writing for a long time.
Not because I wanted to but because I was asked
into a classroom in '96 by my buddy Eboo Patel.
I myself was not a very good student
and didn't think I was going to be a good educator,
but I realized I have a love of the story
and a love for this work,
so my hope is that I'm going to share with you
some tips that you might find useful.
Forgive my face, by the way.
I would never say that because I feel like I'm generally
a fairly handsome individual
but I recently got some dental surgery
so I look more like a chipmunk than the suave gentleman
that I normally am.
So this is what I want to say,
you know I come in a tradition of Chicago letter makers,
Chicago poets particularly
and one of my mentors mentors was Gwendolyn Brooks,
so my mentor, one of my mentors is Hakim Adabudi
and one of his mentors was Gwendolyn Brooks
and one of the things that Gwendolyn Brooks
would tell young writers all the time
and I had the opportunity to see her tell this to me
and you know hundreds of other young writers
is that our responsibility as young writers
is to tell the story that's in front of our nose.
And I think that's important right?
That poetry and writing in general.
Our lives are sites and sources of art
and we should make art.
We can make art about what's around us,
and you know Gwendolyn Brooks of course is a master at this.
She would take what was in her front yard
and her back alley, she would write about
her beloved neighborhood of Bronzeville,
the city of Chicago, people she saw there you know every day
and she would record and report the lives
and the dreams and the horrors of a community, of a people
and I think we should do the same.
I think that poetry shouldn't necessarily have to be
something that is far reaching
or that is grandiose in its idea.
I think poetry can be something that is more everyday.
Poems should be composed about what we know intimately,
so you know how you sound is how a poem should sound.
How the people around you sound is how a poem should sound.
If you can incorporate slang and local tradition
and narrative into the poem.
I believe in the use of the particular pronoun a lot,
so if you are talking very specifically about Wells Park,
then say Wells Park.
If you're talking about 63rd and Kedzie,
or Lawrence and Ashland or whatever spot in your life
you're writing about, then name
those things very specifically.
I think that the world around us is rich.
I think that if we don't do the work
of telling our stories, of recording, representing
our history then inevitably somebody else will do it
and we know how history gets written.
It gets written by the victors
and as we've seen those who have access to capital
and you know Eurocentric white supremacist views of history
are those histories that are reported, that are recorded
and so I think the poem and the narratives
that exist in our own lives are really important sites
and sources to do this work.
Some of my favorite rappers Mos Def and Talib Kweli
talk about their work and their practice
as being real life documentarians.
And so this idea that the worlds that we inhabit around us
can be sites for this work I think is essential.
All right so Gwendolyn Brooks,
tell the stories in front of your nose.
Frank O'Hara is a dead white dude who I mess with.
I normally do not mess with a lot of dead white dudes
in part because when I was
being taught poetry in high school
I was under the impression given the teachers that I had
that poetry was only something done by dead white dudes
who got lost in the forest.
Now I didn't know any dead white dudes,
even though I am white.
And I did not live near a forest,
and so the notion that poetry could be about
you know the world, I was not put on in high school
and you know it was rappers specifically
that broke down that idea because they were recording
and reporting about the worlds around them.
You know when Grandmaster Flash's The Message
in 1982 dropped and you know Melle Mel talked about
the south Bronx and the deindustrializing neighborhood.
Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge.
I'm trying not to lose my head huh huh
which is a haiku by the way.
That I was like yo, that's fascinating.
That's very interesting.
It's not only the emotion of what is occurring
in such a place but it's a thick description
about what's happening in that place.
So hip-hop of course broke for me that notion
that poetry was only done by dead white dudes
that got lost in the forest.
Frank O'Hara is a dead white dude.
I don't think he got lost in too many forests.
He did write really beautiful poems about his life.
Very I would say
you know beautiful, personal love letters
to each day or all these people,
all of his lovers and all of the things that he liked,
he had these beautiful poems about
and he wrote an essay that I go back to a lot
and I teach from all the time called Personism
and it's an essay that came out in Donald Allen's
New American Poetry in the fifties.
It was some of the first places
that the beat poets were published.
It was some of the first places that at the time
LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka, was published.
Allen Ginsberg was in there.
Frank has this beautiful essay
at the back of the book called Personism.
In it he talks about the idea of a poem can be...
The idea of a poem can exist between two pages
as opposed to between two people.
That he could have picked up the telephone,
but instead he wrote the poem.
And so for me what I garner from this
is that you know a poem could be
something that's very intimate.
That how we talk to one another
can also populate the language of a poem.
Sometimes I think we get lost in metaphor.
That we want to be very clever 'cause we're very smart
and we want to you know we want to do these
extended metaphors that are like metaphors
on top of metaphors and it gets
very confusing and convoluted
as opposed to just saying what we really mean.
And I think sometimes like the simplicity of language,
the actual person we're talking to,
the various feelings that we're trying to convey,
the thing that we really had for dinner,
you know what corner we're going to,
what flower we're seeing,
what movie we're going to see later,
what actor we're excited about,
what painting we've been you know
that we've been turned on by at a museum.
All of these things, the particular things,
should populate the poem.
I often say a lot that it's through the particular
that we articulate the universal
and what I mean by that is if you tell me that you're happy
or that you've had a good day,
I don't know what you mean right?
That's very broad, it's abstract.
But if you tell me for you you know happiness
is you know going with your best friend to get a tattoo
that's very different than a happiness that is a
you know a Sunday at church with your grandma.
And it's not necessarily different but it's just particular
and so it's through the particular
that we get at the universal,
so all of these fine things in our lives,
all of these fine details in our experience
should populate our poems.
You know there's no one way a poem should be
and there's no one way a poem should sound.
I love poems that are just stories
that are very narrative and I like poems that rhyme
and I like poems that don't rhyme.
I do think language is also a musical instrument,
and so as much as I'm concerned with how the words
are aligning on the page and I love
playing with enjambment and where the line breaks
and how to get multiple means out of a line break
or spacing and having sometimes increasingly
playing with how a poem might look on the page,
I'm also equally concerned with how the poem sounds.
Poetry is you know one of the most ancient of arts
and it has historically been an oral art.
It's you know it's one of,
it's one of a way for a community to keep history
by singing the songs of its tribe
and so the way that the poem sounds
and the way language works is to also delight
in its assonance and its consonance
to be concerned perhaps with anaphora and the repetition
of words that might clue the listener in
to what's in between.
Similar to how a chorus might work on a pop song,
a poem can work in similar ways.
And so I think to be at once concerned
and maybe foremost concerned with the meaning
but then as you are composing as well
in your revisions, also think about
how the poem is sounding in your ear,
sounding in your mouth.
You know poems should be read and they should be heard
and I think great poems do the work of being read well
and understood on the page as well as
also delighting the ear and I think
that they're equally important.
Yeah so just a note I guess about rhythm
in the poem and really kind of sometimes
the choice you might make as a performer,
to read a poem differently.
Now I'll say this, I mean I think that
I am trying to do the work as a writer
of having any reader be able to pick up my book
and read it as I might recite it,
but that being said and us living in 2015 I mean
you also have you know you have
access to audio recordings and so part of what
I try to do as a reader of my own work
and as a performer of my own work
is to make choices that I think will
inform the meaning of a poem.
And so there's a little example from a poem I wrote
that I want to share and just
talk through the choice that I made.
So there's a poem I have called
How to Teach Poetry in Chicago Public Schools
and in it, I have this bit that on paper
you know it'll read one way but how I perform it
is there's a difference in the performance
and so in the poem I say start with a rhyme.
Something quick, a half note behind west side double time.
Their ears picked able to roll with all those syllables.
That's how it reads on the page.
Now in performance, I might say something like
start with a rhyme something quick
a half note behind west side double time
their ears picked able to roll all those syllables
now read a poem something slow, familiar familiar.
And I do that quickness in order to also
you know enliven the rhythm of the poem,
but also to emphasize the style of rhyming in Chicago
that we are accustomed to hearing.
So you know the innovation of Twista and Do or Die
and Psychodrama and Crucial Conflicts
double time that was also popularized
by the crew from Cleveland, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony
like that idea of rhyming very quickly
is something that is also indigenous to Chicago
and so in my poem I wanted to get at that.
Now double time on the page is interesting
in terms of a transliteration
and so I might on the page try to put that language
closer together, or maybe even like have it represented
in some other way textually
but as a recitation I'm also trying to
you know pay attention to the musicality of it.
And those are choices you make as a performer.
You know I think that you get more and more comfortable
every time you recite a poem and for me
I have that poem memorized
just because I've done it so much
that it's become, it's become part of my practice
and every time I say it I hope I'm saying it
better and better in part because that is also the practice.
And I've learned sometimes I'll edit through a recitation
where there's something that doesn't sound right in a poem
and so it allows me to take something out,
cut out a word, cut out a line,
an idea that just is falling flat in recitation
even if it's just in my room to myself or to an audience
it's also a site to edit.
For me I think the poem has to work on the page
and it has to work in the ear,
and if it isn't working in both places
then there's some editing that needs to occur.
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