The Black Non-Knight

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah is the United Kingdom's "poet of the people," according to Globe and Mail correspondent Mike Doherty. Apparently his very public refusal of a British knighthood made him anathema to the right, the same way his rap-styled poetry has been rubbing the powers that be the wrong way for years, and that suits him just fine:

"I was offered a professorship at Oxford University and a fellow[ship] at Cambridge, in the middle of the eighties. One don said then, 'You can't deny what Benjamin Zephaniah has done for poetry in this country. He's turned a new generation on to poetry; he's got people going out and listening to poetry. We have to honour it in some way. But we should do it in a traditional British way, when he's dead.' "