They tell the story through the eyes of a hip-hop poet, setting the production in an urban milieu.

Angela, an aspiring hip-hop poet, physically attacks a snooty classmate and is suspended from school.

She is a hip-hop poet, and works in Canadian broadcasting.

One of the hottest young hip-hop poets these days is Suheir Hammad, 29, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, and reared in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

These young hip-hop poets seize us with rhythm and passion - the individual voice meeting the group beat.

New York is represented by artists like La Bruja (the Witch), a hip-hop poet from the Bronx.

WHITEBOYS The gifted performance artist and master of urban dialects Danny Hoch stars as a white hip-hop poet from Iowa who moves to Chicago hoping to write gangsta rap hits like his black idols.

He finds that fellowship among the painters at Alibi as well as the hip-hop poets at Sol or Lucien Blue.

Among artists most respected by other hip-hop poets and performers, Ms. Jones has the clearest sense of distance; she can satirize the phenomenon in ways that open it up for people who think there is something mysterious about it.

By that standard, today's scattered scene of underground hip-hop poets, punk rabble-rousers and folk-rock raconteurs just can't get it together, behind either one cause or one artistic approach or even one band.