JOSHUA BENNETT took his brave new voice to the White House Tuesday night, where he performed one of his poems for Barack and Michelle Obama.

"It was just incredible," Bennett, a junior majoring in Africana studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania, said yesterday.

"I performed a piece entitled 'Tamara's Opus' . . . about the struggle between me and my sister to communicate," he said, adding, "She's deaf."

The invitation to the 20-year-old from Yonkers, N.Y., to participate in a night of poetry in the East Room of the White House came courtesy of his status as a finalist in last summer's Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam.

If you haven't been following HBO's "Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices," which tracked last year's competition from the local-workshop stage all the way to the Washington, D.C., finals - and I, for one, came late to this party - then you've missed a rare opportunity to see "reality" television that doesn't encourage viewers to see participants as easily manipulated fictional characters. What scripts there are were written by the participants, and a lot of them actually deserve the name given to them: poetry.

But even if you've missed some of the drama that accompanies the honing of words into sharp instruments, you haven't yet missed Sunday's season finale, in which Bennett and other members of Team Philadelphia, the competition's defending champion, perform another powerful piece.

Called "Sean Bell," after the unarmed New York man who was shot 50 times by police - who were later acquitted of manslaughter - it's emotional, political and unafraid.

And seems, like so much of the work in "Brave New Voices," to make keeping score seem beside the point.

If you caught this week's episode, you already know that Philadelphia's young poets stirred up some trouble in the semifinals, lodging a protest when the team from Chicago wasn't penalized for going a second and a half over its allotted time.

If that sounds more like CBS' "The Amazing Race" than a poetry slam, you're right.

What happens next, though, is far more interesting.

Ultimately, it's even poetic.

"It was just that kind of summer. We were just in a really reflective place," Bennett said.

"The notoriety of being in front of the video cameras had become more important than what got us into the competition in the first place," he said of the team's decision, which will be disclosed in Sunday's episode (with Temple poet-in-residence Sonia Sanchez as one of the judges).

Not that he has a problem with the cameras.

The national youth spoken-word festival is in its 12th year, but "this was the first year it was filmed," he said.

"For a lot of us, I think we just appreciated the fact that the art has come to forefront of popular culture," he said. "It was mass media reaching back to us and saying that you matter."

Though the Brave New Voices competition is open to all Philadelphians, four of the six members of last year's team were Penn students, and Bennett was also on the 2007 team, which won.

A spoken-word fan since he encountered it at a poetry-slam Hurricane Katrina fund-raiser at the age of 17, he's been a member of Penn's spoken-word collective, the Excelano Project, since his freshman year.

When it comes to spoken word, competitors in "Brave New Voices" are welcome to use all the words available - whether the Federal Communications Commission approves them or not - to make their points.

Because this is HBO, no one else holds back, either, including "The Wire's" Idris Elba, who hosts Sunday's show and whose not-so-fleeting expletives may have been less carefully chosen.

Ultimately, it's what the words add up to that matters, and with subjects ranging from lynching to transgendered teens, these voices pack a punch.

Or as Robbie Q. Telfer, the mentor of the Chicago team, puts it in Sunday's finale:

"It's not art for art's sake anymore. It's art that makes you want to get up and light something on fire." *

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