"If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem." This groundbreaking series uses this quaint, quizzical sound bite as its introduction and motto: even at their hokiest or least comprehensible, the poems and performances in these five episodes are guaranteed never to bore. Instead of simply filming flat readings, director Mark Pellington uses hypnotic camera work and MTV-style editing to forge image, music, and poetic performance into sophisticated video vignettes. Performers run the gamut from venerable Beats Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti to urban slammers, cowboy poets, drag queens, genteel seniors, and literate preteens. A surprisingly profound President Jimmy Carter shares the screen with rock stars Lou Reed and King Missile's John S. Hall. The strongest installment is probably "A Day in the Life," organized thematically by times of day--from Peter Spiro's predawn indictment of work ("Yes, the universe is not up there / It's here, and we're in it") through Matt Cook's hysterical afternoon rant on James Joyce, the potato blight, and the metric system (filmed entirely on a strangely appropriate convenience store sidewalk) to Dennis Cooper's decidedly darker reflection on desperate young boys practicing midnight's oldest art. Throughout every episode, the series drives one lesson home: Poetry is everywhere...in bug-infested tenements and secret suburbia, creeping around the hard edges of urban Hawaii and blowing across Oklahoma's open prairie. These United States are eternally fresh and exciting. This America still has plenty of room for pioneers.
--Grant Balfour
This 2-DVD set contains all 5 episodes of the series.
PART 1: The Land and the People
Poetry in a New World! A place where our different origins and lineages mirror sensibilities and traditions to come together as a new poetry. Featured: former US Poet laureate Rita Dove, Indian cowboy poet Henry Real Bird, hiphop meets sound poet Tracie Morris, Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Jeff Tagami, Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Sparrow, Everton Sylvester, Lord Buckley, and more.
PART 2: A Day in the Life
Cycle. Routine. Rhythm. From our first waking minute to setting our alarm clock for the next morning, we are waltz and stumble to the drumbeat of time in all its shapes and form. Hear the words of two Nobel Prize-winners, Derek Walcott and Czeslaw Milosz, as well as Thylias Moss, CD Wright, Dennis Cooper, Hal Sirowitz, Paul Beatty, Pedro Pietri, cheerleaders, auctioneers, and square-dance callers, among others.
PART 3: The American Dream
Can poetry be politicized? What does it mean to be a poem if it contains a political message? Has it ceased to be poetry and become propaganda? Listen to Leonard Cohen, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wanda Coleman, Vess Quinlin, Genny Lim, Ruth Forman, Luis Alfaro, and Jim Northrup.
PART 4: Love and Sex
What is love? An eternal question that gives vent to what is arguably the subject closest to a Poet s heart. Can love be dissected? The subject of love is uppermost in the minds of poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Nobel-Prize winner Joseph Brodsky, rockers Lou Reed, Maggie Estep and John S. Hall, Quincy Troupe, Pear Cleage, Sandra Cisneros and Miguel Algarin.
PART 5: The Word
Poems are made of words. Is ''the apple'' green? or yellow? Hanging on a tree or baked in a pie? Is it knowledge, the darling of your eye, or New York City? All the above and more. This episode features Johnny Depp reading Jack Kerouac s Mexico City Blues, American Sign Language poet Peter Cook, President Jimmy Carter talks about the Cosmos, and other poets give us their take; Michael Franti, Robert Creeley, Ai, Larry Eigner, Carla Harryman, Emily XYZ.
