Page 39 - Provoke Magazine Vol3

nothing. I was living a life of necessity and nothing was ful- filling. I need to do this because I have to pay this bill. Fast forward, a guy would come from Dallas to throw poetry and comedy shows. I was there to see the comedians but the po- ets hit the stage and the form of expression was the most liberating thing I had ever been exposed to. It grabbed me, and I knew then, that was the thing I was wanting while in the shower. I was in awe the whole time. I asked the guy how can I do that. He told me just come back to the next show and sign up. Within that next month, I wrote 2 poems and had them memorized. I didn’t know there was such thing as reading from paper. My first introduction was watching seasoned poets, so I memorized and recited my two poems at the next event and I haven’t turned back. Now I don’t know how I made it before the introduction of poetry. It has be- come my lung. I wrote 2 poems every month. It became my primary form of communication. This interview is difficult but for me, poetry is easy.
How do you feel about rap music and do you feel it is still poetic? We associate poetry with content. We use to associate rap with content. We no longer do that. Poetry has several different components for it to be potent. Take the content and form it in a way that is attractive and then there is de- livery. That is what it needs to be successful. With rap, you can be protected by your beat. Do I think rap is poetry, not all of it. There is some out there but in large, every song isn’t
poetry. I am a hip-hop head I love it, but I see the difference in where it is and where it was. I ‘m personally a Wayne head, when it was popular to hate Wayne, I still loved him. I never fell into that.
What inspires your poetry? Life. I think poetry is a depic- tion of life. This conversation. Something I see someone else go through. What I deal with daily. I can’t narrow it down. Some people are emotional writers and they don’t write un- less something goes wrong. It evokes emotion and they are triggered to write. Me, I just need to be able to breathe. If I am breathing something is happening around me and I can write about it.
Obbie talks about how proud he is of his daughter and that the worst feeling in the world is to feel he had something valu- able but failed to capture. Every poem he has ever written is on the same Blackberry he started with. I thought that was truly impressive. He writes every day and not always a full poem. He uses what he calls seeds to come back to it so that a full expression can be written. Obbie has so much material avail- able online and has also passed down the writers passion to his daughter, Brooklyn who is working on her second publication.
Check out the video on Provoke US Magazine YouTube channel for the full effect.
Keep writing and performing, you owe to yourself and possibly
Andrea Pernell
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