Breakbeat Blackout

Dave is a teacher, emcee, and poet(?) from New York who currently resides in Stratford, Connecticut with his family. He teaches English and advises the school newspaper at Westhill High School in Stamford, Connecticut, and is also one half of the rap duo, d_Cyphernauts. Dave co-teaches a Philosophy of Hip Hop course with his amazing wife at Fairfield University. At Fairfield, he also teaches with the Connecticut Writing Project. During his free time (lol!) Dave does weird stuff like read poems on hikes with his family, or cajole his children to go to Mets games with promises of cotton candy.

Inspiration

Hip Hop turns 50 this year! On August 11, 1973, at a party in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc discovered the “break”–the short instrumental part of a song that he could play and then extend through his “merry-go-round” technique on the turntables. The crowd went wild! And so it began. 

The essential element of hip hop is assembly, taking pieces of something that existed previously–short sections from a song–and stitching those pieces together like a quilt or a mosaic to form something completely new, yet still informed by the essence of the original works.

Process

The blackout poem didn’t start with hip hop–William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were remixing words before Kool Herc discovered the breakbeat–but the process of assembly channels a similar process and ethos. 

For your poem, find a piece of writing that you want to use as a source, grab a black sharpie and start redacting. The words that are left will be your poem. Remember that the source material that you choose can be an important factor in the effect that your poem creates. One of my favorite examples is Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem, “the author writes the first draft of his wedding vows”, which is a blackout poem that uses Virginia Woolf’s suicide note to her husband as a source text.

So perhaps you’ll choose a song lyric,a page from a favorite book, an email… Whatever you choose, find those gems in the text–the beats that move you–and create something new!

Dave’s Poem

Going Home (or, what De La Soul means to me)

for Dave

A Memory
in my open palms–
a winged creature,
beams of sunlight,
I suppose.
Grow beautifully,
Die beautifully–
a view of beauty in their
final years.

Who could cloak misadventures
nestled in between days
when we didn’t have any cash?
We wandered.
We learned.

Source text:
A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib

Your Turn

Now, scroll to the comment section below to write your own poem. (This is a public space, so you may choose to use only your first name or initials depending on your privacy preferences.) Not ready? That’s okay. Read the poems already posted for more inspiration. Ponder your own throughout the day. Return later. And, if the prompt does not work for you, that is fine. All writing is welcome. Just write something. Also, please be sure to respond to at least three writers. Oh, and a note about drafting: Since we are writing in short bursts, we all understand (and even welcome) the typos and partial poems that remind us we are human and that writing is always becoming. If you’d like to invite other teachers to write with us, tell them to subscribe.