More of this Feature • Changes & to come...

Join the Discussions • The Debt of Our Art, Poetry's Utility “Have your perspectives, your hopes & your plans been changed by what happened in your own life & in the world around you last year? Have your subjects or inspirations shifted?”    --Poetry Guide

It was a good one.

We used it.

Poetry’s Utility
9.11 brought an outpouring, covering the streets of New York, the sidewalks, little yellow post-it haikus, epic universal walk-in collabs on canvas, heart heart heart tears tears tears. Readings of pain and anger, Town Hall, Cooper Union, the New School, St Mark’s. Moot the question of “poetry”: it just was, the “missing” posters, the chalk shrines of Union Square.

Poetry Media
In the land of numbers, words peeked again. Piñero, Hollywood version, visited NYC for a week to qualify for Oscars. As Steve Cannon would say, “It’s a thumbs up”: down class PR junkie Christ poet as played by rich Hollywood star still retains the vitality of Piñero’s poetry, the meaning, even, as set against a glamorized Loisaida. Benjamin Bratt made me change my mind about actors “doing’ poems -- much “better” than Miky’s mumbles, as intense as they were. Still, the whole movie reeked of Now: the new Café simply is not the old one, even if it looks funky by Hollywood standards. Miky’s a foot shorter than Bratt, introverted, paranoid to Bratt’s outgoing wild man. But the poems do not suffer in translation -- they shine.

Television also returned to poetry after several years. HBO aired Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and the first show, hosted by Mos Def, was terrific. Lemon got “Shine,” one of the essential African American oralities on TV, a feat. Nikki Giovanni took a 40-second cameo -- we needed more, especially with the standing O she caught -- yes she’s an icon, but first, she’s a Poet! Suheir Hammad’s brilliant provocation of peace, “First Writing Since,” closed the show and was not cut from its five minutes. Benjamin Bratt did a Piñero poem here -- and the NYTimes gave his Hollywood mug the photo for the review on the TV page, self-fulfilling their own patronizing view of spoken word as simply a “pop” phenomenon. This is Culture! TV is art, when poetry is properly represented thereon. And spoken poetry of this variety, as Caryn James wrote, owes as much to Yeats as Tupac.

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