PF Goes Undercover: Black Poetry Contests

For this special blog entry, I went undercover as a black man to mingle with the black smart fraction. They were hard to find, but when I found them, they eagerly accepted me into their ranks. In order to disguise myself, I smeared a very thin layer of Nutella on my face and arms, and put my lips in a bread-clip, until they became swollen. Thus transformed, I was the essence of what all sophisticated blacks long to be: a light-skinned mulatto with a European nose, whose skin really does taste like chocolate.

Finding the trail of the black elite was difficult at first, I had to keep my eyes open. Finally I found something which seemed to speak to the sophisticated: A Poetry Jam! Oh, that sounds like fun, I thought. At the poetry jam several poets recited their works; I noticed a number of recurring themes, one of which was vague general despair. One poet asked himself:

“What a fucked up world we are in,
Filled with anguish and sin.
I dont even know where to begin,
Is anyone meant to win?

My heart bleeds,
I feel I have been led astray.
Paying a price for something I did not do,
I feel so betrayed.

Why oh why is it like this?
Why is no one willing to take a chance?
What is it that people fear?
Is it the fear of happiness?”

ahh, the hypnotic AAAA rhyme-scheme…. Wake up, PF! OK, I’m back. After I ‘jammed’ a bit with the poets back stage, I noticed they all had hopes of one day appearing at a larger, more well-known venue, which I later came to find out was Def Poetry Jam – a television show where poets recite their work before a mostly black audience. Soon I had gotten tickets, and was on my way to see Princess perform her classic, ABC. This poem is full of verbal fire, but I’ll just quote a little:

“I detect dumb dogs doing dirty deeds digging deeper down the environment, diminishing and damaging decades of dignity…”

I was overwhelmed by the speed of the delivery; truth be told, my brain needed more time to parse the complex phraseology, and unravel the layers of meaning and metaphor that underlie it, than I was given. The next artist, Flow Mentalz, delivered his rhymes at a breathless pace, so that one could only follow the sense of them with rapt attention, here is a snippet of his poem, entitled They Call Me Drama:

“I’m that used condom under the bed that your mate found
I’m that last breath you take before you drowned
I’m that last surviving sperm about to go head on with the egg,
I’m the one that raped that monkey to start the AIDS plague
They call me Drama!

I’m that breathalizer test that test alcoholics
I’m that piece of shit that come back after you flush the toilette.
I’m that dumb-ass bet you made when you don’t have no money
I’m that roach crawlin’ across your TV screen every time you got company.
They call me Drama!”

What struck me about this poem was the poet’s willingness to compare himself to disgusting things— a used condom, a piece of shit – and I honestly wonder if we have any similar examples in the European tradition of any poets comparing themselves to shit, or actually claiming to be a piece of shit. I searched Virgil in vain for a comparable passage.

Well, the heat of the studio lights was causing my disguise to slowly melt. There was something uncomfortable about the whole situation: sitting amid a sea of laughing blacks, covered in a greasy chocolate sandwhich-spread, listening to a poet compare himself to a piece of shit. As the Nutella began to mix with my own sweat, and the poet began referring to himself as a telephone poll, a pill-bottle, shit stains, and whatever else, I began to feel quite ill. I told my black acquaintences that I was going to go light up a blunt and ghost-ride the wip, and then I high-tailed it out of there.

Posted by Potential Frolic on Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at 03:38 AM in
Comments (6) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Søren Renner on March 14, 2007, 03:45 PM | #

Very very amusing.

Posted by Guessedworker on March 14, 2007, 03:48 PM | #

I agree. And I’ve never liked Nutella.

Posted by Voice on March 14, 2007, 04:06 PM | #

Great Stuff! LMAO

Posted by Daniel J on March 14, 2007, 05:38 PM | #

How old are you sir?

If you need my help with pop culture references lemme know…

Once again, my side hurts.

Isn’t there a passage in Notes on Virginia where Jefferson muses about the ability, in the future, of the American black to write poetry.

Well, in any case, the query has been sufficiently answered by PF.

Posted by Richard on March 20, 2007, 04:33 PM | #

One of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s terrible sonnets begins thus:

I am gall, I am heartburn…

But unlike the poems you quote it aint a pile of manure.

Posted by Richard on March 20, 2007, 10:45 PM | #

That’s ‘terrible’ not terrible. They are wonderful poems about despair not ethnic drivel.

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