Steven Willis and “Beat Writers”

Beat Writers- Steven Willis

Willis introduces this poem with “Beat Writers” as the title and dedicated for Baraka and Ginsberg. Considering that Baraka was “arguably, the most significant BAN artist/theorist and an essential figure in twentieth-century American literature,” paired with Ginsberg, who tends to be almost the father of American Contemporary Poetry, I feel as though Willis is addressing the fact his poem is based on the African American experienced paired with two revolutionaries in the poetics at that time. He introduces the poem through the same line that Ginsberg uses to begin “Howl.” Both of these poets express the hardships they see with people who they relate to and the civil society they belong to. Their culture, the basis of who you are such as your history, socialite institutions, arts, customs, is represented throughout the very raw and emotional lines. Just like “Howl,” Willis gives the readers a true insight to the community and the experiences they are going through such as “Crack(s)/ In their nostrils and pavements, the worse condition but were/ destined for greatness.” There have been conspiracies that the CIA sold crack cocaine to the Crips and Bloods in the 1980’s, which by the time this poem was written, Willis would have seen the fall out of this in his community. At the end of this post, I included an article link to a discussion on the CIA and newspapers reporting this information.

In Coval’s writing, he states “Hip-hop is Black, therefore hip-hop poetics are Black and are created in part as a response to the historic and currently maintained legacies and realities of white supremacy and institutional racism, the war of drugs, and the growing privatized prison-industrial complex and school to prison pipeline…” which Willis shows through these lines  “The ethnography of poverty that we coat/in metaphors and similes to help cope/ in beloved communities that are deficient of hope/ that’s why the young and the music elope” (xix). Willis becomes relatable to the young and the old who have suffered through some of these experiences while always relating back to the idea of community and how art, through music or poetics, has helped them cope through expression. He is moving toward the truth of the African American experience without temping it to the White American. He does it through specifically addressing issues, such as the cocaine epidemic and the racism that African Americans endure everyday. Coval states that “Hip-hop culture reimagines the public sphere and claims agency in sites and systems of disenfranchisement. Hip-hop is a pastiched community at the margins of dominant discourse that uses the creative elements of dance, graffiti, turntables, and oral and written poetics to insist on participation at the center of the American experience” to which Willis does a great example of revealing this (xx-xxi). Willis claims agency through the communities and intelligence that African Americans have, that have been discredited by the White American for so long. Disenfranchisement means “the action of taking away the right to vote from a person or group; a feeling in a person or group of having no power or opportunities, or of not being represented in the political system” which Willis describes points in time through everyday experiences which reflect this (Cambridge Dictionary).

As a previous high school English teacher, I always told students that hip-hop or rap music was poetry, if you genuinely looked at the lyrics. Hip-hop and rap are currently some of the most listened to music genres out there. Students loved the word play, metaphors, and the rhythm, even being able to recognize songs based on the first few seconds of the beat or the words. Willis uses rhyme to emphasis these experiences of African Americas, both through internal line rhyming and end of line rhymes. I found this SoundCloud link which was the only online version of “Beat Writers” audio wise. https://soundcloud.com/stevenwillispoetry/beat-writers He uses informal language in a multisyllabic way, emphasizing the syllables to produce a rhythm that flows throughout the entire poem. He uses alliteration regularly to encourage this flow, while also having a harder sound pattern. The alliteration allows for the harder sound patterning, which also reinforces the hard experiences that he is describing. The tempo propels you forward in a serious tone. He uses longer sentences mainly throughout the poem, yet at the end creates a formed stop with the last five lines, helping emphasize the ideas of beat writers transitioning their poems to music, their aesthetic and style, and lastly, repeating the idea of “The Beat Writers who wrote poems to Beats.”

https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9712/ch01p1.htm

Disenfranchisement definition | Cambridge English Dictionary. (n.d.). https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/disenfranchisement 

Coval, Kevin. “Introduction” to The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015