[...] it's quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today. 'Real' (viz. academic) U.S. poetry, a world no less insular than rap, no less strange or stringent about vocab, manner, and the contexts it works off, has today become so inbred and (against its professed wishes) inaccessible that it just doesn't get to share its creative products with more than a couple thousand fanatical, sandal-shod readers, doesn't get to move or inform more than a fraction of that readership (most of the moved being poets themselves), doesn't generate revenue for much of anyone save the universities to whom the best Ph.D. poets rent their names and time ... and especially does not inspire a whole culture's youth to try to follow in its Connecticut-catalogue brogan's prints. Because of rap's meteoric rise, though, you've got poor kids, tough kids, 'underachievers,' a 'lost gener-ation' . . . more young people—ostensibly forever turned off 'language' by TV, video games, and low U.S.D.E. budgets—more of these kids hunched over notebooks on their own time, trying to put words together in striking and creative ways, than the U.SA. has probably ever had at one time. [...]