The BreakBeat Poets: Translocal Placemaking in the Contemporary Midwestern Lyric

In the introduction to the Haymarket Books collection The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015), co-editor Kevin Coval asserts that the anthologized poems are not simply influenced by hip-hop; “these poems are hip-hop.”¹ The anthology’s focus on a genre, a cultural phenomenon, might seem like an odd fit for a special issue on placemaking. Its national frame might seem too expansive for the study of regionalism (though there is a history, established by James Shortridge, of conflating the Midwest with the nation).² But The BreakBeat Poets is also attentive to more precise versions of “the public cultural spaces of hip-hop praxis.”³ Coval exemplifies those spaces through two long-running events in Chicago, a DJ set and an open-mic night, which leads to a discussion of literary events and spaces across the country. At the core of both this book and the series it inaugurates is a relationship between hip-hop and place. The introduction poses it like this: “Hip-hop invited us to write. To do what Gwendolyn Brooks told thousands of young writers in Chicago and everywhere: tell the story that’s in front of your nose.”⁴