Wednesday, February 4, 1998
Professor-author subverts concept of ‘ethnic’ poetry
BOOK/MUSIC: Director, authors, rappers, basketball star
contribute to anthology
By Megan Dickerson
Daily Bruin Contributor
The famous Apollo Theater closes in on Derrick Gilbert like a
high school auditorium as he steps onstage. A successful comic has
already been booed off the stage once that night, and the audience
is waiting for more. And in this welcoming situation, Gilbert is
going to be the very first poet to ever do the Apollo.
"I was the risk, I was the Judas-goat," recalls Gilbert, a UCLA
Sociology Ph.D. candidate who just published his new poetry
anthology, ‘Catch the Fire: A Cross-Generational Anthology of
African-American Poetry.’ "They introduced me as a poet, and so I
knew I had about 10 to 15 seconds before they started clicking and
knew they could start booing or whatever."
So, before thousands of people, the poet rearranges his prepared
piece so that he might hit home with the primarily African American
audience. In a gentle yet powerful deep voice, he begins, motioning
with his long fingers:
"Remember when a wall of rainbow beads took you from one room to
another … / And remember when carpet was all shag and all
shag-gy, even in the bathroom … / And remember those velvet
pictures that seemed to be in every black living room."
As he carries his listeners back in time, he lifts up his arms,
and whispers, "Don’t you all, let me hear you say, remember," and a
strong reply of "remember" falls on the audience like a blanket.
When he finishes, he steps back, crosses his arms over his chest,
and, as he flashes a peace sign to the speechless audience, says,
"peace, I’m D-Knowledge."
The hushed audience jumps to its feet, giving Gilbert the first
standing ovation ever given a poet at the Apollo.
Since then, dozens of poets have played the Apollo. But what may
be, to date the rising poet’s most lasting contribution to black
culture is his new poetry anthology. The volume, which was
officially released this week, contains works from such notable
black authors as Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez and June Jordan. It
also includes non-traditional works from a variety of poets,
including basketball player-rapper Shaquille O’Neal, actor Malcolm
Jamal-Warner, rapper MC Lyte, and actor-director Mario Van
Peebles.
Through the inclusion of works from all walks of life, Gilbert,
who also teaches an upper-division sociology class at UCLA, wants
to let his audience know that anyone can "catch the fire" within
poetry.
Gilbert sits back in his Haines office. As he gestures with his
left hand, a class ring from one of his many alma maters gleams in
the sunlight. The remains of a henna tattoo crawl up his fingers.
In a mere 27 years, the man who seems so calm and collected in this
office has managed to cut a poetry album under Quincy Jones’ label,
play himself in John Singleton’s movie "Higher Learning," read
poetry on tour with Peter Gabriel and Lenny Kravitz and appear in a
Rolling Stone CD-ROM. He seems wise beyond his years, balking at
the lure of celebrity and answering each question with a poetic
sensibility inherent in someone twice his age.
Perhaps it is this sensibility that lets him get away with
reading poetry at the start of each meeting of Sociology 160:
Intergroup Conflict and Prejudice. Co-taught with Professor Jerome
Rabow, the class deals with identity politics and issues of race,
sexuality and gender. Not only has he been known to read poetry, he
has in the past brought in guest lecturers like Levar Burton, MC
Lyte and various Def Jam comedians. All this synthesizes to make
the class more of a life experience than a lecture.
"I never realized how much I could get out of a poem," says
third-year sociology student Christina Montanez. "(Gilbert)
inspires people to write poems."
Professor Rabow, who has taught with Gilbert for two years,
confirms this sentiment.
"An emotional day means we are getting into and through and
releasing the enormous pain that prevents people of different
groups to trust each other," Rabow says. "He and I work hard with a
spectacular group of students who are working on their prejudices,
biases, stereotypes and racist behaviors that for this education
group seem to be more of racism by omission rather than
commission."
On this note student Samira Hekmat says, "There’s not a day that
goes by when this class doesn’t come into play in my life."
It’s all in a days work for Gilbert, who was not always as
academic as he appears today. As a student at Millikan High in Long
Beach, he says he was more likely to make fun of the debate team
than be a part of it.
"It was kind of like I was a closet poet, I hadn’t come out,"
Gilbert says with a smile. "I had ideas that I could only express
through poetic form, and I didn’t necessarily share them."
At UC Berkeley, he says he discovered a "hipness" in being
smart. After he began reading two extra books a week, friends
nicknamed him "Knowledge," a name that evolved into his stage name
D-Knowledge. And yet he would not call himself a poet.
"I never was comfortable to say ‘I’m a poet,’" Gilbert says.
"When I went to college, I got so caught up in the analytical side
of being a sociology, rhetoric major; I was reading historical
texts, and again I didn’t really embrace the term. It wasn’t until
this experience of coming down to L.A. that I was like ‘wow.’"
Gilbert’s poetic epiphany occurred at the Anansi Writer’s
Workshop, after a friend got him to go in hopes of meeting women.
But after a few minutes of the spoken word, Gilbert was mesmerized.
As he writes in the introduction to "Catch the Fire," the
passionless poetry zombie he was when he walked in burned at an
ancestrally rooted stake and he was reborn.
It is this same fire, ancestral or otherwise, that he hopes to
instill in his readers of all races. That is one reason why he
included such a breadth of poets in the anthology, to prove that
there is poetry in everything. The anthology includes rap, which
has often been defamed for its anti-women sentiments.
"I think that … there is some horrible rap, just like there is
some horrible poetry," Gilbert says emphatically. "There’s equal
amounts of misogyny in some alternative music, and some rock and
some country … I think that young, black, disenfranchised males
are easy targets."
While he acknowledges that there are some self-destructive
things happening in rap, Gilbert says there are also some wonderful
things.
"Like the piece that Shaquille O’Neal gave me for the book,"
Gilbert says. "It’s phenomenal … He just strips all that cool,
throws that away to write this poem for that man."
The rap, which climaxes with the refrain "Phil is my father /
Because my biological didn’t bother," conveys both the pain O’Neal
felt at being abandoned and the love he has for the surrogate
father who raised him.
Although the anthology only includes poems from African
Americans, Gilbert believes it has an appeal that crosses racial
barriers.
"An Asian student at UCLA could read this book, a gay man could
read this," Gilbert says. "I think that this is a very important
concept, that passion is universal.
"I’m reading this book right now called ‘The Open Boat’ – it’s
an anthology of Asian American poetry," he continues, to prove his
point. "I don’t sit there … asking myself ‘oh, how do I identify
with … having parents in incarceration camps?’ I can’t put myself
there, but I can identify with the feeling of loneliness … I find
these universals and I’m moved."
Gilbert shies away from stratifying poetry in ethnic genres.
"I don’t even subscribe to ideas that there is black poetry, or
Asian poetry or Native American poetry – I think there is poetry,"
Gilbert says. "Ideally, in a hundred years we won’t need such a
thing (as ethnic genres)."
In the meantime, Gilbert focuses on making poetry more available
to those inside and outside of academia, from the juvenile halls,
where he teaches poetry, to the sociology classrooms of UCLA.
If readers can get the same inspiration from "Catch the Fire"
that he uncovered at the Anansi poetry reading so many years ago,
he has accomplished his main goal.
"What I hope this book does is that it shows that … poetry is
everything," Gilbert says, folding his hands over his stomach.
"That it’s rock, that it’s narrative, that it’s personal, it’s
funny, it’s painful, it’s exciting, it’s intriguing, it’s
confusing, that it’s all of these things, so it’s really like life.
It’s like poetry is a human being that has all these
complexities."