Poetry Reading-- Review

I attended the poetry reading at the Black Dog Cafe, in Lowertown.  What I initially interpreted as a weird event quickly transitioned to a respect and admiration of the poets who spoke their thoughts in front of the crowd. Every poet had lines and verses that made people smile, or in some cases, think hard about what had just been said.  It was extremely easy for me to track the acceptance and reception of every poem, simply by the faces of the rest of the audience, who's reaction was sufficiently different from my own.

The poet that evoked the most emotional reaction, by far, was Marcus Harcus, a black poet who talked about the extremely prevalent racial stereotypes he experiences first hand, or watches on a day-to-day basis.  It was not only the words of his poem that got such an exceptional response, but his delivery evoked just as much, if not more, emotion than the poems themselves.  His theatrics included rapid hand movements, parading around the stage while marching to the beat of his own voice, and concluded with him tossing the papers he was reading from up into the air, leaving them to flutter down lightly, a somewhat comical gesture that, to me, contradicted what he had just said in his poems.

The most influential and powerful poems that Harcus read was entitles "The Missing Class Ain't the Middle Class."  In this poem, Harcus protests the attempts of the American government to solve the "problem" facing America.  He depicts the picture of "former slaves, rising from the abyss of poverty, and yet still considered the filth of the population," an image that evoked emotion out of not only the black audience members (which made up the majority), but out of everyone listening to him speak.

Overall, the poetry reading exceeded all expectations, and broke many of the predispositions I had about such an event.  The atmosphere was incredible, and there was immense support of each one of the nearly 20 poets that came to speak.  Every person in the cafe had either a sketch pad or some sort of note-taking device, and was reflecting their own thoughts, putting them into words or a picture.