Poetry with Kevin Coval

Kevin Coval, 33, is the co-founder of Young Chicago Author's Louder Than A Bomb Chicago teen poetry festival and the author of two books of poetry, most recently "Everyday People." Coval has performed his poetry around the world, including Cape Town, South Africa; Mumbai, India; Jamaica; and on HBO's Def Poetry Jam. I caught up with Coval during the inaugural college poetry slam and he was kind enough to spare some time and thoughts about poetry.

What is Louder Than A Bomb?

It is a city-wide and Chicago-land youth poetry festival. It incorporates fifty-six teams from [schools] all over the city and some of the surrounding suburbs. About five-hundred young writers, age thirteen to nineteen, are competing in this year's festival. This is our ninth annual festival - it started in 2001. This year we also started a college-level slam, so there's about another thirty kids participating at the college-level.

Why did you incorporate a college slam this year?

When [young writers] graduate from high school there's no real space for them, for emcees to go in the city...We wanted to create a space where they have more opportunity to continue honing their craft and also to be heard.

The college slam was introduced this year. What's next for Louder Than A Bomb?

Eventually we would like to have a middle school competition, high school competition, college competition - all working as teams. So at the college-level, Northwestern would go against Harold Washington, Malcolm X versus Roosevelt....

So the teams would be representative of their schools?

Yes, exactly. It would be like any kind of athletic competition. We want to grow to the point where it becomes something like a mix between the forensics tournament and the high school basketball tournament where it's a state-wide competition...Eventually, we want every hihgh school in the state of Illinois to have the opportunity to participate in Louder Than A Bomb.

Is there a difference between emcee and poet?

I don't think so. I don't think there really is a line between the emcee and the poet. When I say emcee or other people say emcee, they probably mean emcee - master ceremonial rapper. But the reason why I write, the reason why I started Louder Than A Bomb was because of poet-emcees. We take Louder Than A Bomb from a Public Enemy record, "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," and they have a song on their called "Louder Than A Bomb." It was those emcees: Chuck D, KRS One, MC Lyte who got me interested in writing poetry...I mean this verse is alive and accessible and complex and has multiple levels and it draws people in, the matters and the lives of people. Where as the poets we learned about in high school were not, they were not making a difference...In high school, I wasn't feeling Shakespeare, I wasn't feeling Robert Frost.

Poets are rappers - same thing, both are writers. The emcee has different responsibilities once they're in a hip-hop show, but poets perform too. Traditionally we think of the emcee as performing over a beat, and the poet is just acappella, but I think a lot of the kids are writing rhymes that could be fit over a beat, maybe even were but because of the rules of the competition they end up reading their rhymes acappella. [Poet and emcee] have always been intimately linked. The spoken word and hip-hop community in Chicago have forever intertwined.

Why was Public Enemy's song "Louder Than A Bomb" chosen as the festival's name?

Young people that we were working with in the schools were being criminalized under the city's anti-gang loitering law...locked up for hanging out on their street in groups of more than two and for being young and of color. They'd be arrested and put in jail for no reason. These stories about what they would go through in their communities are not the stories you would hear on the television or on the radio, and we really wanted to bring them together.

In Louder Than A Bomb's history page, that you wrote, you refer to yourself and others as "Freedom Dreamers." Do you believe poetry is a route to freedom?

I think it is, I think it's a way to unlock a kind of public dreaming that needs to exist. I don't think we do that work enough...Part of what poetry does is allow us to see, to account for history and also to imagine a place that is different than this.

What do you say to anyone that criticizes slam poetry for not being traditional poetry?

There's a fear in academia that will point out that they don't think that what we're doing is poetry. [Academia] is saying that for a couple reasons: one, they're frightened that [slam poetry] has an audience; [frightened] that what they do is actually meaningless. They create abstraction upon abstraction to satisfy a very small group of people, and [slam poetry] is poetry for and by the people, and the people who are creating this poetry predominantly are people of color, are people who are unheard and often times existing outside of mainstream forms of communication, and I think that threatens academia, I think that threatens old white dudes who hold onto university chairs who know they're writing [expletive] about horses or about having a scone in Maine.

This poetry is a poetry that I think reaches people and their poetry is not, and that's why it stays in academic journals that four people read. Academic poets think that if they sell five-hundred books of poems that's a big deal. I know there's fifty kids in this audience who have sold two-thousand CD's out of a backpack; you know, who's having an impact on who's life?

Now, there are some poets in the academy that I think are cool, and I think the academy is also beginning to change. There's always this tension between new movements and American letters. Forty years ago we were having this same conversation about the Black Arts Movement or beat literature, and now some of those poets are the most revered in the academic canon.

Where does your motivation and inspiration to write come from?

I started writing because of hip-hop. I wanted to write rhymes. Early on I was very interested in language and Run DMC's ability to juggle language, or KRS One's ability to tell a story, and those writers sent me to the library to learn alternate takes on history, in doing so, I came across the Black Arts Movement's poets: Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and that led me to a world and a life of literature.

Chicago influences me...the students influence me, riding the train influences me. Gwendolyn Brooks told writers to tell the story that's in front of their nose, so I try to record and report what I see.

In a past interview, you explain that not all knowledge can be learned within the walls of a school. You said, "...the freshest culture happens by and large outside the institutions when people create for the sake of creation not degrees." Could you elaborate?

These young writers live in a world that they are educated by, they're educated by their daily surroundings.

Do you have a college degree?

No, I don't have a college degree...but I might go back to Chicago State and get in their M.F.A. program.

From that same interview, you explain that there's more to poetry than, "...dead white dudes getting lost in the woods." Were you referring to Robert Frost?

Yes. All these guys write about the forest or horses or birch-wood or something, and I have a hard time finding that interesting.

What's harder, writing poetry or vocally expressing poetry?

Writing. The page is where the work is. The performance of it comes later, but the page is where the intense labor occurs.

Who's your favorite poet?

I really like Willie Perdomo, that's a tough question though.

Define poetry.

I don't know if I could do that...I'm interested in using language to articulate the world around us, but there's all kind of poetry.