In 1991, I walked into the Small Press Traffic Bookstore on 24th Street in San Francisco, and John McNally suggested I pick up a copy of Big Bank Take Little Bank, the debut book of Paul Beatty, a New York poet. I took it down from the shelf, read one poem, “I Luv to Singa,” and took it right to the register.
The poem’s central image is a junky who is metaphorically the only Black statue in the city’s parks. At once, the poem takes on institutional racism, drug addiction, homelessness and the way we accept the shortcomings of the city life in our presence. It’s about a lot of stuff. I’ve read it 100 times and I might be missing something. But the language and the way he uses it is all his own.
Beatty only wrote two books of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce, combined, less than 200 pages but they are all-timers. I think he’s one of the best American poets. Ever. But definitely, one of the best of the ‘90s. He reminds me a bit of Etheridge Knight or Michelle T. Clinton, in the way that their bodies of work are small, page-wise, but they’re all bangers. Plenty of well-known poets write one or two good books, then a bunch of others that we never needed to see. Hey, I get it, it’s a tricky art form, and sometimes you only have two books in you, and maybe you should leave it at that. But I also wanted another poetry book from him every two or three years.
What we got instead are four novels and an anthology of Black humor. Hokum: An Anthology of African American Humor is the most underrated comedy book I know of—it’s a crazy phone-book-sized tome that covers everything from the obvious standup comedians to other infamous figures like H. Rap Brown. The White Boy Shuffle is on my list of the best American novels of the ‘90s. There’s also Tuff, Slumberland, and The Sellout, which I enjoyed, but nothing intrigued me like the poems did.
With his poems, I reread them trying to figure out how he uses language. He rhymes, but is not bound by a scheme’s structure; he can break into free verse whenever he wants. I read them out loud trying to figure out the intended rhythms, as sometimes they make more sense off the tongue than in the mind. His references range wider than any other poet I know, and I’m sure that I’m missing a lot of them—as I’ve reread the work, I see a word or a phrase I didn’t catch before—by the age of 30, he had accumulated a vast storage of sounds, literary samples, and allusions. Here’s the fun part though: you don’t need to get them to understand the work, but if you do, it’s another layer of understanding. It’s like his poems are full of secret doors and passageways, tiger-trap pits of references.
But Who Is Paul Beatty?
Beatty, as far as I can tell, is not on social media at all. I don’t know how to tell you how odd this is—every publisher I’ve worked with has demanded an active online presence, usually in some app I don’t want to use. One year it was LiveJournal, another MySpace, on and on until now, they want to know your TikTok strategy for promoting your work. I don’t remember seeing him on any iteration of social media at all. The closest he gets to a public profile is his section at The Lyceum Agency, who reps him for speaking engagements.
Beatty is listed as the writing faculty in Columbia, so I assume he lives in New York City. But other than that, there’s little out there about his personal life. He does promote his work, and tidbits will come out, but all those facts are from the time of publication of The Sellout, so I have no idea if it’s still accurate. This level of privacy in this era is baffling and to be admired. I’ll put it up there with Bill Murray’s landline and Janeane Garofalo’s lack of an email address. I don’t know how y’all do it, but kudos.
The Legacy
Throughout the ‘90s and with diminishing participation thereafter, I was involved in the poetry slam scene with, at first, hopeful enthusiasm, and, later, professional reluctance. What started as a showcase of various styles evolved into a homogenous sing-songy trope of wavy hand movements and the same triumphant poem over and over. I swear to you, when that whole scene was new, it was a diverse mix of demographics and aesthetics, and became neither, like pouring 99 colors of paint into one vat and stirring until it was one boring, predictable pigment.
The number one ripped-off/plagiarized poet was definitely Gil Scott-Heron, but Paul Beatty’s poems were also cannibalized like a stripped stolen car. “A Three Point Shot from Andromeda” was a popular choice—all of the sudden there were outer space metaphors in all the poems—hey, I know he doesn’t own planet imagery, but it became an immediate trend. And I had to assume that most of the kids I heard were swiping lines from New York poets who were copying Beatty’s style. By the late ‘90s, poets made single-mike recordings and burned CDs with Kinko’s covers and sold them to you at a 1000% markup…it was really easy to go to a slam and buy an out-of-towner’s CD and disassemble it for parts.
Frankly, I’m still trying to figure this stuff out. When I first read it, I felt like Eric Clapton wandering in to the Winterland and hearing Hendrix cover “Sunshine of Your Love,” and wanting to quit. Then I saw that there was an outer boundary of poetics I hadn’t approached, that I had a lot of room to grow. That was over 30 years ago, and I’m not there yet.
If you’re writing poems, you should either quit or get better. The world has enough of the same poems in it. We all know your grandmother’s hands told a story about how hard she worked. But if you can get to a new place, thank you. That should be your goal—what hasn’t been done yet? Beatty went places no one had been poetically, then walked away, made a pivot, as they say now, and turned to novels and now teaching. As I said before, I would love to have more of his poems, but am eternally grateful for what he left us.