Poetry Beats Go On into Realms of Hip Hop
By Robert Waddell, April 4, 2009
 Grunge, walk-up former factory space turned into apartments and lofts. A guy sits collecting $5 per patron where everyone stands around listening to hip hop and spoken word poetry. And the bathroom, aligned with urinals, is unisex. No, it’s not the Lower East Side in the 1980s but the South Bronx, March, 2009.
On this night, before the event hip hop artist G1 with Isolina de la Cruz, were painting the walls golden yellow and Virginia Ayres stenciled in larger images of Latin American and revolutionary struggle icons.
Nearly 50 artists and fans of spoken word; no longer is it just called poetry but the merging of hip hop and poetry becomes Spoken Word: heavy on performance, words are the medium. Posters of Che, Malcolm X, Hugo Chavez, along with the Cuban, Dominican and Puerto Rican flags adorn the walls. The action takes place in a large room, with a band stand, where patrons mostly stood around awaiting for the evening’s host at S.P.I.T., a monthly presentation of the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective on Austin Street.
The host for the evening was poet Hipnotic Coleman who during the course of the evening invited Yenny Love onto the stage. Surprised, because she wasn’t going to read, Yenny Love read her spoken word poetry.
"She is beautiful, without attitude. She is intelligent, without smugness,” said Hipnotic. “She is an engaging performer, without ego. She is professional enough to work on her craft yet new at it enough to still have the smallest bit of nervousness which is charming."
 Yenny Love is a high school biology teacher, former hip hop video dancer who performed with Jennifer Lopez among others, is from New Jersey and who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was 11 years old. She first lived in the Pocono’s then in Jersey City, New Jersey.
As a child, Love couldn’t get enough of the video game Super Mario Brothers. She said that she was absorbed with rescuing the princess and this other world. Soon Yenny Love turned to poetry because she could connect with this other artistic world within her, which was full of pain and where she could triumph as the hero of her own story.
“In order to express yourself and not worry what other people think,” said Love, one Sunday afternoon at G-Bar on the Grand Concourse. “…You cannot be afraid of expressing what you feel.”
Today Love still lives in New Jersey with her pet albino rabbit named Lola and knows how to get to Rebel Diaz, Accentos poetry workshops and Hostos Community College. The Bronx has become Yenny Love’s home away from home.
These days poets have the best nick names: Sam Vargas becomes Fish: Maria Teresa Fernandez is Mariposa; Caridad de La Luz, La Bruja; O. Rivera became Flaco Navaja; Jesus Melendez, Papoleto and Pedro Pietri was El Reverendo. Spoken word artists have better nom de plumes than the X-Men or members of the WWF. So, new to the poetry scene Jennifer Figuero becomes Yenny Love.
In Love’s poem “Little Gurl,” which fills the stage and the page with dark childhood memories, the poet switches the mood in mid-poem from real harsh memories that turns into redemption and the saving grace of artistic self-expression. “When I was a little girl the world seemed pink for a moment…p-o-e-t-r-y…you’re taking all over my senses,” she wrote.
At a Friday March 27th poetry event at Urban Juke Joint, in the Bahai Center on East 11th street, Love read a poem with attitude and defiant self proclamation. She said, “From the collision of the emotions that cause commotion…I am the goddess of sensuality…Can you remember who you are? Take that thought and run with it.”
 It has been over 25 years since the creation of the Nuyorican Poetry Movement by Miguel Algarin and Miguel Pinero. With the advent of poetry slams, hip hop and venues like Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam, poetry has taken on new significance as an extension of hip hop. The legacy of the Nuyorican Poetry lives today in those poets who grew up with hip hop stars and they too want some of the glory.
Yenny Love’ poetry is filled with the voice of the Dominican woman with Caribbean sensibilities and American values. She doesn’t whine or yearn for the past but looks to the future.
“I think I always was an artist since I was little,” said Love. “….I wanted to be a dentist. I love science, which is why I’m a biology teacher…I never ran away from poetry….When I write and do my poetry I want to make them think, make them feel. Get an idea out of what I’m telling you.”
This story was developed through the Education Beat Writing Fellowship at the New York Community Alliance. |
