poet.

This is my third post in a row about poetry. Deal with it.

I went to the LA Festival of Books at UCLA yesterday. My first mistake: assuming that the weather was going to be as witch tit cold as it had been the previous few days. I wore a huge exceptionally warm woolen sweater, and was very proud of myself for being so prepared for my outside excursion. Alas, the sun came out, and within five minutes of setting foot on the UCLA campus, I was cranky, I was hot, and I could feel little balls of chocolate brown wool adhering themselves to the various trickles of sweat forming on my torso. Camus would have been proud me for this close communion with the sun and the resulting pain, all in the name of my art. But Camus can fuck himself. I went to the first kiosk that sold t-shirts not in kid sizes (it took a surprisingly long time to find one.) The brand name was Spicy Brown, some sort of Japanese line, I have no idea what they were doing at the books festival, but I snagged me a nice cottony-light t-shirt with a cartoon of a baby seal across my chest, captioned by some Japanese characters. I could give two shimmies what the characters meant: even if my shirt said "Hiroshima was God's natural plan" in Japanese, I still would have worn it with pride.

But that's not even the point of this. What I really wanted to talk about was my accidentally stumbling across the poet's corner. Of course I wanted to stay for a sec and see what the poet was all about. I never caught his name, but he had the silky cocoa smooth voice, and the groomed silver demeanor of a poet. It seemed promising. He talked some about his inspiration, where he lives, who he was, and then read a snippet of some of his poetry. Something about a flower catalogue he receives in the mail, and a flower that's called "the anvil of darkness." In my very amateurish but strong opinion, he was crap. I could only take his flower stump speech for about a minute.

We moved on, my friend Jess and me, roamed for a little while, and found ourselves at the poet kiosk. poet is a group, I think located only in Los Angeles, that brings literacy to underprivileged teens by introducing them to poetry, and encouraging them to slam and thus find their voice. From what I've heard, this organization takes the teens to buses, to subway stations, to street corners, basically to unlikely places, and they recite to whomever will listen, sometimes their own words, sometimes great poems that speak to them. At the kiosk, four teens were performing, two girls and two boys. And I listened to them all. Each kid recited a classic, one was Hughes, one was Angelou, and they were fantastic. They were self-possessed, committed, in love with what they were saying. They made eye contact with every member of the crowd, and you could really see each teen owning him/herself in that moment. And this in spite of the vendors passing by, screaming LEMONADE and COTTON CANDY, and a touristy woman with a camera loudly insisting that Harry get closer to the sign so she could take the picture. At one point, one of the girl teens, in the midst of her poem, caught my eye and started to crack up, which made the whole experience that much better.

And what was it? What made these kids more special than the silver poet with the liquid tongue who had his very own stage, removed from the vendors and the screamers, with an audience easily five times the size of theirs? Why did I pass him by so quickly, and then stay and listen to every single word the teens gave me? Did the difference come from within me... was it my Marxist inner child coming out, wanting to support the proletariat teen? That same part of me that always cries at the end of movies like "Cradle Will Rock" or more embarrassingly, "Sidney White," when the underdogs rise up together, and through sheer will, make the world a better place. Were these kids really more noble because of their meager beginnings? Who's to say that they won't all grow up to be just like Mr. Flower spouting his catalogue nonsense?

Or was I just content because I was finally wearing a Japanese baby seal t-shirt? You decide.