On Blues and Poetry Lyrics – Gil Scott-Heron
Singer: Gil Scott-Heron
Title: On Blues and Poetry
So, i wanted to contribute myself. i was writing down and putting all the categories together: ‘i-ain’t-got-me-no-money,’ ‘i-ain’t-got-me-no-job’ blues, ‘i-ain’t-got-me-no-woman’ blues. and i said, “wait a minute, see, i don’t want to waste no categories, the ‘i-ain’t-got-me-no-money’ blues, ‘i-ain’t-got-me-no-job’ blues, ‘i-ain’t-got-me-no-woman’ blues, hell, them the same thing.” ’cause if i could get me a job, i could make me some money, i could call me a lady. i’d be doing a whole bunch better. so i put them all in the same category
But i wrote other pieces of blues, blues information. because what had happened was that i had found out that, later on, unfortunately, in my education, about people like langston hughes, about people like sterling brown, about people like countee cullen, and jean toomer, and claude mckay
And these people had taken the blues as a poetry form back in the twenties 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 ninth grade, like, a teacher just sneaked up on us and put these pieces of paper on the table, told everybody to read ’em, and then tell her what we thought about it
So i said, “well, that’s alright. sh#t, 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, “well, god damn. let me read this again. ‘what not upside the wall i see…'”
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, like, what we must be, “this must be deep” means that, like, “i recognize all of these words individually, but damned 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?” you know? 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, people come up to me sometimes they say, “hey, read my poem.” and i read it, “what now upside the wall i see…” and the only thing i can say to them is, “hey, this must be deep”
Because, like, like, 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
Why would you need a poet to make things more complex? two winos could make things more more complex. one of them say to the other one, “well, (*gibberish*)” and the other one look at him right serious and say, “yeah!” and they communicated, you see, if communication is what it’s all about, as far as most people sitting around watching it could been two poets talking to one another. they didn’t have a clue
So the idea became not only to use ideas that were familiar to people in the community, but to use the language that everybody could understand
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