Poetry is clearly in motion right now. A whole set of new releases and projects in early 2023 feature writing and vocal delivery that is distinctly literary in nature.

Prime among them is Learn To Swim, the debut solo mixtape from the Nigerian-British artiste Joshua Idehen.

Idehen has been around the block over the past decade-plus, lending his philosophical and slice of life musings to a huge range of electronic, jazz and hip-hop.

He broke through with his observational narratives of London’s regions and public transport links on 2011’s Routes with the Anglo-South African post-dubstep electronica duo LV, and probably his highest profile work to date has been his stentorian historical-political polemic for Shabaka Hutchings’s super group, Sons Of Kemet.

Learn To Swim though, is personal. It’s about growing up, finding your way in the world, the social support that individuals need but can’t always find or even know how to look for.

It’s predominantly set to dance beats by Swedish producer Ludvig Parment, with added choral harmonies and instrumentation from Idehen’s friends. The sound is kind of pop-dance a lot of the time, but the sense is less that this is trying to be populist, than that it’s the story of a life unfolding through modern life in shops, bars and clubs where these grooves are omnipresent.

Songs like “Weak Become Heroes” and “Blinded By The Lights” by Mike Skinner aka The Streets are obvious touchstones, but Idehen’s strength of personality makes it clear these are his stories, a particular life unfolding in a whole new decade.

Kara Jackson’s Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? is less obviously a poetry record, in that it’s all sung – where Idehen mixes singing, rapping and recitation.

But make no mistake, Chicagoan singer-songwriter Jackson is a poet too. Indeed, she served as the third Youth Poet Laureate of the US in 2019, and has published her writing widely. So this album, though it’s in a folk-blues idiom, is absolutely shot through with grade-A phrase-making and toothsome terminology.

It feels deep rooted in the tangles of American vernacular, but – just as the music is given digital sheen and shimmer – completely alive to the modern world. It’s a masterful album, with consistent lightness of touch belying heavyweight emotional and intellectual power. It’ll leave you wondering what you’ve just heard.

There’s more, too. Twenty-one-year-old Lola Young has her second album due at the end of May.

The singles including the huge “Don’t Hate Me” suggest her mixture of poetry and Adele-like soul-pop is rawer than ever – her disarming honesty flipping the demands of those who stereotype or judge her, judo style, in a way a little like Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) has explosively succeeded with lately.

And Young’s fellow South Londoner Kae Tempest, as well as an EP for Record Store Day, has their fifth volume of poetry out this month.

Looking into June, the remarkable aja monet's debut album when the poems do what they do mixes surrealism and classic spiritual jazz and blues poetic styles to talk about history, resilience and love.

In a time when pop culture poetry is all too often associated with glib bank adverts and soppy institutionalised versions of youth culture, these artistes are here to remind you that it’s much more than that.

This is why we’ve compiled this new playlist.

Over more than two hours we’ve put the aforementioned poet/musicians alongside other less-known current names, and some precursors going back through the decades.

You don’t need to listen to and study every word, because this is music as much as it is anything else: a big part of the pleasure of this is hearing the collage of voices, styles and lives ebbing and flowing.

The power of poetic language isn’t just for school classrooms. It can be hugely pleasurable in the here and now.

Elevate the way you listen to poetry with KEF

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Cover Credit: jjying/Unsplash

Writer | Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing, covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops', covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor / MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at tinyletter.com/joemuggs.