For Wednesday, 16 October

  • Adam Bradley, ‘Rhyme’, Ch. 2 in Book of Rhymes (2009)
  • Audio: Adam Bradley, ‘American Poets on the Hip-Hop Songs That Most Inspire Them’, New York Times (4 March 2021). To complement T’s recent feature on how the barrier between rap and poetry is becoming increasingly porous thanks to a new generation of practitioners in both art forms, we asked a number of poets mentioned in the piece about the hip-hop songs they return to again and again. (These excerpts from interviews with various poets shouldn’t be read apart from the embedded Spotify playlist, ‘A Playlist from the Poets’.)
  • Video: ‘Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time’, Vox (19 May 2016)
  • Due BEFORE Class: What’s your favourite rap song? Identify all the techniques from ‘Rapping Deconstructed’ (e.g., crossing the bar line, motifs, daisy-chaining, etc.) or Bradley, ‘Rhyme’ (e.g., assonance, consonance, epistrophe) that occur in this song.  (Note: Using one of the verses discussed in the videoessay is cheating, obviously.) Post a link to the song (YouTube or Whosampled, ideally), along with a brief explanation as to how one of these techniques is illustrated in the verse you’ve selected (define the technique and cite the page[s] where it’s discussed in the reading), in the #discography channel on our Discord server before our next class.

In Class

    1. Attendance
    2. Q&A: What can the study of poetics teach us about rap lyricism?
    3. Reading Notes for Next Time

For Next Time