I hope you enjoy this edition of the Docudharma Writers Jam fest, and please, feel free to contribute.
For more detail on different styles of poetry, please go to poetryonline.com
As my first contribution to this series, I thought it would be beneficial to all to start with a review of different styles of poetry with an example of each. This is a useful tool to show which styles there are and how you can use different styles to convey different emotions.
I have written poetry since I was 16. I am now 29.
My first writings were free style rap. I was influenced by Krs One and Rakim, as well as other early 90’s rappers like Jay-Z, Tupac and the Notorious Big. I was what you might call a wigger.
Krs One, George Carlin and other influences were a strong in my early political and literary life.
When my father died I dropped out of school and entered the workforce. To excersize my mind I would go to the public (socialist) library and devour books on all subjects, politics, economics, history, and the classics of prose and verse.
After a year of experiencing the wage slavery of class war head on, I went back to high school. My first class of the day was Poetry. I feel in love and graduated as an honors student 2 years later.
The problem with hip hop is that it is so highly structured, so fast and so short in phonetic flexibility that it is difficult to say much without being overly repetitive.
Also, the english language simply lacks the rhymes. French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are romance languages that are full of rhymes, most words end in O or A, and the depth of communication is certainly more rich than the large and overtly technical English language we use in American discourse.
As George Orwell wrote of poetry
“Did you know there are only 10 words in modern Newspeak that rhyme with Rod?”
Therefore, Engliish clearly has it’s poetic limits. The point here, and what makes the works of Shakespear so brilliant, is how we can strcth those limits and expand the boundaries in order to make our language so much more vivid and Descriptive.
We can create a world of words that goes beyond the limitations of the world around us.
