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Poets share their living art
By ANGELA MOORE © St. Petersburg Times, published April 13, 2001 TAMPA -- About the only contact most people have with poetry is inside a Hallmark card or when pop singer Jewel fancied herself a poet a couple years ago and churned out a bestseller. To some, poets are irrelevant -- dead British men or the beat poets of the '50s who died of alcoholism or suicide. But real poets are everywhere. Good ones. Ones whose images weave and twist around in the brain. Eight of the area's best lent their work and their voices to a CD called "Poets of Tampa Bay" that was recently released in coffee shops and bookstores. Thursday night, as many as 90 people eschewed CBS's Survivor and NBC's "Must See TV" to hear and see those poets in an art gallery at the University of Tampa. They gathered in honor of National Poetry Month. "As if people didn't turn to poetry every day," said Don Morrill, author of At the Bottom of the Sky. Morrill, a UT English professor, said that poetry is more a part of daily life than most people realize. "Whatever people think of poetry and poems in books, on a page, they think of as old-fashioned," Morrill said. "All they have to think about is when somebody quoted to them a song lyric or something someone said that spoke to them." Poetry, then, is heard. It's not dusty words on a page. "The spoken word CD combines technology with the ancient traditions of poetry," Morrill said. "Poetry originally was oral . . . When people hear poems, they hear how bodily poems are." But it helps to see them, too. Nationally renowned poet and St. Petersburg resident Peter Meinke grins underneath his mustache when he reads Zinc Fingers, about his encounter with a pickpocket on the Paris Metro. Although his carefully chosen words are light and funny, it's his demeanor and his voice that complete the poem to the crowd. The poems of Tampa's poet laureate, James Tokley, are best experienced live, when his booming, melodic voice can tell the story as much as his words do, especially in Red Top Jive at Five. Richard Mathews, another UT English professor and poet, said the poetry CD and the readings are a sort of "poetry outreach" for people whose only previous contact with poetry was inside a textbook. "Up close, it doesn't seem so totally esoteric and hard to grasp," Mathews said. Thursday's readings attracted all kinds, not just the dark-clothed, tousled-hair, chain-smoking, coffee-drinking wannabe poets. There were business people and college students, sport coats and ties and Hawaiian shirts and blue jeans. Bill Mitchell is an attorney, and he looks the part. But he's also an unpublished poet trying to hone his skills. He took poetry classes from Morrill at the YMCA and attends readings whenever he can. Ozzie Walker is an aspiring poet and dreams of the day when he's one of the people reading to the crowd. He gets writing advice from Tokley and reads Paul Lawrence Dunbar constantly. Tokley tells him to check out Langston Hughes. "I started writing poetry because I got my heart broken," Walker said. "It's like I say in one of my poems, "Sharing the feelings of a poet is an experience in itself.' "
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