On Blues and Poetry

So, I wanted to contribute
Myself i was writing
Down and putting all the
Categories together: 'Iain't-got-me
No-money, ' 'Iain't-got-me no-job' blues
'Iain't-got-me no-woman' blues
And I said, "Wait a minute, see
I don't want to waste no categories, the
'Iain't-got-me no-money' blues
'Iain't-got-me no-job' blues
'Iain't-got-me no-woman' blues, hell
Them the
Same thing" 'Cause if I could get me a
Job, I could make me some money
I could call me a lady i'd
Be doing a whole bunch
Better so I put them all in the same category

But I wrote other pieces of blues
Blues information because what had
Happened was that I had found
Out that, later on, unfortunately
In my education, about people
Like Langston Hughes, about people like
Sterling Brown, about people like Countee
Cullen, and Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay

And these people had taken the blues
As a poetry form back
In the twenties and the teens
During the Harlem Renaissance
And they had fine tuned the blues
They had sanded it down
So that it became a remarkable
Sort of an art form

But what happened was that in many
Instances we didn't learn about that
We learned about the kind of
Poetry that nobody could understand

Like, on 17th Street and 9th Avenue
When I was a teenager, man
We didn't want to hear nothing
About poetry somebody'd say something
About poetry and we'd say, "Oh yeah
Where's he at? Bring him
On over here" 'Cause we was
Into shooting the jumper
And that was damn near all

So, in the ninth grade, like
A teacher just sneaked up on us and
Put these pieces of paper on the
Table, told everybody to read 'em
And then tell her what we thought about it
So I said, "Well, that's alright shit
I'll try it" I looked at the
Poem and the poem said:

"What now upside the wall I see
A shadow of an image, me"

I said, "Well
God damn let me read this again 'What
Not upside the wall I see'"

In the back of the room somebody said, "Hey
This must be deep" You know, like
"This must be deep" is like a drape that we
Throw over everything, you know, like
Like, what we must be, "This must
Be deep" means that, like, "I recognize
All of these words individually
But damned if I can get
Anything out of the order
In which they currently appear
This must be deep"

I mean, because you figure it must be
Deep in this book you say "Well
Why the hell would they put
It in this book if
It didn't mean nothing?" Because
Ordinarily you'd read that and say "Hey
This must be nonsense" But you don't want
To say that with the teacher
Standing right next to you... "Why you give me
This?" You know? So you say, "Hey
This must be deep"

And what happens is that when a lot of
Folks get ready to write poetry that's what
They decide they going to be – deep
They decide they going to be poetic

So they come up to me, people come
Up to me sometimes they say, "Hey
Read my poem" And I read
It, "What now upside the wall
I see" and the
Only thing I can say to them is, "Hey
This must be deep"

Because, like, like
Being influenced by the kind of poetry that
We were all introduced to... people
Feel as though, like
The way to be poetic is
That there are certain
Little parts of it that
Can't nobody understand

Why would you need a poet to make
Things more complex? Two winos could
Make things more more complex one of
Them say to the other one, "Well
(Gibberish) " and the other one look
At him right serious and say, "yeah!"
And they communicated, you see
If communication is what it's all about
As far as most people sitting around
Watching it could been two
Poets talking to one another they
Didn't have a clue

So the idea became not only to use ideas
That were familiar to people
In the community, but to use the language
That everybody could understand