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RE: SteemitPoetryContest #15 - "Writing whilst you dream"
:) This was a very interesting read. It reminds me of certain videos I've seen about people who stand on the streets in USA with beat boxes and just declaim poetry to the rhythm, as if they were rapping. They usually have lyrics that are different from the norm of poetry, like this. It's always caught my attention.
omg the beat boxers and street hip hop is the BEST!!! and to be compared to the way they string together words so beautifully is such an honor to hear:) there's this group i discovered called the Legendary Cyphers that meets once a week in Union Square in NYC (its like one of the main parks/squares in Manhattan and is super active with skateboarders, singers, people playing jazz, etc). they are AMAZING!! they get together and battle each other for 1-2 hours and i will literally go and watch them the entire time, just standing on the outer rim of their circle and cheering them on. its an incredible energy and i really fell in love with it. ive even thought about doing it at first, but i process words slowly and i think the fastness of it scares me to death. they are truly masters of words though - it is such an art!
this is the legendary cyphers in their public battles in the square :)
Cyphers! I like the word "cypher" more than "crypto". Maybe I should create CypherSharon :D
I tried to watch the vid but I can't understand what they say hahaha. There was a time when I was a bit more familiarized with that specific dialect (NYC informal language used in raps) because my culture/literature teacher used to like that kind of stuff. But that was like 4 years ago and only for a few months. I've since forgotten a lot and lost the ease with which I've understood them. Perhaps if I watch a bunch of their vids I'll recover it relatively quickly.
It's not so hard to make this comparison. Look at this part:
Let's compare both genres, street hip hop and your poetry.
Both have the metalanguage in common. Rappers often talk about their own rapping. I wouldn't find it strange for plenty of raps to contain phrases similar to "my words come out like machine gun bullets".
There's the rhythmic sound of unliterary words uncommon to poetry but common to your thought processes (drift into deeper spaces of dream thought), which in a street hip hop community are mostly slang and common knowledge/common community topics, but, in your intimate writing process, are talk about space and thought processes.
The strategy in classical poetry is mostly to fit only certain words and certain parts of the verses into a literary game of similitude/rhythm/metric, etc. But in your case and in the case of rap/hip hop, this common poetic game is distorted and liberated into other parts of the verse. We arrive thus to the alliteration in phrases like "profoundly postulating" (which is also an uncommon connection of words) and "bedsheets and blankets", which are pairs which start with the same letter (p-p, b-b) and have a long rhythmic sound.
The last line of the cited text just sounds like hip-hop tbh. And since it doesn't sound really that quite exactly like hip-hop, I proposed instead those street poets with beat boxes. These are similar but don't usually improvise or have such a rap rhythm. They instead speak their poetry to the beats. It's a bit strange and interesting and I think that it resembles more your style.
And this ended up being an essay on the similitude of your work and street poetry. Toot.
and i LOVED your essay. you could be an english teacher. but like an english teacher in the US. not of the language itself, but of readings and poetry and culture and authors and art. like, i mean that 100%. you're taking me back to AP English Literature classroom days a decade ago, and its a beautiful thing :)