In his review of The Anthology of Rap (published in the February 2011 issue of Poetry), critic and poet Adam Kirsch maintains that rap, as an art form, is mired in its own adolescence and must overcome it if it ever expects to be taken as seriously as high-art literary poetry, to which is it increasingly (and, perhaps in his mind, too often) compared: “Reading rap as poetry, the way the Anthology invites us to do, makes [rap’s thematic] monotony especially stark, since reading is a more critical mode of engagement than listening.  If rap is mainly a genre for and Read more…