You Fish For Flesh, I Fish For Souls
In Ars Poetica on 20 November 2009
I’m going to leave the debate over what is and isn’t poetry for someone else. For myself, lyric is lyric, whether it be traditional poetry, spoken word or the words that come with pop music. Hip hop, whose lyrics are mostly spoken, feels like poetry even more than rock lyrics. The border is porous, to say the least.
Denizen Kane has long been one of my favorite poets and once he began making music, one of my favorite emcees. I met Denizen back in the 1990s during the early days of the Mental Graffiti reading in Chicago. Like most of my favorite spoken word artists, Denizen preferred to write more lyric compositions rather than opting for the more rhetorical, expository Henry Rollins style of spoken word. I remember the first time I heard him perform; in one poem he made allusions to Li Young Lee and Jurassic 5, using a flowing, smooth delivery that eased his listeners into his image-dense, complex poems. His writing has always connected with me on a very personal level; raised, like I was, in a Christian home, Denizen has wrestled to reconcile the faith with which he was raised with his growing understanding of his cultural heritage, his politics, and with his personal poetics.
Most writers I know are locked in the midst of their own wrestling — we wrestle with something from our pasts and presents — it is what pushes us to write. For poets who wrestle with religious traditions, which themselves perform functions similar to poetry — imaginative redescriptions of the world that give its hearers and readers new ways of interacting and being — words themselves become the subject of the wrestling. As poets, we maintain a sense of wonder and mystery, but as poets we find ourselves continually pushing for new ways to see things. We can’t help it to a certain extent. There is a long tradition of writers dealing with this difficulty, from the book of Job and the texts of the ancient Hebrew prophets to Muslim poets Rumi and Hafiz to modern poets like Yeats and Dylan Thomas to Ginsberg, Li Young Lee and others, and, in music, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Michael Franti and Mos Def, just to name a few. Denizen continues this tradition, and draws on all these listed, and more, to weave his own, new personal theology and politics that’s born of his relationship with words themselves.
This video from his latest album, . Listen to how he reforms old concepts anew to apply to his particular context, and how natural the syncretism he’s built out of hip hop aesthetics and imagery from almost every major religious tradition. The result: a personal statement of mission and faith that’s easy and strong as the gentle power of water. Not overpowering or overbearing or preachy, but familiar, open-hearted, and beautiful.
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