“Spoken Like a True Word: Bianca Mikahn, Eminem, and a Spoken Word, Hip-Hopped-Up Assay/ Essay… Memoir of Sorts” by Stuart Lishan

Well everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird bird
The bird’s the word
A-papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-oom-mow-ma-mow
Papa-ooma-mow-mow
Papa-oom-mow-ma-mow
— from “Surfin Bird,” by The Trashmen, 1964
“We should look at green again and be startled anew.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (from “On Fairy-Stories”)
FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENTION OF CONTENT
— Charles Olson
Form is never more than a revelation of content.
— Denise Levertov
The sense of music in poetry: the music of meaning – emerging, fogging,
contrasting, etc. Tune attunement in understanding – the meaning sounds.
It’s impossible to separate prosody from the structure (the form and content
seen as an interlocking figure) of a given poem.
— Charles Bernstein
Or is it what they meant to mean in the steam of their writing:
Form is never more than an empowerment of content?
At any rate, it’s what I hope to bare in the prayer of these words, because
I’ve been thinking about spoken word and hip-hop, and how the word is a bird
as it leaves your sweet lips on its trip to our ears as we hear you, and fear you,
and dear you, and queer you, depending on how the syllables fly, and it’s sheer
bliss sometimes, man, which is, I guess, as good a definition of poetry as you’re

likely to get in this assay/ essay… from me today: Language as sheer bliss, as words
shear through the commonplace, to kiss you on the lips of your beautiful face
(Yeah, and they always kiss with the tongue, don’t they – It’s how we get our bells rung).
So let’s begin.
Like, take Tolkien: “We should look at green again and be startled anew,”
Meaning, I take it, good Brit. Catholic, hip, Oxford don Hobbit
Man that he was, taking language out of the convent,
that load of abbey that lies in convention,
and, if I can offer some light from the dew glistening
off the wings in flight that is memory,
the lies that got me in detention
in high school, because I didn’t pay enough attention,
because I couldn’t keep to the rules,
sitting in the straight line of desks with the fools,
the conventional uncools, and the mother and father fire truckers,
those teachers hosing me down when I got too uppity, too up-fisted,
when I shop-lifted my mind off the approved curriculum,
going off the directory into unlisted, stick-it-to-em
territory (where, truth be told, we all go, don’t we?),
that glorious place when we invent in the “there, there”
out there, beyond the convent of convention. So screw that detention.
I never paid attention to it, anywho. So, this is the 1970’s

I’m trying to heavenly harken to, and let’s all “pity the fools” that we were then
with Mr. T, with his bling-blinging gold medallions,
and with the original Italian Stallion, let us all shout, as part of the A team,
“Yo, Adrienne!” The name of his Rocky love, which is as good
a name to fame up the muse who visits you and visions you as any other name I know
(and trust me, dear hearts, he or she will grace you if you let him or her,
or whatever gender whim the muse lets you grace him-her-shimmy shim shim with),
but still, “pity the fools” that we were, because we were flopping around,
even when we were muse-tinged back then, because we were without hip-hop back when,
or that other member of its word-stirred flirt of its flesh-and-bone family,

that spoken word poetry.
But that 1970’s stuff is all in the past anyway, right?
Like, it was all “Van Nuys” back then, man,
at Van Nuys High School, in L.A.’s hot, sweaty, eerie, smog-tinged-teary-
eyed valley where I grew up, compartmentalized in various apartments,
but if I didn’t fish out of the trash that crumpled up article
about poet Kenneth Patchen in the LA Free Press
in 1970, and didn’t have a heavenly weird word-blessing English teacher –
fat, rumpled, cap-toothed, calling-all-us-students-peasants-
but-reading-poetry-like-an-angel Mr. Frisius – who knows but I if
I wouldn’t, Joni Mitchell Blue and all, have sat in those straight rows
With the rest of the shmos, and never thought of barding up my life.

I might have boarded it up instead – now, that would really be detention.

Like maybe I wouldn’t ever have known what words could do to us, taking me
beyond the cusp of what I knew, and all the crap I cussed back then, into sus-
tenance sometimes, or how rhymes high-fiving you could help you know,
connect you to what you never knew, like, to recover green, like, to discover Blue.
Like I say, it was 1970, man, and hip-hop hadn’t come on the scene, recovering green,
Like it has for so many since Rapper’s Delight, by the Sugarhill Gang, came on with a bang in 1979 (says the white-bearded professor don, citing Answers.com). No, I was Trout Fishing in America before that, man, like a Richard Brautigan
Before his time, with nothing on my line, reading Creeley, and Kerouac, and the other beats, and Kinnell, and Pound, and Merwin, and somethin’ was stirrin’ in me,
word alive (And yes, English majors, I know they were all white and male,
but to my fifteen year-old self they weren’t stale, but cats who could whale with words), and I would try to tell it, to jell with it, to be stellar with it in lines that I pined, but there was hardly anyone to listen in the cistern of our souls that was Van Nuys High School – because there weren’t enough of us out there back then who were empowered
by the chime of a rhyme, trying to take flight on the bird of the lyrical stuff
that is a word. No, not nearly enough.

And so I’ve been thinking about hip-hop and spoken word. I’ve been wondering about Bianca Mikahn’s “Last Love Letter” (>http://www.podslam.org/?q=node/22 >),

riffed off on Podslam.org, check it out, and how she loves and gets hip-hop better
than most professing dons and donnybrooks I’ve read-fed my heart and mind with.
Like she talks about the “people/ Who love you even when they didn’t like you” (6-7),
because the view you sometimes give, hip-hop,
like a word-slapping shive, stuck through your ribs, through the brain stem of a cat
like Eminem, the words popping through the seams of what seems his unhinged, unhung tongue, from a place slopped through with hate crated up with anger and sent stone cold into the folds of the ever-loving-CD-buying world, is of a hateful, spiteful, spit-full, sprite despising but not daring to rise above our basest, tribal shelves of selves. Like
“You ain’t nothing but a slut to me,” Eminem head butts his audience in “Kill You,”
and in the same song he flings the wrong in lines like these that bleepily-bleep-bleeping bleed out of some sort of unstrummed, hurtful, unheartful, unthought-through need:

Put your hands down bitch, I ain’t gon’ shoot you

I’ma pull +YOU+ to this bullet, and put it through you

(AHHH!) Shut up slut, you’re causin too much chaos

Just bend over and take it slut, okay Ma?

“Oh, now he’s raping his own mother, abusing a whore,

snorting coke, and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?”

You god damn right BITCH, and now it’s too late

I’m triple platinum and tragedies happen in two states

I invented violence, you vile venomous volatile bitches

vain Vicadin, vrinnn Vrinnn, VRINNN! {*chainsaw revs up* Texas Chainsaw, left his brains all

danglin from his neck, while his head barely hangs on

Blood, guts, guns, cuts

Knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts (15-27)
What an ugly thuggish shrug of language, of verbiage as upbraiding umbrage,
as unguarded garbage; vicious words with angel wings trashed and

squashed and stashed, stopping up the mouth, stapled and trampled, lamped-lighted
out into a stark of darkness, into nothing but meaningless meanness. I piss on that, man,
diss it into dust, because it’s not us, it’s not trust, not representative of that deeper thirst, that upward thrust of heart and soul and mind into something more real and feeling
than that. And I mean that.
So Emimen’s crusin in his blues in The Marshall Mathers LP, or is it T.P., say some,
(but I won’t, because I’m in a different boat), and he has the nerve to say in “Who knew,” “How much damage can you do with a pen?” (79). It’s just a song, right, even if it is a fetid swampy fen I make of it, our Eminem seems to say, cagily, Slim Shadily, blaming everyone else but himself and the power of his words, for the violence and unseasonable unreasonableness in our culture. Yeah there are vultures out there, but you’re a part of it, too, Slim, so man up and admit it. And if you do I won’t say anything about the sellout and the cop out and the flop out in the self-serving verse after curse after verse, as you hum into “triple platinum,” That shit makes money, right, No, I won’t say that, or that you’re a hip-hopping misogynistic, homophobic-bigoted hypocrite. I promise, I won’t.
But with Mikahn, the word swan, I’ll say this: Poetry is language that is sheer bliss, remember? And words matter, Mr. Mathers, Mr. Slim of greater ideas and reason.
Words mean, even when the meanings are mean and sting. Just ask any kid
who’s been called stupid by his father, or mother, or teacher,
which is why Mikahn loves you, hip-hop, why she doesn’t want you to stop.

Because you’re a medium made of words, and words matter. Like an anti-matter, anti-Mathers blaster, they can blast through the shit, until we’re suckling on the tit of truth. It’s when the words flower on rhythm and rhyme into power and beauty, and time seems to stand still as we swirl in the twirl of them, and we know that, and you do, too, Slim. That’s why you say in “Stan,” “I say that shit just clownin dogg” (90). That’s why Mikahn says “that it’s in our best interest for/ me to hold on and learn new ways to compose the dawn” (22-23). She’s waiting you out, Slim, you and all the other hate bangers of words in hip-hop. We all are, man, because we believe in the love and not the shove of the words, because poetry is language that is sheer bliss,
because it’s like a kiss. And that’s why we write, for the shadow, but also for the light. Because words mean, and that’s how we recover green. That’s where the scene is. Maybe you’re learning that, Slim. If so, then right on, and write on, and right on, and write on. You just go on, man and try, because form is never more than an empowerment of content. So I dare you, Slim, “compose the dawn” in the word song of hip-hop. Empower. The word rhymes with flower. You remember those, right, dogg? Flowers. Yeah, I bet even you do, Slim. Peace, brother.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Charles. “Semblance.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2. Eds. Jahan Ramazini, et al.,
New York: Norton, 2003. 1111- 1115.

Eminem “Kill You.” The Marshall Mathers LP. Aftermath Records, 2000.

______. “Who Knew.” The Marshall Mathers LP. Aftermath Records, 2000.

“Hip-hop.” Answers.com. <http://www.answers.com/hip-hop>

.
Levertov, Denise. “Some Notes on Organic Form.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2. Eds. Jahan Ramazini, et al., New York: Norton, 2003. 1081-1086.

Mikahn, Bianca. “Last Love Letter.” Podslam.org.< http://www.podslam.org/?q=node/22 >.

Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2. Eds. Jahan Ramazini, et al., New York: Norton, 2003. 1053-1061.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1964). Tree and leaf. London: Allen & Unwind.

[author_info]S.D. Lishan is an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University. His book, Body Tapestries (Dream Horse Press), was published in 2006. His poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the Arts & Letters, Pedestal, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, the American Poetry Journal, Bellingham Review, XConnect, Barrow Street Creative Nonfiction, ForPoetry.com, and other fine magazines. He lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife, Lynda, and their English Setter, Laddie.[/author_info]