Our “Speaking of” series spotlights local creatives sharing their inspiration, influences and experiences. In our continued efforts to expand the series, today we add “Speaking of Poetry” to our collection.
In this segment, Atlanta’s most prolific wordsmiths discuss the art of evoking emotions with words.
For the first edition of “Speaking of Poetry,” we feature poet Adan Bean. Bean describes his poetry as rhyming poetry as he comes out of a music background of MCing and rapping. “It’s descriptive, there’s imagery, there’s an emotional context to it, but ultimately it’s going to have rhyming… It’s definitely not poetry that is simply meant to be read, but it’s an audio. It’s meant to be heard,” says Bean.
Once he started to write raps as a child, he realized, “Oh, I’m actually practicing a form of poetry.” He then started drawing the connections between artists like Nas, Jay Z and Mos Def to poets like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.
In this segment, Bean shares the opening of his poem “The Spiral.” “It’s a poem that I wrote in dedication to my late father,” Bean said. “It kind of plays on both ideas around our love of football, so throwing a ‘spiral pass’ and then also the idea of spiraling in grief.” Here is the excerpt he shared:
