A Bronx tale

Photo Credit: Trip Advisor.

Edgar Allan Poe’s cottage, built around the turn of the 19th Century and occupied by the American poet in the “lonesome latter years” of his life when its Fordham Manor locale was a bucolic corner in the periphery of New York, sits today in a gritty, predominantly African-American and Latino inner city area of the Bronx, surrounded by concrete playgrounds and housing projects. Some quick stats reveal the character of the neighborhood it’s now in: the median household income hovers over $30,000/year, 97% of residents rent (only 3% own), it has a high population density, with higher crime and incarceration rates than the rest of the city.

In short, it may seem to the locals that the same tornado that picked up Dorothy’s house and dropped it in the land of Oz also picked up the Poe cottage and left it here.

Poe apparently predicted that his neighborhood as he knew it would not last, and would eventually become unrecognizable. But I’d like to respond to this odd pairing by making another unlikely connection between Poe and urban culture: what seems to me a natural correspondence between Poe’s poetry and rap. Many musical tributes, from the Beatles to the Allan Parson Project, have toasted Poe—but generally all of them are white artists, usually in the gothic or metal music genres. Scant little attention has been paid to Poe and rap.

Yet, the connection is there for anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear. Lewis G. Parker lays out the basic case in a 2010 piece comparing Poe to the rapper Eminem.  Both Poe and the rapper, Parker argues, compose “long, disturbing tales with complex rhyme schemes which reveal the underlying madness, delusion and depravity in their narrators. They’re works of clear literary merit, which show an inventive use of language and expert control of narrative. The characters are so well-formed it’s like reading the graffiti scrawled on the inside of a lunatic’s mind as his life crumbles around him.”

Others have made the argument with their tongues pressed firmly against their cheeks, for example in an “epic”—and hilarious—mock rap battle between Poe and modern scare-meister Stephen King.  There are homages (here and here) to Poe in rap, and even a rapped “Raven.”  Well, I’m here to tell you that there is a serious point to be made here and it is that, up until the advent of rap, popular culture had not seen an intense focus on the sonic aspects of composition as Poe brought to writing verse.  The internal rhymes, the alliteration, and even the deliberate effort to strings words together primarily for sound effect, is something that every rapper “spitting” a rhyme inherently understands today, at a time when most self-respecting poets reject the need to have perfect meter or rhyme schemes. (Though the “poetry slam” movement in the 1990s sought to restore some of that and, in the process, appeared to draw poetry and rap closer together.)

Perhaps it is not such an odd pairing to have the Poe cottage in the Bronx, the borough with a claim to being the birthplace of rap, and home to such outstanding practitioners of the craft as the Grammy winner Cardi B, one of the most successful and influential rappers today. If I were speaking to a group of schoolchildren today about the bard who lived out the last years of his life in their neck of the woods, I might try making the point that their urban music culture continues a long standing tradition in their neighborhood of celebrating words, like:

Singing on and on, and on, on and on—

The beat don’t stop until the break of dawn;

Singing on and on, and on, on, and on—

Like a hot, ready-to-pop, the-pop, the-pop dibbie-dibbie

Pop-the-pop, pop, you don’t dare stop,

Come alive y’all—gimme’ what you got!

(From the Sugar Hill Gang’s 1979 “Rappers Delight”)

From there, it does not seem that great a distance to “The Bells.”

Photo Credit: Google Maps.