I ain't seen no poems stop a 38," the poet Haki Madhubuti wrote more than 20 years ago, "i ain't seen no stanzas break a honkie's head/i ain't seen no metaphors stop a tank/i ain't seen no words kill." Back then he was called Don L. Lee, and he was part of the black-arts movement that marched alongside the black-power revolution and whose energy, anger, joy and strength – though not necessarily politics, ethics or aesthetics – have been reborn in the hip-hop generation. In the earlier movement, music and poetry flowed from the jails, universities and streets. As John Coltrane, James Brown, Miles Davis and Sly Stone translated the vibe into music, poets like Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni made words that could breathe, fly, kill.

Now the poets who grew up listening to Rakim and Run-D.M.C., as well as reading poems like Sanchez's "Blk Rhetoric" – "who's gonna make all/this beautiful blk rhetoric/mean something" – have begun to emerge from the cafes, lofts and cribs where they've been brewing a more incendiary form of poetry, geared toward performance and often informed by hip-hop's aggressive politics. Where previous generations of poets established themselves with books and readings, the new one will with CDs, tours and MTV. Its members aren't selling out, just updating their media to fit their times.

The first of the new style to take his act to disc is Reg. E. Gaines, but there's a lot more flavor where he came from. A short list: Ninety-9, Beans, High Priest, Jasiri, J-Me and Shä-Key, all from New York, and Major Jackson from Philadelphia. The 17 cuts on Gaines' album, Please Don't Take My Air Jordans, are less songs than essays introducing ideologies, pathologies and characters from the spectrum of black consciousness. All Gaines' tales speak about the worthlessness of black lives. From the black community's ignorance of Jimi Hendrix during his life to a rapist's-eye view of a rape to the reflections and memories of a once-abused, now-homeless and crack-addicted man to black maids – Gaines calls attention to places inside the people no one cares about. Yet instead of preaching, Gaines' first-person poems indelibly link him to his characters. If they are worthless and forgotten, so is he and, by connection, we are, too.

The album's spectacular title cut is a step inside the mind of a young brother for whom it's crucial to look good, 'cuz "when I'm wearing fresh gear, I don't have to hide." Gaines' protagonist can't steal the shoes he needs from the mall, so he kills for them: After shooting, snatching and dashing – "while laying there dying, all he could say/Was 'Uh-uh, please, man, don't take my Air Jordans away'/You'd think he'd be worried 'bout staying alive" – the young brother walks into school wearing fresh Jordans. Gaines adds two postscripts: the main character's – "now I needs a new jacket to wear" – and a lonely police dispatcher calling for help for the other black male who has been left for dead. "Need someone to respond," he repeats over and over. No one does.

The music for Jordans is secondary to Gaines' leaps into the realities of black life and ideology, which hip-hop often eschews for 40 hooks and a bandwagon. The music might be present so the album won't be banished to Spoken-Word Hell, but you know Gaines was never recording for the 200- to 500-per-minute revolutions of a CD: just one.

As for this generation, hip-hop poetry still can't overcome its medium. Brilliant art – though it may enrage, enlighten and empower – will never, on its own, set us free. Huey Newton was murdered over cocaine; professor-activist Angela Davis was caricatured as a cleavage-happy diva by a self-dismissing fashion magazine; and George Jackson's classic book, Soledad Brother, has gone out of print. And the most precise, insightful and elegant words in the imagination will not make one difference. Listen to the poets, yes, but also keep the sentiment at the end of Madhubuti's poem close to heart: "& until my similes can protect me from a night stick/i guess i'll keep my razor/& buy me some more bullets." (RS 684)

TOURE