Poetry

I used to hate poetry.
It was a confusion of metaphors and allusions I had no reference for.

But I loved rap.
Go figure, amiright?

When my grandfather passed away I was in the sixth grade. I had no previous experience with death but I saw how much it tore up my father. My grandfather had cancer that they said would be his ruin in less than a year. He ended up living six more years.

My family's pretty stubborn like that.

But seeing the pain my dad went through and no longer being able to talk to a man I hadn't spoken to enough, stirred something inside of me. For his funeral I wrote a poem, and I don't know what it was or what it said but I remember something finally clicked in me.

It was the feel of it that moved my words. I didn't need to make up elaborate comparisons to how the moon was a parallel to a rising tensions in a male dominated society... or you know something like that.

I think that's why I could never connect with poetry on the page, because I couldn't feel any of it. I had no way of mentally connecting to the words when I couldn't hear it as it was intended. So I related more to rap, which my grandmother was "thrilled" about, but I couldn't help it.

I stepped away from poetry from years and only recently stumbled back into it. When I went back to rap as well I realized a lot of it had changed. There wasn't that same feel of poetry, or an actual message being sent out. I turned to slam poetry and spoken word because it's still had the rhythm and truth that I really loved. I stumbled upon the British artist Kate Tempest who put her love of rap into words that I can't help but regurgitate:

"But people seem to think that if you find peace and study
It means you ain't hip hop.
Fuck off,
Hip Hop,
Taught us,
About nourishing our souls
with the wisdom of the ether above us
and the concrete beneath our feet, but
God love us,
We've had to watch our true love
gettin smothered by the industry.
Putting out a message that rap should be a simile
for trash talk and negativity
The mainstream propagates the fucking imagery
that hip hop is a lower form
rooted in stupidity"

I honestly can't say it better than that. Spoken word and rap always seemed to go hand in hand before.But now it seems like a fabricated marketing ploy to repeat the message of "I'm rich. You're a bitch. Deal with it"

Ehhhhh... I mean sure. That has it's place. Honestly I think that can be fun, but when it's all inundated with that message it loses it's originality. And just like the stuffy poetry books I could never get into during school, rap is now losing me too. Some of it at least.