Poetry Power For Street People

Gritty, death, and breadsticks: Philly street poet will write you a poem on any topic | We The People

by Stephanie Farr, Updated: August 28, 2019

Marshall James Kavanaugh had been set up for about an hour in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square — with a typewriter, a framed photo of James Baldwin,

and a yellow sign that read “PICK A TOPIC GET A POEM” — when Jules Skodzinski walked up on a recent Friday.

Skodzinski, 58, a burly guy, told Kavanaugh his mom died recently. It was tough, he said, but it also brought him and his siblings closer. Could he maybe write a poem for him about strong bonds?
And in about five minutes, Kavanaugh, 32, of West Philly, did.

It began:

tested in night and day
the bonds of a family
grow stronger through the storms
that attempt to push them away

Skodzinsky marveled at the poem, which he said he planned to share with his siblings. “He’s an artist but also a technician,”Skodzinsky said of Kavanaugh. “I think this is like the difference between saying something and singing it.”

A Street Fight – Poem by Francis William Lauderdale Adams

SIR, we approve your curling lip and nose
At this vile sight.
These men, these women are ‘brute beasts’? — Who knows,
Sir, but that you are right?
Panders and harlots, rogues and thieves and worse,
We are a crew
Whose pitiful plunder’s honoured in the purse
Of gentlemen (like you),
Whom holy Competition’s taught (like us)
‘What’s thine is mine!’ —
How we must love you who have made us thus,
You may perhaps divine!

Poetry and Power

Gravity Kills

This is nostalgia
And only the hero
Fights for me and you dear listener
You leave old memories
And such things disgust me
Storm the door, I must get out
Poetry and power
Ice and fire
This is poetry and power
Poetry and power
Ice and fire
This is poetry and power
You’re worse than mirrors
Are you reflecting
I don’t know
All this help leaves me cold
This is confusing me again
I must get out
Poetry and Power
Ice and Fire
This is poetry and power
Ice and Fire
This is poetry and power
Your poetry is power
Your ice becomes fire
All things disgust you
And you are the listener
A hero dies for me
I must get out
This is poetry and power
Your poetry is power
Your ice becomes fire
This is poetry and power
Your poetry is power
Your ice becomes fire
This is poetry and power
Your poetry is power
Your ice becomes fire
This is poetry and power
This is poetry and power
This is poetry and power

https://www.lyricsfreak.com/g/gravity+kills/poetry+and+power_20299757.html

Does Poetry Have Street Cred?

By Major Jackson

September 6, 2019

Does American poetry suffer from an abundance of artistic dignity and not enough street credibility? It’s possible. When I asked a friend, a terrific prose writer, why she seems to have a slight disdain for poetry, she replied, “It’s too elitist, like walking through a beautiful forest in which I know not where to look, much less know what I am searching for. If I don’t get it as a reader, then I feel like an idiot and somehow not worthy of the form.” In years past, I would have fretted and dismissed her remarks as garden-variety philistinism, but my friend is admirably sensitive, a brilliant scholar, Ivy educated, and not someone prone to make trivializing remarks without great consideration.

Does Poetry Have Street Cred?

Elaine Brown (Interlude)
Alicia Keys

Can I do one more really quick?
So he said blow black mother, black mother
He always announce the title black mother, this is rap
This is hip hop, this is all that, from the street

Poetry from the street
Black mother
I must confess that I still breathe
Though you are still not free
What could justify my crying start
Forgive my coward’s heart
But blame me not the sheepish me
For I be sleeping in a deep, deep sleep
And I be hazed and dazed
And vipers fester in my hair
Black mother, I curse your drudging years
The rapes, heartaches, sweat and tears
But I swear I’ll seize night’s dark and gloom
A rose I’ll wear to honor you
And when I fall
A rose in hand
You’ll be free, and I a man
For a slave of natural death who dies
Can’t balance out two dead flies
I’d rather be without the shame
A bullet lodged within my brain
Black mother