BOOK DUE IN OCTOBER: “Hip Hop Speaks to Children”
World-renowned poet Nikki Giovanni, poet Oni Lasana and actress/director/producer Val Gray Ward got together in Blacksburg, Va., Monday to do some hip-hop. They mixed in works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Dunbar and others to put together a CD that will accompany a book called “Hip Hop Speaks to Children,” a collection of poems and songs due out in October. What powerful words, those of Dunbar and Brooks!
We Wear the Mask
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
To Thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
– Paul Laurence Dunbar
“We Wear the Mask,” reprinted from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1913.
Click here to listen to Gwendolyn Books read “We Real Cool” (offsite Web page at poets.org… text available there too).
Before hip hop, we had its antecedents — Dunbar, Brooks… we had church music, old blues, Langston Hughes, Mohammed Ali, Maya Angelou, all with words that really sting. Giovanni wants children to know about all that, how deep the roots of hip hop go. I think of Africa, of Will Smith, Jamaica, block parties, break-dancing, the many, many forces that pushed hip hop along.
***
EVENT: Favorite Poem Day. Grant County Arts Council. 2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008, at Moomau Public Library, 18 Mt. View Street, Petersburg, WV 26847. Public invited. Event is said to be a tradition in Petersburg and attracts amateur writers. Come and read or listen.
(304) 257-4122
