Jay-Z and Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare and Big Daddy Kane, Ralph Ellison and Kanye West. On Thursday night, the names mixed together indiscriminately.

Adam Bradley, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado-Boulder, delivered the message that rap is pounding on the door of the literary establishment as part of what he called a “State of the Union of Hip Hop 2011.” He was joined in Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union by a panel of guest speakers that included University faculty and staff as he discussed rap, writing a book with Common and the structure of hip-hop.

Bradley, the author of “The Anthology of Rap” and co-author of Common’s memoir, “One Day It’ll All Make Sense”, presented his view that traditional poetry could no longer afford to ignore rap.

And rap and hip-hop, he said, are not synonymous.

“KRS-One said it best,” Bradley said. “Rap is something that you do, and hip-hop is something that you live.”

Bradley broke down the parts of hip-hop for the audience which included disc jockeying, emceeing and grafitti. Rap, he said, was composed of three parts: rhythm, rhyme and wordplay. Rap is an extension of the classical rhetorical tradition, he said, of poetic storytelling.

The arguments for why rap is not poetry, according to Bradley, depend on notions that rap is profane and trapped in a suspended adolescence. Also, it is music.

But just as Homer told stories through song, Bradley said, so does Jay-Z. For thousands of years, poetry and and music went hand in hand. He questioned why they could not go together again, even if traditional poetry has gone a different direction. As to profanity, Bradley said rap reflected the world that real people live in.

Some people are reluctant to include rap in the canon of literature, Bradley said, because intellectual elites cannot control it. Rap exists outside of the systems of patronage that have traditionally supported the fine arts.

“The poetry of hip-hop is a political statement,” he said. “The people making rap don’t necessarily look like those that judge poetry.”

Bradley also pointed to a declining interest in literary poems among the general public.

“Each one of you in this room knows someone, somewhere, who is writing a bad poem,” he said.

With more people than ever before writing poems and fewer reading them, he said, rap is at least one way that people are exposed to poetry.

John Dillingham, a freshman from Houston, said he appreciated the University providing a forum for something that students really like. The message he took away from the lecture, he said, was “keep being active in what you feel passionate about.”

Kenton Rambsy, a graduate student in English, was on the panel Thursday and is active in the study of hip-hop and literature. He works with the Project on the History of Black Writing, an archival project that began in 1983 at the University of Mississippi. Initially devoted to collecting and preserving novels written by black people, the project has expanded to study black music, art and the politics of protest.

Rambsy and other bloggers on the project’s website hope to legitimize rap music and make it a subject for serious literary criticism.

“Even though this music is good to listen to in the clubs, we also want to appreciate the artistry of it,” he said.

— Edited by Laura Nightengale