BreakBeat Poets Honor Birthplace of Hip-Hop Culture
By Elliott Knight
She made it look so easy. The way she twirled her hands and cocked her hips, her body moving to the rhythm of the poem.
“You are a threat knowing yourself! You are a threat loving yourself!” shouted Mahogany L. Browne, one of the featured poets from the spoken word event. Her words were powerful without a doubt, but it’s the delivery that resonated with the crowd as they followed her “cyph” (slang for rap) with a roaring applause.
The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop is an anthology of poetry which chronicles the evolution of hip-hop culture. The spoken word event, featuring the book, was held at The Bronx Museum of the Arts on September 18th. It was one of a series of events in the Brooklyn Bookend Festival, co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine and PEN American Center.
The book not only outlines the chronology of this influential music genre, but it also targets ongoing issues such as “race wars,” sexism, financial inequality and the appropriation of hip hop culture by white artists.
Nate Marshall and Kevin Coval, editors of the BreakBeat anthology, MC’ed the event with a laidback charm.
Poets at the event said that hip-hop is often stigmatized as detrimental to the African American community because of the sex, drugs & money portrayed in the industry but insisted that it had done more good than harm.
They also questioned credibility or authenticity of white Americans who “culturally appropriate” hip-hop traditions or even black culture in general. The poets suggested true hip hop comes from experience.
“Hip-hop is the cultural renaissance of the impoverished of the 1970s-80s just as the Harlem Renaissance was for black Americans during the 1940s,” said anthology co-editor Marshall.
At the end of the event there was a 20-minute Q&A. One attendee asked, “Everything is digital, or moving towards that way, how can you make your poetry progress more digitally?”
Anthology co-editor Kevin Coval said he often records mixtapes and YouTube videos, but that he hopes the anthology will be a textbook for generations to come. “We are writers and more than anything, we’re more concerned with editing our shit right on the page,” he said, while the other poets nodded in agreement.