The kid looked like Eminem. Forearms flailing rhythmically yet with restraint. Steady wide-eyed gaze emphatic and penetrating. He had the flow, the excessive hyperactive energy, the uncanny sense for timing and shifting intonation, the brilliant lyrical subtlety …
CNN / repeated again for me / the necessity / to attack Iraq/
I will not look back / one day over the corpses of many /
while pumping cheap gas into a guzzling Ford F-one-fiddy!
Matt Von Fricken (CAS ‘03), his red baseball cap and a few sheets of paper clutched in his hand, stepped down from the platform in Uncommon Grounds early Wednesday evening to encouraging applause. No beats or DJ for this occasion, Von Fricken shunned even the mic in favor of an unmediated reading to the small crowd.
Von Fricken is a member of a small but growing group of budding lyricists, the Georgetown Poetry Society, that organized Wednesday’s open-mic reading. The Poetry Society, in its first year as an officially recognized student organization, meets each week to read and discuss poetry and to critique each others’ writing. “Poetry for Peace,” as the night was dubbed, was GPS’ coordinated effort for the national “Day of Poetry against the War,” itself the result of a bizarre twist of events.
Originally, Wednesday was the scheduled day for a highly-touted event at the White House with First Lady Laura Bush, “Poetry and the American Voice.” Meant to be an aggrandized photo-opportunity and ego-inflation device for politicos and the literary intelligentsia alike, the ensuing fiasco was quite the opposite. The program was cancelled following an effort by poet Sam Hamill, one of the invitees, to convince other poets to disinvite themselves in protest of the President’s push for war in Iraq. Hamill gathered an anthology of some 3,500 anti-war poems that he had collected from contributors across the nation, and intended to deliver them to First Lady Laura Bush during the occasion. (bellarinova.com) In response, Bush said that the event ought not be “politicized.”Hamill, in pushing his anti-war message, co-opted the originally planned event, turning it into a grassroots day of action and free speech, and raising the ire of many political pundits, and literary critics alike.
A failed experimental trial in the forced leftist politicization of spoken word art? Predictably, many pundits argued that politics and poetry form an unholy alliance, a strange brew of effervescent speechifying blended into rhyming couplets. These are the same people, they argue, that enjoy courses like “Critical Perspectives on the Corporation in Modern American Life.” The First Lady, apparently, would prefer her poets taking Bible study.
But at Georgetown, in the insular and womb-like confines of Uncommon Grounds, the mood was supportive. The poems read Wednesday night ranged from the somber and despondent to the angry and effusive. And while there were only five of them, for an group clawing its way up from the underground into the mainstream, GPS’ effort to bring the anti-war movement up with it is nothing but remarkable.
Disarm / Disarm / Disarm
Which arm is that? Dis one? Dat one? /
I wonder if this is a vicious pun.
