“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Poetry,” the Mouth Almighty tour for National Poetry Month 1998, put The Last Poets, Maggie Estep, Sekou and me on the road for three weeks in April. The Tour would promote label identity, crossover the diverse audiences who make up the Mouth Almighty family, sell CD’s and launch In With the Out Crowd. Mercury promised tour support, and we hired a college booking agency to do the actual scheduling. After a couple of months it was apparent that even offering a gang of great poets at a good price was not enough to break through the long range scheduling of most colleges -- the kind of gigs we were talking about are booked a year, or two, in advance. So we went to a ska/reggae promoter, who assured us there was plenty of time. And there was. But the gigs were not forthcoming -- poetry was just too much of a stretch.
So I took on the tour myself and if there is an entrepreneurial gestalt in the poem, that’s it. D-o-i-t. Just do it. Whitman, he printed it himself and then reviewed it himself and Ferlinghetti ran ‘em off and stapled ‘em. So I made the phone calls and called in the favors and we were two nights at a hiphop conference in Oberlin and the next at Pittsburgh’s major rock emporium and the next at a sweet upstairs boite in Philly then off to a rock club in Toronto that refused to call us poets and then to a junior high in Syracuse. The two upstate literary centers sponsored gigs -- Rochester’s Writers and Books put us in the School of the Arts auditorium and just buffalo booked us into the Tralfamador, the big rock club. In San Diego we performed at an art gallery, in LA at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Barnsdall, and the City of Chicago Cultural Center had us inaugurate a new performance space at the Old Library.
Like poetry itself these days in these states, the Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Poetry tour fit in many different spaces, attracting an audience richly diverse in age, race, and culture. Poetry in 1998 is your prescient shadow -- a democratizing, participatory opening into culture, to art.
In With the Out Crowd, too, journeys from haiku to c&w, from rock to rap to rhetoric. “Journey” is operative here. I think of Ron Padgett’s first poem, “Post-Publication Blues,” in Toujours L’Amour, where he’s considering his recently published book (Toujours L’Amour? --ed.), and mulls, “Unfortunately I am a very bad poet and / the book is no good.” How familiar the feeling; how finished the book feels! unlike the ever-ongoingness of the poems. With a CD it’s different. Words not set in a headstone, they flow in and by, and I remember not my memory-image-sound texts but hanging with the band, the mental space of the recording studio, Hal Willner’s clinched eyes seeing sound. It’s the poem all-audio, and these disks take thousands of years to compost. Mind dances, under the headphones, to poetry on CD.
