“To good sex, to bad sex, to getting laid at all/to best friends and summer time, to pure grain alcohol, to memories and black outs, and skinny-dipping in the night/to concerts and mosh-pits, and one or two fist-fights.”
The raw, honest poem, “Those August Blues” by Hunter Daniels, 16, a Moorpark College film major, set the tone for the evening.
This poetry reading’s feature poet was Kurt, 23, a rail-thin Oxnard College student. Lanky and restless, with a penchant for profanity, Kurt can actually pull off the intellectual renegade personae. He flicks poems at the audience as if they were bits of cigarette ash.
“There are people playing/cash registers like pianos/there are people playing/pianos like cash registers,” one untitled poem states. Kurt drags his fingers across a stubbly face and red-rimmed eyes as audience members nod and laugh. He dares to say what everyone is thinking, but no one has the nerve to put into words.
The next poetry reading was held on Sept. 15 in the music building, room 114. The feature poet, Poetri, runs the Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles. He takes Kurt’s harsh truths and wraps them in a warm blanket of sincerity and laughter. His huge dark hands grasp the air as he closes his eyes and speaks of spirituality, love, and life’s ironies. Visible passion floods through his six-foot-plus body as he dances across the room, belting out a few gospel phrases. Sandra Hunter, Moorpark College English and Creative Writing instructor, founded the poetry readings in fall 2004. She realized students needed a non-academic forum where they could read their poetry.
“Poetry is a living thing,” she declares. “[Performance] creates this organic creature where the audience and poet bond.”
Originally, the feature poets performed for free. However, recently Moorpark College Student Activities Specialist Sharon Miller joined up with Poets and Writers, Inc., an organization that helps colleges pay poets for performances. Now, poets are paid $100 each.
Poets scheduled for upcoming Moorpark College poetry readings are Katerina Canyon, on Oct. 19, and National Poetry Slam poet Crystal Irby, on Nov. 16. The next poetry reading will be held on Sept. 21 at Moorpark College in HSS 111 at 5 p.m. World Heavyweight Poetry Champ Pat Payne will be speaking.
The poetry provides, as Hunter had hoped, a reason to interact and form lasting friendships. Their strings of words become a celebration of life.
Indeed, Daniels wrote his poem in honor of a friend who had died at seventeen.
“To ingenuity, to giving up, to giving it one more try/to happiness, to success, to every time you want to cry/to the bad times, to depression, to when things ARE as bad as they seem/to standing in the rain at night and screaming ‘Carpe Diem’.”
The simply-named poet, Kurt, read his poetry on Aug. 31 to an MC audience. Crude and gritty though it may have been, his depictions of sex, vandalism, society, and art exposed the truth as brutal as well as beautiful. (Iris Smoot)
