J. Ivy

After watching dozens of Youtube videos of Def Jam poets, I felt really prepared for what J. Ivy was going to do when he got on stage. I was wrong. From the second row, nothing could have prepared me for the passion, lyrics, and rhythm that J. Ivy manipulated and mastered on stage.

The craft was masterful. J. Ivy used words like “Him” and “Hymn” to not only sync a hefty, seemingly unconventional but nonetheless powerful rhyme while also delivering a powerful message about his dad. I’ve watched Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye West, and others rap and J. Ivy uses similar methods they do to drop rhymes. These include a diversity of methods such as internal rhyme, ABAB, but the most powerful were slant rhymes. I’ve seen other Slam poets do this to perfection. The “Slam” slant rhyme allows a well-educated poet such as J. Ivy talk in street slang. This drives home the message of connecting with his home roots and humble beginnings.

The story made for the most powerful part of the whole routine. J. Ivy did not hesitate to jump right into rhyme by introducing himself as a kid from “ChiRAQ”, connecting his experience of war to the War on Terrorism in Iraq. Following this introduction which covered his broad array of sports and performance background, J. Ivy told us of the conditions of Chicago and the difficulty of young blacks escaping tough times. Luckily for him, he said, his voice gave him a chance to perform a poem on stage and one after another in college, he performed his heart out. Funny poems filtered his performance with an extremely comedic poem about a blind date that ended with J. Ivy being mugged in Jackson Park by his blind date and her boyfriend. A poem about “look up when you get down”, was his inspiration and big break onto records with names like Jay-Z and Kanye West. J. Ivy concluded his performance by performing “Dear Father”, which is my personal favorite. This praise poem praises the dirty, the ugly, the abandonment, the drugs, the family fights, the brutality, and the love of his father. J. Ivy closed his eyes and said, “Father, when I get to heaven, we going to kick back … and watch the Bear’s game.”

I wrote a poem about my brother yesterday about a terrible dream I had in which he killed himself because of depression. After watching J. Ivy, I have new inspiration and have been working on it all night. When I talked to him after the show and told him about my love of Def Poetry, he said to keep working and keep rhyming, cause a “big break is one lyric away.”

I have come away from this experience with a renewed respect for the work that Def Jam poets do. Race, poverty, depression, and floods of other issues inspire these artists, emotions that I may never truly understand due to my white, suburban background. Yet, I feel apart of them when J. Ivy drops his rhymes and delivers a powerful message of inspiration, “causing actions by [his] verbs.”