Keith Matthew Thornton, Poet Laureate of the English Language

       The most significant poets in American history have been, with several exceptions, Black. Sure, there were the Beats, there was Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But the most financially successful poets, of any race or nationality, in fact, have been the white musicians and songwriters who appropriated African American song forms, notably the blues, jazz, and rock and roll. Although some of these composers were creating work of artistic and cultural relevance, in their own right, nonetheless they profited from the creation of Black America, just as our nation was founded on the blood and sweat of Black slaves.
       It was, in fact, a slave who was one of the earliest known Black American poets. Dave the Potter was both a skilled worker and literate; he etched in his clay pottery simple yet profound verses which told the tale of his life and times, and echo universal human truths and feelings. There have been successfully published and known Black creators of written verse as well, such as Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Amira Baraka…but the most influential contribution, in fact the single cultural product of any true value which America has put forth, is Black music.
       Much of this is simple, plaintive lyric verse such as the call and response of the blues. There were certainly many who incorporated more 'sophisticated' word-play and mainstream Americanisms, such as Chuck Berry, who ingeniously hit a wider (whiter) audience as the Father of Rock and Roll; but for the most part this music confined itself to the Dionysian pathos of lyric poetry. We could replace Archilochus with Leadbelly as the hero of Dionysian poetry in The Birth of Tragedy. Mainstream white music tended to be more Apollonian, focusing on appearance and technical display rather than true depth of feeling and universality.
       The parameters of rap music allow it to convey a greater depth of intellectual consideration than the passionate call-and-response of the blues. Sometimes this leads to shallow superficiality, and in fact materialism. But it also paved the way for the true synthesis of the 3rd element, which Nietzsche erroneously (and critically) identified as the 'Socratic' force of reason and reflection, corrupting the artistic perfection of Greek Tragedy, which perfectly blended the Apollonian and Dionysian art impulses into that 'mysterious union.' I would substitute the term 'Hermetic', to be more alchemical, and true to the Greek Deities. The ancients knew there to be three forces in the universe; in Ayurveda this light, mental energy is called Vatta.
       It would take a poet with a truly scientific insight into both the deeper pathos and the more superficial impressions of everyday life to fully merge these three forces in poetry and music, crowning the great artistic medium of the 20th Century with the most brilliant stanzas ever written. 
   
       Keith Matthew Thornton is the greatest poet in the history of the English language. His achievement goes beyond his technical mastery of the medium. Few rappers, or spoken-word artists, have such a variety of cadence and vocal inflection in their art. That dynamic delivery of phonetics is something the printed page is simply unable to capture. Keith's brilliance transcends his intellectual genius; of any artist I have ever heard Keith has the most completely independent voice…not just in terms of the subjects he chooses to rhyme about; it is truly that here one comes into contact with an individual human mind, free of, and yet at the same time making use of every artifice of expression in order to convey his mood, his thought-process, his sensation of relative humidity and every other variable of the human experience, beyond simple (yet powerful and evocative) emotional symbols which poetry has relied upon for centuries, at least.
       When Kool Keith is discussed or even mentioned, it is usually to talk about how 'strange,' 'weird' and 'crazy' he is. Certainly this is a great part of his appeal. Keith is creative and unique, an anomaly for sure, and he has done a great job of building (and living up to) this reputation himself. At the same time, it is only too easy for the press to marginalize his artistic output and cultural significance, particularly as his abilities and intelligence could be threatening to the controllers of mainstream white media. Just as Jimi Hendrix being cast as the 'Wild Man from Borneo' helped to reduce the anxiety he provoked among white (British) musicians who had grown comfortable in their appropriation of a Black American medium (the blues,) so the removal of Keith from the spotlight and focus on his eccentricity allowed for the expedient and rapid demise of mainstream rap music during the time of Bad Boy's over-budgeted MTV videos and the subsequent appropriation of superficial markers of hip-hop culture by mainstream white America. 
       Even without the issue of race, madness is characteristically used as a way to scapegoat tremendous, visionary artists with the potential to alter the mass consciousness, for better or worse. Another amazing poet of American popular culture, Jim Morrison was crippled and destroyed by his own role of insanity, in which he was inspired by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud's 'derangement of the senses in order to achieve the unknown.' In fact, Rimbaud is the only poet of the previous millennium comparable to Keith in lyrical acuity; and when it comes to this new age, just forget it. I don't think anyone writing today could even fill-in-the-blank on a Dr. Seuss book. Certainly 'Rockets on the Battlefield' or "No Awareness' are poems comparable to Rimbaud's absinthe-induced 'Season in Hell.'  When we confine ourselves to the English language, there is simply no parallel…"Shakespeare's gone, don't even think about him."
       Perhaps this very linguistic framework is the key to Keith's ability to convey perfectly all the psycho-sensory nuances of the human existence. In many ways, English is decidedly un-poetic. The lack of sonance and the prevalence of stiff, unwieldy suffixes characterize the Germanic languages in general, making them far less melodically viable than, say, the Latin-derived family. Yet somehow the frankness and candor of our language allow for a simplicity in verse comparable to ancient Greek lyric poetry.
       A posterity with any cultural integrity whatsoever will include the name Thornton with those of writers such as Homer and Aeschylus. It is high time for a credible, authentic press media to acknowledge Keith's role as master poet, as musical innovator, even philosopher. It is his ability to capture the tiniest detail that others might not notice, or take for granted, in any case not write about as the subject of 'grand poetry,' that sets him leagues above the rest. It is this cinematic quality, like LSD revealing the individual blades of grass where the average person would simply see a lawn that needs mowing, that propels his metres into mental activity, 'traveling at the speed of thought' and manifesting inside the rapt mind of the listener.
       Keith is this Hermes, this Thoth, who Morrison himself predicted (in an interview with PBS) would emerge in the post-rock era, after European and African music had been thoroughly fused in the creation of the true Apollonian/Dionysian synthesis of rock-and-roll, to speak and to sing over recorded media, taking what had emerged in Jamaica as 'toasting' over the instrumental recordings of reggae hits in the streets by popular sound-systems, and was then imported to the Bronx by Kook Herc as Hip-Hop, and making it a grand and epic art-form comparable in technical consideration as well as cultural import to the classics of the Ancient World. It is no accident that Keith himself grew up in the Bronx, amidst the birth of Hip-Hop, channelling the urban experience into the ultimate reflection of America's transient and manifold soul.

suggested reading:
Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"
Amiri Baraka, "Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music"