The Last Poets

This approach has quite a lot of truth as well as superficiality. American poetry is still alive, as does that country, at various levels and within different social strata, ranging from poetry salons frequented by Nobel Prize winners to hooligan rap garbage heaps and industrial ruin.

I spotted a poster at one of Pennsylvania's countless music stores, showing three fantastically colorful old and fat blacks clad in rags. A rock group called The Last Poets. To me it was the US version of my beloved Booh-Bah-Booh. And the caption told me that "the last poets were the first rap musicians." Great, here was yet another batch figuring they were simultaneously the first and last, I told myself.

A couple of weeks later, while in New York City, I was invited to read a lecture at a nightclub called New Yorkan, located in one of the East Village's Puerto Rican quarters. The invitation was signed by a certain Keith Roach. As would be explained to me later, roach is what is left when a marijuana joint gets too small to handle.

Poetry readings are staged at the New Yorkan every Friday night, starting around eleven and lasting until two or three a.m. You come up to a solid steel door displaying a rich assortment of four-five-word graffiti and are encountered by a hefty gray-haired man known locally as Uncle Tom, reeking of stale whiskey and unsteady on his feet. You pay him a five as a cover charge, and he lets you in, whereupon you find yourself in a cramped up room and are immediately deafened by a motley of voices and colors; you elbow your way through the thick crowd and clouds of smoke, toward the bar. The room is small, with customers at every table, so latecomers make themselves comfortable on the floor, in the upstairs gallery, and somewhere by the wall. There drunken whistling and applause, and above all there is the ear-shattering music, certainly reggae, funk or rap.

I will never forget the atmosphere I found myself in on that particular occasion: dozens of faces, skin colors, the entire human race represented right there in the heart of New York, liberty incarnate, finally achieved by all those descendants of American slaves. While in New York City, one should not waste one's time exploring museums. Instead, one should use the subway or take a stroll along streets, taking in the passers-by, this unbelievable ethnic mix, exotic attire, hairstyles, chains, bracelets, tattoos, listening to their Spanish-English-Chinese dialects, finally appreciating the true meaning of the Tower of Babel myth.

I will never forget the moment Keith Roach made his appearance at the podium, the all-time favorite, chewing on the invariable reefer. The number one emcee. His jokes sent the audience into roars of laughter, though his Harlem lingo made little sense to me if at all. But then he said Booh-Bah-Booh, sounding like juju, and I realized my turn had come.

And I will never forget all those incantations, long and charismatic, I heard from a Black poet with a basketball player's physique. His verse was supposed to be revolutionizing, and the audience intoned, repeating certain lines like a refrain, sounding to me something like ohm-shalak-shalak!

I will always remember the way I approached the podium, unsteady on my feet with anxiety, my throat dry. I had that long since forgotten feeling of stage-fright, like that first time fifteen years ago when I had had to address people I did not know and who could well ask themselves what this young fellow is doing here anyway.

Then I started speaking into the microphone and everything was fine. The audience was extremely attentive and I could see faces that now looked very attractive, like flowers collected from all over the earth. I offered them "Cossack Jamaica". Its English version belonged to Vitaly Chernetsky, and it seemed a very good one. Among other things, it enriched my own vocabulary; now I know that our syvukha is moonshine, but the line reading in the original "If you are Europe, do you really feed on fellow humans?" delighted the listeners; now they knew that Ukraine is another former colony, that we have to fight slavery, and that we have to find a way to overcome our servile mentality.

The final touch was the shock I received watching an old Puerto Rican, king of the local poets, surrounded by a pack of bohemian-looking girls. He walked up and embraced me, saying something that made me instantly sober, despite many toasts risen and accepted: "Listen," he told me with a wide equatorial grin, "Taras Shevchenko is my favorite poet! And I also know yob tvaju mat'!" The latter is the great and mighty Russian language's parallel to that weapon of choice in the verbal arsenal of every vulgarian.

Well, he had meant to convey two important things and did.