Poetry Out Loud : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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A jazz combo played short standards during the period between each contestant. Scott Simon’s face was too far away for me to think of him as anything but a voice as he read the names of the young people coming on stage to perform. He was witty, as completely giddy about the proceedings as he does when he is interviewing someone who is supposed to be funny on the radio. It is charming, even if not always funny. The Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University somewhere in the middle of DC is packed to the brim with parents, relatives and a large contingent of supporters for the performers from Maryland, Virginia, and DC. They are noisy, enthusiastic. It is the kind of atmosphere that the really enthusiastic planners and boosters of the event will describe as being like any high school basketball game. That would be an exaggeration, but one can understand hyperbole—after all, the subject is a poetry recital contest during which high school aged kids, most of them with clear aspirations to be actors, recite poems by often dead people and some living poetic geniuses.

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05.03.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Jeffrey McDaniel

Race/Poetry Symposium

I don’t go to church, so poetry readings are the closest thing I have to a communal spiritual experience. I think something happens when we come together and honor one another with our attention and break breath. I sometimes define poetry as “chiseled breathing”, but maybe for the purpose of metaphor, the better word is “leavened”. Poetry is leavened breathing.

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04.01.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Jeffrey McDaniel

more about Los Angeles

One cool thing about being a poet in Los Angeles, (a strange positive that perhaps came from being in the shadow of Hollywood, faraway from the power brokers of the literary world), was that when I met other literary writers I was genuinely excited, and there was a lot of space for unconventional things to happen organically. For instance, in 1999, I was hosting an event at Beyond Baroque to raise money to take six high school poets to a teen poetry festival in New Mexico, and one of the featured readers, an actor/writer named Sarah Koskoff, performed Plath’s Daddy. She didn’t just read the poem; she embodied it. Fiction writer Aimee Bender happened to be in the audience and came up with the idea of organizing a Dead Poets Slam, featuring Los Angeles stage actors and performers who would embody the work of dead poets. A couple weeks later, I was in Aimee’s living room, with several UC-Irvine grads (Genevieve and Alice Sebold—pre-Lovely Bones), mapping out potential teams; we finally decided on the Natural Deaths vs. the Unnatural Deaths. We rifled through sprawled anthologies, looking for dead poets to bring back to life. I can’t imagine an event like that happening, in the same small, funky way, in any other American city.

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03.24.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)