Book: "Hip Hop Speaks to Children"

NYT
November 8, 2008
Child’s Garden of Hip-Hop (for Mom to Love, Too)
By MOTOKO RICH

By now, hip-hop has become a mainstream part of the cultural landscape for children on shows like “Sesame Street,” “Yo Gabba Gabba!” on Nickelodeon and “Choo-Choo Soul” and “Handy Manny” on the Disney Channel. But when Rona Brinlee, a bookseller in Atlantic Beach, Fla., first heard about “Hip Hop Speaks to Children,” an illustrated anthology of poems and song lyrics, she worried that prospective buyers might shy away.

With previous volumes of poetry for children, she had noticed that the books were popular among grandparents looking for gifts. “I didn’t know if these same loving grandparents were going to say, ‘Wow, hip-hop,’ ” said Ms. Brinlee, who owns the BookMark, an independent bookstore. “Because some are going to make assumptions that this is violent, or they just don’t know anything about it.”

Ms. Brinlee quickly sold out of the initial six copies she stocked, and she has 10 more on order. “I’m thrilled to say that I was wrong,” she said.

“Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry With a Beat,” which features lyrics by Mos Def, Kanye West and Queen Latifah, as well as poems by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks, has become a modest hit, rising to No. 3 among picture books on The New York Times children’s best-Seller list last Sunday .

One of the selling points of the book, which was edited by the poet Nikki Giovanni, is that it comes with a CD of recordings by many of the poets and artists performing their work, including an excerpt from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Ham ’N’ Eggs” and “Dream Variations,” by Langston Hughes. The book and CD conclude with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, followed by a hip-hop interpretation of the speech by Ms. Giovanni and the performers Oni Lasana and Val Gray Ward.

“We wanted to connect some dots, but in a very light way,” said Ms. Giovanni, who contributed three poems to the book, as well as an introduction. “I wanted to find that hip-hop voice that allows children to enter it, because they are listening to it anyway.”

Ms. Giovanni said she also wanted to reach back to what she sees as the roots of hip-hop in older poems by mainly African-American poets, like Hughes or Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as to use the familiar vernacular of hip-hop to lure children to more established literary voices.

“I wanted them to see that there are, for lack of a better word, some train tracks with stops and stations along the way,” Ms. Giovanni said. “If you like Queen Latifah and ‘Ladies First,’ you’re going to love Langston Hughes and ‘Dream Boogie.’ ”

For that reason teachers and librarians have welcomed the book. “This is poetry in a form that really appeals to them,” Diane Chen, the librarian at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Nashville, said of her students. Ms. Chen said she played the CD regularly in the library and had ordered 15 copies of the book for the school.

While hip-hop has become ubiquitous on the radio and on television, its verbal component is increasingly embraced as a literary form. “There is a growing sensibility that is recognizing that hip-hop is where poetry lives today in so many ways,” said Adam Bradley, assistant professor of African-American literature at Claremont McKenna College in California, who is an editor of a coming anthology of rap lyrics for Yale University Press.

Professor Bradley added that for children, hip-hop was a natural way to learn the basics of poetry. “The kinds of word games that children naturally create really mirror hip-hop in its most basic forms,” he said.

Ms. Giovanni has been doing readings at bookstores and schools since the book came out early last month. Politics and Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, hosted an event for about 225 students. “Every school in the area was calling to see if they could come and bring their kids,” said Dara La Porte, manager of the store’s children’s and young adult department. “Schools are really looking for a way to interest kids in poetry. This is their poetry, and Nikki knows that.”

Barnes & Noble has selected the book as one it will feature on picture-book walls in the children’s departments of all its stores throughout November and December in the hopes that it will be a popular holiday gift. Sales could be difficult, though. As Leonard S. Riggio, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, recently warned in an internal memo, the chain was “bracing for a terrible holiday season” over all.

The book is the second foray into poetry for children by Sourcebooks, a small independent publisher in Chicago. Three years ago the company had a best seller with “Poetry Speaks to Children,” a collection of favorites by the likes of Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson and Ms. Giovanni, who contributed four poems. That volume also came with a CD and featured historic recordings by poets like Frost and Sandburg.

Dominique Raccah, who withdrew $17,000 from a 401(k) retirement account to found Sourcebooks 21 years ago, started out publishing books for the financial services industry. In 2001 the company moved into poetry with “Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work From Tennyson to Plath,” a book-and-three-CD package for adults.

Although Ms. Raccah said that each of the company’s previous books of poetry had sold more than 150,000 copies, she said the publisher had difficulty persuading booksellers to take on many copies of “Hip Hop Speaks to Children.”

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, the book has now sold about 3,000 copies. Ms. Raccah said that figure did not account for sales in some African-American bookstores or at group events. She added that there were now about 25,000 copies in bookstores.

Both the publisher and Ms. Giovanni are hopeful that the anthology will have quiet traction. For her part, Ms. Giovanni said she believed the book would help counteract persistent negative images of hip-hop.

“I just didn’t want to see it hijacked by half-naked girls and boys doing bling-bling,” she said. “I just wanted to try to help remind youngsters out there that this is a good expression.”