A Poet's Democracy-Inaugural Poems-Goucher College and Sistah Joy
A Poet's Democracy-Inaugural Poems-Goucher College and Sistah Joy Last night I attended a wonderful reading at Goucher College. The occasion was “Inaugural Poems: Baltimore-D.C. Poets Bear Witness To A New Presidential Era.” The event was organized by Johnny Turtle, Director of the Katz Writing Center, and Noah Klein, a student at the College. What made the event most memorable for me was what I call the bandwidth of the ideas presented. The poets ranged in age from the early twenties to over sixty and read a wide variety of poems that spoke to the complexity of poets, poetry, and the difficult task of confronting politics. After all, though both poet and politics begin with the letter “p,” the two terms seem to exist in alternate universes. A poet uses words to convey human experience, while politics seeks to use words to determine a human being’s experience. The convergence of the two suggests a middle path of action—difficult to obtain. Many of the poets, myself included, ...