Star poets and poet stars: the rise of the celebrity bard goes to the heart of what role verse plays in our lives

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005 by Samantha Thornhill

In the past five years, we've experienced a salvo of celebrities such as Alicia Keys, Ashanti and T-Boz emerging with poetry-related texts. Because much of this celebrity poetry doesn't possess the maturity of craft to satisfy the finicky palettes of the literati, because much of it has an unfortunate resemblance to journal entries, because we are most likely to see poems of this caliber in the context of our Intro to Poetry classes, many of us are inclined to view this trend as a purely capitalistic venture for these pop icons.

Kwame Dawes, a poet and professor at the University of South Carolina, differs in opinion. "These artists are millionaires. Selling sixty-thousand books of poetry (record numbers for verse), will still be a drop in the bucket for many of these artists," he says.

Walter Dean Myers, a prolific and respected writer of books for young people, says it's the publishers who are naturally motivated by profit. "Economically, they [celebrity books] often make sense to the publisher," he adds. "I believe that Ashanti and Keys have probably even been writing for a while and earnestly believe in what they're doing. Often it's the publicist or agent who suggests publication."

So why are some of these celebrities, who are unarguably more stellar in other areas, choosing to publish poetry? "I think that these celebrities want a deeper connection with their fans ... and poetry is a great way to do that," comments Allison Joseph, poet and editor of Crab Orchard Review, a biannual journal of creative works. This makes sense; celebrities must have some intrinsic desire to be truly understood, deplasticized.

However, does the fact that celebrities--and many others--choose to publish poetry say less about them and more about how poetry is regarded as an art form? For instance, on a flight to the East Coast from Los Angeles two years ago, I was seated next to the rather charming Antwone Fisher, who proudly proclaimed that he was a poet. He then spoke proudly of his poetry book Who Will Cry for the Little Boy? (William Morrow, 2003) with the same, if not greater, sense of accomplishment as his screenplay for the 2002 movie The Antwone Fisher Story and his best-selling memoir Finding Fish (HarperTorch, December 2002).

Esteem Versus Profit

Perhaps, to be a poet or "weaver of words"--as Kwame Dawes puts it--is still considered one of the most esteemed occupations in the land, like the African djeli. Sure, when Rita Dove releases a book the masses aren't ravaging the shelves all in the name of poetry (can someone say Harry Potter?), but it's far from being a dead market.

"Poetry will sell if we push it or give it away like AOL did with its software," says E. Ethelbert Miller, the Washington, D.C., poet and literary activist. "We say there is no market for poetry, but then we publish poetry by Alicia Keys and it sells. I remember when folks said there were no markets for black dolls. Some storeowners kept the black dolls in their back rooms and then later shipped them back to the company saying they didn't sell. It's the same with poetry. Look at where the poetry sections are in the bookstores. Put the books in the windows and up front and watch the stuff sell."

Still, celebrity poets breed a little resentment among "serious" poets. Joseph, the literary review editor, adds, "I think poets resent that these celebrities haven't served the apprenticeship we have-collecting rejection slips, revising and rewriting, taking classes and getting critical commentary and struggling to get a book published."

The function of our literature continues to be a major concern in African American letters. During the Black Arts Movement, few writers could escape the social pressure to create work with a tangible societal function, whether they chose to do so or not. So during these times of deleterious illiteracy, what kind of literature do we need to keep our youth interested in reading? And at what cost?

As dubious as some of us may be to its literary merit, does Keys's book of poems and song lyrics have the propensity to draw significant numbers of young people (who might not normally choose books) to reading?

"As an editor, I read a lot of poetry that is head-scratchingly inaccessible," says Joseph. "I think that the accessibility of music and the lure of celebrity bring a lot of people to these books."

Verse for Everyday Use

Dawes has a different take on the issue of accessibility. "There's a block that comes from the suspicion that people have, that poets are trying to hide something from them. No one feels that way when they encounter a Bob Marley song that they don't understand. They trust the artist. They enjoy it anyway," he says. "Poets are not granted the same leeway. That's a shame because it is fundamental to the reading of poetry that we come to it with an emotional openness and a sensibility that allows us to feel things long before we understand them.

"Some contemporary poetry seems inaccessible and that is intentional," Dawes continues. "This doesn't mean we can't react to it. I have always said that there is a place for the poem as a public entity. The greeting card poem is its own thing. I can't write the greeting card poem because it makes me weary to spend time trying to be generic. But I do buy greeting cards, and I give them to the people I adore the most in my life. What is that about? So now, am I going to lambaste the greeting card as pure trash? What is that saying about me or about what I feel about the people I love?"