David Bradford : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Renee Gladman’s Calamities, Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds, Rachel Blau Duplessis’s various Drafts, Fred Moten’s “On Freedom,” Andrea Actis’s “Volta: One poem,” Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Anne Boyer’s “Questions for Poets”—I feel like exposing our reading loops is both irresistible and embarrassing, but here we are anyway.

To give a straight answer I’ve got to bend the question a bit because I’m most likely to return to hip hop. When I’m spent, sometimes I think 2Chainz’s “FREEBASE”—those “I came from nothing” hoots get me every time, but also: 

Work hard play hard work hard again (Freebase)
My bankroll had twins can you comprehend (Freebase)

To make sense of this thing we do, I like to be reminded of the whole maniacal theatre of confidence and hustle and survival that can go into it. Often Princess Nokia’s 1992 Deluxe gives me that too, but with a different kind of situatedness than the above—I’m thinking of “G.O.A.T.”, that “eatin’ off the land” serious joke seriously landed. I go to Jay Rock’s “WIN” for the cynical but critical mass version of the same—you know if you know it.

But lately, it’s been JID’s DiCaprio 2. JID’s a poet’s poet, an MC’s MC, an ATLien talking that shit. I’m reminded of Simone White wondering why she’s so stuck on hip hop and the moments when she may have stopped caring. This whole album’s one of those moments and a complete classic to me, but “Despacito Too” took me forever to get into. Now, though, it breaks me right into something insular but big—a chip on the shoulder, that paranoid player one, forever fresh and on refresh—and it reminds, me, on some level, poets are always playing, playing hard, even darkly:

I can be a dream, yeah, or I can be a nightmare
Born on Halloween night, it seems like a light year
Double my sprite, hey my guy do you got a light, yeah
Squash them pea, plenty lion and many bison, huh
Seen some, seen one, but it's not many like 'em
When I fry or when I die, bury me with many mics, yeah

If you can fully work out the rhythm he so fully works out here, you’re doing alright. Give it a listen. This whole poem thing is a dramatic, unreasonable confidence game we’re playing with ourselves. That good-good rap reminds me to big it up.