I do not own the rights to this. However, I am grateful for what Gil had to say.
“These people had taken the blues as a poetry form back in the 20’s and the teens during the Harlem Renaissance, and they had fine tuned the blues. They had sanded it down so that it became a remarkable sort of an art form.
But what happened was that in many instances we didn’t learn about that. We learned about the kind of poetry that nobody could understand.
Like, on 17th Street and 9th Avenue when I was a teenager, man, we didn’t want to hear nothing about poetry. Somebody’d say something about poetry and we’d say “oh yeah, where’s he at? Bring him on over here.” ‘Cause we was into shooting the jumper, and that was damn near all.
So, in the 9th grade a teacher just sneaked up on us and put these pieces of paper on the table, told everybody to read them, and then tell her what we thought about it.
So I said, “well, that’s alright. Shit, I’ll try it.” I looked at the poem and the poem said:
what now upside the wall I see/a shadow of an image, me.
I said, “God damn. Let me read this again.”
In the back of the room somebody said “hey, this must be deep.” You know, like “this must be deep” is like a drape that we throw over everything, you know…like, “this must be deep” means that like, I recognize all of these words individually, but damn if I can get anything out of the order in which they currently appear. This must be deep.
I mean, because you figure it must be deep in this book you say “well, why the hell would they put it in this book if it didn’t mean nothing?” Because ordinarily you’d read that and say “hey, this must be nonsense.” But you don’t want to say that with the teacher standing right next to you…”why you give me this?” So you say “hey, this must be deep.”
And what happens is that when a lot of folks get ready to write poetry that’s what they decide they going to be - deep. They decide they going to be poetic.
So they come up to me sometimes they say “hey, read my poem.” And I read it…and the only thing I can say to them is “hey, this must be deep.”
Because being influenced by the kind of poetry that we were all introduced to…people feel as though like, the way to be poetic is that there are certain little parts of it that can’t nobody understand.”