Hi Jeff,
I used to live in Dallas, around 1995, and that's where I tried to revive dreams of a poetic community which I'd missed since I left University in Nigeria in '88. The closest thing I found was a group of poets who met weekly at the Milam Art gallery. After I'd read people would come up to me and say "man I didn't know anyone still tries to write like T.S. Eliot!" In other words, they seemed to tolerate me as an atavistic curiosity. It was decent company, mostly slam poets and people clinging on the the Beat movement with their bleeding fingernails. I did eventually tire of it a bit, and wend back to my solitary writing habit. Anyway, if you do succeed I'd be thrilled to hear it.
I must also take great issue with your saying that clever rap lyrics are a rare thing. There is plenty of hip-hop of astonishing lyrical virtuosity out there, though most of it is not on the Clear-Channel-run airwaves. I could quote long passages from Talib Kweli, Lyrics Born, Jean Grae, Mos Def, Pharoahe Monch, Black Thought, Lauryn Hill, The Genius, Canibus, Posdnous, Ghostface Killah, and even MF Doom which exhibit half the tropes laid out in any Elizabethan prosodic manual. And that's just in English. When you talk the likes of MC Solaar and Passi from France, Specializtz from Germany, Born Here from Palestine, MC Paul Barman (sorta) from Israel... I'll pluck one example out of hundreds of the global power of eloquent rap lyrics, if you speak French just give a listen to El Général's "Rais" which sparked the Tunisian revolution and thus the Arab Spring.
I've had formalist poets tell me how impressed they are with Eminem, though I usually have to respond that he doesn't even make my top 25 hip-hop lyricists.
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