ABSTRACT
The Black Arts quest for a Black audience showed itself as a viable strategy in hip-hop, which, as part of the musical realm, operated the way African American music always has. Poetry is mystical magic via language elevated to everything is everything. Of course the empire will tell you different. It will tell you poetry is the mastery of form, the mastery of convention, the mastery of precise craft, though in the world you hear poetry come from the most lowly places, the most dejected quarters. Loving you is complicated. Maybe if we listened to everything we would learn that there is poetry everywhere. Within the empire, one cannot listen to everything. One must honor their to do list, execute tasks, walk past the homeless on the way to work.
