Dragonfly (page 28)

Here's the next poem from Dragonfly, also a music poem: a rap delivered by Sir Gawain of King Arthur's court, from the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This rap is in ballad stanzas, with internal rhyme in lines 1 and 3. Fun stuff! Gawain's Rap Yo! My name is Sir G, and I got the energy   To kill you a giant green dragon, Then rescue a girl down in the underworld   Before breakfast. I ain’t even bragging! It was Saturday night, and we were partying right   (Yeah, Christmas at King Arthur’s crib), When swoosh! through the door swept a great big horse.   And the rider . . . man, he was a trip! He was green, he was green! Ain’t kidding you, green!   Greener than the back of a dollar. Decked in emerald gauze like the Wizard of Oz,   On his emerald horse, he hollered, Now, who’s tough enough to risk all his Puffed   Wheaties on a teenouncy wager? Who’ll strike me first? Baby, do your worst!   Then let me hit you back a year later? I thought, what the heck? So, I took his green axe,   and twish! I decapped his head. But the jerk jumped right up and picked that thing up!   I’ll see you next year, chump, he said. Well, that’s the end of my song, but don’t get me wrong:   Next Yuletide, I hang at Hulk’s castle. I play with his wife and give him his life,   Then slide back here, Jack! No hassle. Page 28 "Gawain's Rap" was originally published in the Winter 1989 issue of The Wooster Review, published once upon a time by the College of Wooster in Ohio. It later appeared in my first poetry collection, Dragonfly (1994), as we can see here. In 2018, the poem was reprinted in Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Here is my author's note from that reprint. “Gawain’s Rap” by Vince Gotera: During the 1980s, in U.S. po-biz, we endured the Formalist Poetry Wars, as some of you may recall. Poets called New Formalists were reviving interest in writing poems in traditional forms, in rhyme and meter. These poets were attacked by members of the free verse establishment, who called them reactionary, ultra-conservative, Reaganites, and so on. Thank goodness those wars are now gone. In the MFA program I was in during the late ’80s, however, the poetry wars were definitely not gone. We fought often about formalism vs. free verse, and I tried to stay in the middle, bridging both. The battles were tiring, though, and seemingly personal. So one day, angry about the drubbing one of my formalist classmates had received in workshop, I thought, why don’t I write the most formalist poem I could muster? I settled on writing a rap, employing hymnal stanzas, with internal rhyme in lines 1 and 3, the longer 4-beat lines, and frequent soundplay: the alliteration of Christmas/crib, swoosh/swept, jerk/jumped; the assonance of my, I, Yuletide, wife, life, and slide in the final stanza; the rich consonance of emerald and hollered or decapped and picked. I even used some sly, enjambed rhyming, like girl down / underworld, where the rld rhyme is created by the ending rl of “girl” and the beginning d of “down.” Ditto in lines 7 and 17: door swept / horse and heck so / axe. In addition, to be even more subversive, I wanted to use a speaker who would be very distant from rap. Thus arose my DJ, Sir Gawain. I’d always loved Arthurian legend (as a kid, I had read and reread the Howard Pyle novel, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, with the glorious illustrations). I also snuck in some African American culture, for example, the word “teenouncy,” which is Southern slang for tiny, teeny. (Some of you may know that word from The Color Purple; I used Alice Walker’s spelling, though it is pronounced tee-NINE-see.) And of course, the opening “Yo!” and the hip-hop-style “Sir G” rapper name. Well, to make a long story short, my little revenge didn’t quite pan out; I thought my free-verse classmates would trash the poem and I could sit back and gloat, but no, they loved it. Nevertheless one of the proudest moments of my MFA apprenticeship. I’m happy “Gawain’s Rap” went on, after its 1989 appearance in The Wooster Review, to be noted in at least one Arthurian scholarly bibliography, and today the poem’s appearance here in ETTT enlarges and entrenches its Arthurian pedigree. By the way, if you’re wondering if the poem works as a rap, here’s a recording you might enjoy: https://youtu.be/qGxK24tC6Ig. Gotta love that Gawain, what a trickster. Paragon among medieval MCs, ne plus ultra. Word. As I mention in the last paragraph there, I created a video in 2014 performing the poem as a rap, with music. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat. DRAGONFLY FIRST CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST