The Poetry of Hip-Hop

What counts as poetry? Is it always tidy print marching down the path to find two roads diverging in the woods then stopping to wait for a death metaphor? Is it a barbaric yawp from the best minds of your generation from a poet who doesn’t even know it? What if we went beyond the confines of Western Lit 101 to uncover poetry that resonates with us now?

At the most fundamental level, hip-hop and poetry both play with sound, turning them into meaning and then back to sound again, declaimed alone or to the sound of a drum machine or coiled inside a catchy song, verse/rhythm/rhyme from Tupac and Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) and Gil Scott-Heron and Nikki Giovanni and Danez Smith and Erykah Badu and and and...

Today we hope to introduce you to poets and musicians creating a bit of magic with their command of language.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’ poetic forms flow smoothly with the panache of a radio DJ. “The Originator” from Twerk honors OG DJs within the confines of a villanelle, a poetic form with roots in Italian folk song. Her words in that hypnotic hum hearken back to their style, “check ya dial... grand to slam a party—peep two needles in collision: here’s the remedy for your chronic whiplash....ululate the call; gods never caught tongue-lash—tweak an EQ. my hash sparks double vision: here’s the remedy for your chronic whiplash.”

The BreakBeat Poets have put together a number of excellent collections of poetry. In their first volume, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, an amazing range of wordsmiths are gathered. In “Badu Interviews Lamar (An Erasure)”, Camonghne Felix remixes an interview between Erykah Badu and Kendrick Lamar, turning it into something new. Franny Choi takes Lil’ Wayne’s “Pussy Monster” and transforms it from a song into a disordered list of words and then into a poem through performance. The next volume, Black Girl Magic, focuses on Black women across the diaspora. (Patricia Smith writes about poetry in the foreword, though you can catch “Hip Hop Ghazal” here.)

In 808s & Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, & Mythologies, Sean Avery Medlin explores their gender, masculinity, Blackness, and love in poems and reprises. “Some say I’m describing an emcee, there’s no difference to me: griot, prophet, poet. To be a rapper, then, is to speak, and speak, and speak, until what you say becomes reality.”

To delve into more ways where music and poetry intersect, check out From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across America and Turn It Up!: Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-hop. To read the poetry books mentioned above, check out our booklist, The Poetry of Hip-Hop. To connect with the songs and sounds of poetry, check out this playlist on YouTube, Lyrically Lush. You can also uncover hip-hop classics in Central Library's record collection—we recommend checking out Boogie Down Productions.