Young Americans

This month I'm hosting two benefit readings. Proceeds go to Reunion Sportive d'Haiti, an organization whose mission is to provide "youth recreational sport activities, education and youth leadership development programs in impoverished communities in Haiti. Working with NOAH, we organize youth annual soccer tournaments and essay competitions in Port-Salut, Haiti, for the children affected by the 2010 earthquake. We have collaborated with Foundation Digicel to build an elementary school in the village of Roche-Jabouin, so that children no longer have to walk three hours to receive a basic education. We believe in working side-by-side with local communities to reduce the effects of poverty, to promote rural economic development, to assist communities in education projects, and to stop the spread of the cholera epidemic by providing clean water and sanitation."

Our cause is obviously a good one, which has drawn the participation of a number of poets I had expected to participate, along with a number I had not. Among this second group are children, specifically the two young sons of a married couple of poets who took part in a benefit on Long Island, for which poets were asked to show up with broadsides of their poems, which they would sell at one dollar each. All proceeds would go to RS Haiti, which they did. Toward the end of the reading, the couple asked whether or not their elder son could step up to the Mic at the Sip This Cafe' in Valley Stream. He read a terrific little poem that he had apparently written a couple of years earlier, after which we all gathered around the table to shop for broadsides and to talk.

In the course of our conversation it came out that the two boys were Presidential trivia whizzes, who had appeared on a number of national political television programs. So here were two prodigies in both American politics and poetry, getting to know their country's landscape and learning to write a kind of plain-spoken poetry of which W. C. Williams would approve. Meeting them made me wonder about how we introduce children to poetry, and about the nature of children's poetry programs across the country. Surely, not every child involved with poetry will have two poet parents who take him or her to adult readings and simultaneously encourage the kind of scholarship that can nourish future work.

What are we teaching kids about and through poetry? What opportunities are we creating for them to encounter poetry? What kinds of opportunities do we think we're creating? Are we creating them just to enrich children's lives or to perpetuate the poetic species, as it were? Are we consciously developing the future voices of American verse?

It follows to ask also what sort of opportunities we create for other population groups limited by age or access. And it is certain that these questions will take this project in a few unexpected directions.

Group Solidarity

Last night I attended a book launch/reading for an Italian American poet and essayist whose career spans four decades. The evening was a celebration of this poet's life and career and struggle, including her struggle for acceptance among "mainstream" American writers. At one point, she told a story of how two writers prominent in PEN/American Center had publicly dismissed Italian American writers as a viable group.

I call this poet an Italian American poet because she identifies as such. Many of us "ethnic" writers have done this at different points in our careers, though not always. Many of us have found strength and support in gatherings of ethnic writers associations, such as the Italian American Writers Association. Last night many of the stalwarts of that association, along with other Italian American poets, gathered in one room, to read and comment on work by one of their own. Many of these writers had shared various stages and pages over the past twenty or so years. Many have careers because they were able to share these spaces with other Italian American writers, who promoted their work by introducing it to others inside and outside of the Italian American circle.

If a particular group of poets do not share a common ethnicity, they may share a gender, sexual preference, culture, belief system or home turf. Many poets may identify with several groups at once. (It was good to see at least one Greek-American writer and one Anglo-American "New York" writer in the room.) The ability to identify with a group may facilitate poets' crossing into various groups' poetic territories, producing and performing work in veins these groups, even groups to which they do not belong, have mined. We might say then that identity group readings are the backbone of American poetry scenes.  

Poetry Among Pros

A few days ago I attended a reading by two highly respected (among writer types) poets, at a cafe' in Brooklyn. Some of the faces I knew from their book covers or Facebook presence; some I had met in passing at other events; some I had known years before, as colleagues and co-readers, but had not seen for a long time. The hosts, also established poets, were friends. Very few of the thirty-odd people there were not accomplished, widely published poets.

This gathering represents one stratum of the poetry scene, at least on a night like this one. These are the people on the scene who live and derive a living from it: those who have taken years to study and master their craft, those who have worked hard at getting their work together and out, those who have sought and found jobs teaching creative writing at universities and in workshops around the country, those who talk to each other about the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference the way that families talk about their annual reunions. All were gathered to listen. Only a few read in the open mic afterwards, and then only a poem each. And all had come to hear one of the headliners sing with his band (He was actually very good).

Do these people set the standard for dedication to poetry? Are they those whom others on many scenes across the nation aspire to be? Is this the life?

The Book and the Film

I am beginning to understand that Virtue at the Coffeehouse will have to be a film as well as a written text. There's just no way around it. I anticipate meeting a lot of compelling figures as I travel from town to town in search of poets, their work, and their stories. I have $3000 in grant money now, and should I be lucky enough to win this year's Scholar on Campus award from my school, New York City College of Technology, I would have another $3000. This money would pay for a lot of my travel. How to film?, then, would be the question.

Well, I know a few things. I have a camcorder. I have a video phone. I have an old Mac. I have editing software. With a little money from Kickstarter, I could add to the basic equipment, learn a little more about editing, and pull it off. I'm not sure where Virtue could or would ultimately show, but I also know this is why festivals exist. 

To Chasar and Beyond

I've started reading Mike Chasar's Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in America, an American studies take on the consumption of poetry in various commercial forms across the early and mid-twentieth century. So I'm bridging the gap in my knowledge between traditional critical history of American poetry, like Parini's and Millier's Columbia History of American Poetry, and volumes like Glazner's Poetry Slam, Eleveld's and Smith's The Spoken Word Revolution, Algarin's and Holman's Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe', and the introduction to Cannon's New Cowboy Poetry. Dana Gioia's essay collections Can Poetry Matter? and Disappearing Ink begin to address the aesthetic differences between stage and page, and well as the relative health and status of different varieties of poetry in contemporary American, but they are just a beginning. Just as helpful, as Chasar points out, are Nelson's Repression and Recovery and Rubin's Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. These studies focus on the history of American poetry as resistance and as popular culture, but they are, in the end, about what's past.

What I'm seeking to do here is write a book about the impulse to write and perform poetry in our society as it is today, or at least very recently, since, say, the advent of slam poetry in the mid-1980s; a book that tracks specific poets, performers and audience members as they live through and for poetry, and as they do so in different places, under different circumstances. I believe there's also room in the book for a brief study of the aesthetics of performed poetry in these different places, under these different circumstances. So it's onward to Chasar, and to New Orleans in January.  

IR(new)B

Poets and literary scholars aren't necessarily used to filling our institutional research paperwork. Writing poetry and literary criticism often doesn't require human subject research. Until this project, I've never thought of seeking certification, but seek it now I must. In the very near future, I'll be interviewing, on audio and video, lots of people involved in poetry scenes around the country, starting in my home base of Greater New York and moving in January to Tampa and New Orleans; then on to Bay Area and to Appalachia in the spring; and then to Rochester/Buffalo/Cleveland in the summer of 2013.

So I am learning to be an ethical researcher, one who creates effective surveys and valid release forms; one who stores and destoys data responsibly; one who shares data when appropriate; and one who decides how many real names he can use in his non-fiction narrative.

Writing (About) Poetry

Now that the funding applications are in, thoughts of actually taking this project on lie heavy with me. I am in the midst of three manuscripts of poems and one novel in progress, which, I have reason to believe, will find homes when I finish them. But then this idea of writing ABOUT poetry comes up, and I write these grant applications. At least I've made one mistake in the NEH application, and accidentally listed another funding agency in the line "Without a ____ award, I simply will not be able to pursue this project." This may very well turn out to be the case, though, if life continues at its current challenging pace, it will. At least the fire still burns for answering the question, Why do so many people need poetry in their lives?