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be the first rap ever released, and you hear echoes of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” given subversive new lyrics:
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    Roll, roll, roll your joint
Twist it at the ends
You light it up, you take a puff
And then you pass it to your friends.
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    Or listen to Run-DMC’s alliterative take on Peter Piper:
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    Peter Piper picked peppers,
But Run rock rhymes.
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    Nursery rhymes have long been a source of inspiration for poets of all kinds. Robert Frost once described the childhood source of poetic rhythm like this: “You may not realize it,” he writes, “but it is the way you have all come thus far from the days of your Godmother Goose through books and nature, gathering bits and scraps of real magic that however flowery still clung to you like burrs thrown on your clothes in
holiday foolery. You don’t have to worry about clinging to such trophies. They will cling to you.” Poetic rhythms cling to us from our earliest childhood memories, and like magic we can tap into these formative lyrical experiences throughout our lifetimes. That rap understands this lyrical magic so well helps explain its longevity.
    While all poetry has its roots in our childhood love of rhyme, this relation is often most visible at the birth of a new poetic movement. This was certainly the case with hip hop, which seemed in its early years to revel in its naughty sendups of childhood verse that celebrated the familiar rhythms of common verse. As the years went by and rap developed a poetic heritage all its own, the general trend moved away from the rudimentary roots of rap’s early rhythms and rhymes to a more nuanced poetics. And yet rather than look down upon those early rhymes as rudimentary or restrictive, we might remember them as the necessary and revolutionary poetic acts that they were: bending the most rigid forms of an inherited tradition to a new purpose—new voices, new sounds, new ways of describing the world and the people in it.
    When tracing rap’s poetic roots, one is naturally drawn to the oral tradition. Oral poetry, from the lyric to the epic, has deep roots in most every continent, certainly in West Africa where the poet functioned as much as a musician as a wordsmith, weaving narrative verse around patterns of call-and-response with an active audience. For many rappers and scholars, rap’s connection to African poetic practice, charged as it is with symbolic meaning, is the most important progenitor to the poetics of contemporary rap. KRS-One makes the connection between rappers and griots, as much for their
function within the community as for their aesthetic methods. This remains an essential bond, one with vital importance for the black diasporic tradition.
    As a practical matter of poetics, however, rap is most directly connected to the Western poetic tradition of the ballad and other metrical forms. To say that rap takes its form from Western sources is not, however, to whitewash its identity. Since its birth, rap has been a defiantly black form. Just as the early jazz musicians commandeered European marching band instruments like the saxophone and the trumpet and bent their sounds to fit the demands of a new expression, so, too, have African-American rap artists transformed the very poetic forms they’ve inherited. This is no less a creative act than if they had conceived the forms sui generis; indeed, it is the hallmark of a typically American, and specifically black American cultural practice, the vernacular process. Rap is a vernacular art, which is to say that it is born out of the creative combination of the inherited and the invented, the borrowed and the made.
    One can hear in rap the Anglo-Saxon tradition of accentual or strong-stress meter in which each line contains the same number of natural speech stresses. The most common iteration includes four stressed syllables per line with each line divided in half by a medial caesura, or an extended pause.