House Lions is Wesleyan’s resident poetry podcast. To hear featured poets read their poems live and talk about their work, check out the House Lions weekly featured reader. Look for information about live recording sessions in the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, and a new featured poet every week. For more information, or to express interest in being on the show, shoot an email to sknittle@wesleyan.edu.
Note: On Monday, February 8th, House Lions will have its first live recording of the semester in the Shapiro Writing Center at 9 PM. Poets Alana Perino ’11, Sarah Ashkin ’11 and Camara Awkward-Rich ’11 will be featured.
This Week’s Poet: Josh Smith ’11
Although Josh Smith’s poetry bears obvious homage to hip-hop, it is distinguished by the degree to which it begets its origins in the work of poets such as Yusuf Komunyakaa and Thomas Sayers Ellis through careful attention to activity within the body of line and to an effort to echo both the emotional and rhythmic cores of the post-soul aesthetic. Smith’s work is both explosive in its pacing and its careful deployment of fireworks of consonants wrought by a density of sonic repetition, and excruciatingly beautiful in its astute attention to the usage of visual detail through which it builds a series of singular atmospheres.
Bio: Josh Smith is a poet and emcee from Woodstock, NY who grew up with hip-hop as the unlikely soundtrack to the vibrant rural landscape of his beloved Upstate home. At Wesleyan, his work has been published in The Hangman’s Lime and allegedly, under a pseudonym, in Stethoscope. As an emcee, he makes music under the name WordSmith, performing around the Northeast with both acoustic and electric ensembles. You can listen to some of his music here.
Reinvent The Wheel
4/4. acoustic guitar atop a breakbeat. vinyl record hiss. scuffed speakers. 94 beats per minute.
I did not invent the wheel, I was the crooked spoke adjacent
van ride tape decks
landslide draped legs
across the seats/heard the lyrics top the beats
loose-lipped lines were not enough
on trips to sketch cobbled libraries
New Haven speakers nodded our heads
til we could feel the grit of Farragut Road
Black Helicopters in homage to the BK boro/
city-bred Jewish emcees keeping it thorough
I wore my scars like the rings on a pimp
I kept my verses Wood-stocked within the barrel/
and took breaths on every school day
I stayed fresh in my apparel.
In the days of kings and queens I was a jester
I learned from lines as hot as this
so I shunned every dollar missed
collaged the paint on hollow fists
and retreated into the birch branches
to develop my craft trying to find a balance
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat hi hat to grind that
stone into the dust of my notebook
I needed the Eastern horizon to be my Brooklyn
so I lay low beneath the window in the wall and looked in.
All I ever wanted was to pick apart the day
put the pieces back together my way
I built a cannon
with two Ns and a neckbone
to withstand any staredown
stood atop the heap with a rare sound
and listened to Minneapolis
drop the P from pRIDE and hop in my car
to drive far between music scene-less cities
seam-less dreams-left in the flooding Sawkill
to rock rocks into pebble by midnight.
Not until you’ve listened to Rakim
on a rocky mountain top have you heard hip-hop
I climbed Bonticou Crag and headed the trail
freestyling in the foliage
Climb trees, go out on a limb I moved my
wrists like calypso/ never let a clip go
(kick snare kick kick snare)
upstate kids winnings bids with a thick glow
(kick snare ki-kick kick snare, crash)
I ciphered on Raymond Ave. at 3 AM
and fumbled home to the fables of Aesop Rock
Learning to pro-create/ never to appropriate
and every time I wrote too late
the late nights held me down.
I spit to the rhythm of crickets my vision hazy
notebook, space that my life never gave me.
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/Reinvent the Wheel.mp3″] Reinvent the Wheel
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/Harlequin2.mp3″] Harlequin
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/Night Fishermen.mp3″] Night Fishermen
[argusaudio src=”http://wesleyanargus.com/audio/Interview.mp3″] Interview