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