The Meltdown festival at The Royal Festival hall 2003

Thanks for dropping by. Click for a quick video - a poem I wrote for manchester. I have different kinds of downloads for you. On the right there's some poetry with music and on the left there are some spoken word downloads. See. Easy. It's all good. Maybe I should put the text up too - let me know if you think I should.  click

One of the worst thing that an artist can do when working with music is to duplicate what's gone before and then claim it as original.

The history of poets working with music and the industry is long and anything but a new thing.

Reggae was my introduction. Some great Exponents in reggae and poetry since the 1970s up until the present day are Jean Binta Breeze, Benjamin Zephania and Linton Kwesi Johnson. In jamaica Mutabaruka is another great poet who works with reggae music. Oku Onuora founded the term Dub Poetry. He performed at Bob Marleys Famous One Love Concert.

But poetry has accompanied all forms of music. Artists in pop culture are not distant cousins to poets. Jazz and poetry have long been associates and so too blues funk and soul and folk and rap. From Mary J Blige to Tupak Shakur; Floetry to Nick Cave; Robbie Williams to Kylie Minogue. The list is endless.  

But its greatest outspoken exponent of the last thirty to forty years has to have been Rap. The late Langston Hughes the great American poet of the Harlem Renaissance had many his of works read to music.At the time of his death in 1967 a whole new form of poetry and music arrived -The Last Poets. They performed in that same year at Marcus Garvey Park in New York preceding a speech by a young and vibrant Malcolm X. The beginnings of a new form of poetry was being born here and in the bronx- rap. 

I traveled a few years ago to New York and made a BBC radio four documentary about the last poets. The radical last Poets influenced and encouraged another young poet. Gil Scott Heron took poetry and music to another level. And so The New Beats established themselves on the frontier of American Culture long after the other beat poets had OD' d.

The Late Tupac Shakur, Americas most famous and revered rap artist, had his first book of poetry published posthumously. It's called The Rose That Grew Through Concrete and features an introduction by celebrated poet Nikki Giovanni.

So far I've gone back as far as the beginning of the twentieth century which was the birth of langston Hughes - up until the present day - The Rose that grow from concrete. I know I have chosen very few examples but their great ones all the same.