Birds and Stuff

This is a repost from my Yahoo! 360 blog

Thursday January 19, 2006

I don’t know if I’m misreading people, but sometimes I get the impression that a lot of young well-read people aren’t very impressed by some of the more known classics. Well, I just want to say that I am impressed. The other day I was reading Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and, as it does every time I read it, it amazed me. This time though, I had hip-hop on my mind as I read it and it struck me – Poe was into wordplay. The type of wordplay many MCs would be proud of if they could claim authorship. The poem came up in conversation with a friend of mine, another MC, and he made a similar comment. The value of certain works of art are very much connected to their placement in time. Think of that song that makes everybody go back to a certain era of time whenever its played, but if the song were to come out now it would’ve been laughed off of the airwaves. We move forward, certain forms get more developed, certain things that were once original and rare become cliche and boring, and interests change. You have to respect a piece of art that can pass through time without succumbing to those threats and remains valuable in different contexts because its true value is seperate from its original context.

As if that wasn’t enough, while I was searching the web for a link to the poem to post here, I came across an essay that Poe wrote detailing how he went about writing “The Raven” and why he made some of the decisions he made regarding. This man was a genius. He treated writing this poem as if it were a math problem and he came up with a formula that led to a poem the stepped out of the formulaic box poetry tends to fall into. No rant today, just a recommendation.

Read the poem.
Then read the essay.