Def Poets society meets SAG

I was watching Def Poetry Jams on HBO the other day. It’s the show put on by Russell Simmons and the famous rapper Mos Def. Basically, amateur and professional poets go up on stage and recite their own verses or verses of other poets. It’s quite an interesting show. The stage becomes a political forum, a platform for morality, thought, introspection, and interrogation. There are comedic poems and serious poems. There are poems about personal history and yet poems about the political climate. I love the show and I always wondered what it would be like if the idea went to the silver screen. It wouldn’t just be a recording of the show. I would take the lines of poetry and transform them into the script. Or, better yet, the poems would be the dialogue. I don’t quite know the setting or the plot, but the characters would converse in poetic verse. The meter would change; the rhyme scheme would differ, denoting the type of character. This new script style would focus the attention almost solely on what was being said by the characters. The shots wouldn’t really matter, except to embellish the messages presented in the poems. The plot would become relevant through the intensity of the readings and the emotion felt via the metrics and imagery. I just took a page from my AP English class and put in my notebook for the film class. I also just integrated two types of knowledge, thus taking a page from my philosophy class. I just found out I’m rambling so I’m going to go try to write about a real film. See y’all soon.