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Seven Philadelphia-area poets to savor

It's often said - because it's true - that there are as many kinds of poetry as there are poets.

MARY CROSS
MARY CROSSRead more

It's often said - because it's true - that there are as many kinds of poetry as there are poets.

No two people use language in exactly the same way. It figures, then, that poets would be even more individual, even more strongly voiced.

What follows is an album of seven poets, all strong voices, who work within 50 miles of Philadelphia. We could have included dozens and dozens more; there's no way to do justice to all. We offer this album as a gesture to Philly as a truly great Poetry City.

Each poet reads two poems aloud at www.philly.com/poetrymonth2010; the complete texts are there, too. We invite readers to get to know these wonderful talents better.

Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. For her poetry, she's received Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships.

"Right now," she says, "I'm working on a third book of poems, as yet untitled." She teaches creative writing at Villanova University, and lives in South Philadelphia with her husband, writer Jim Quinn, and their daughter. In her poem "American Brass," she describes the earnest members of a brass band:

The massy, meat-bound, milk-fed teens

hold their tubas like dads hold pubescent

daughters. Like they're too big

to be held. Like they love them like babies.

Hers is poetry that manages to "say something" by just being something.

Leonard Gontarek is everywhere in the Philadelphia poetry scene: workshop leader, teacher, host of poetry happenings near and far. The West Philly resident hosts the free poetry series at the Green Line Cafe (45th and Locust Streets) the third Tuesday of each month. His books include St. Genevieve Watching Over Paris, Van Morrison Can't Find His Feet, Zen for Beginners, and Déjà Vu Diner. His poetry is diverse, sometimes surreal, but always a fusion between solid observation and the philosophical urge, as in "Pale Blossoms":

The way is lost when we know where we are going.

It is cumbersome, but this does help us

to withstand the turbulence and seasickness.

Who among us would rather not have a clue

about lilac, about mud, about the rats.

Asked what keeps him up at night, he says: "You know what keeps me up? One hundred new poems in various stages of revision. A 21-inch stack of books, which I just measured, next to a 23-inch stack. My cat, Isabella, who hunts a toy rabbit, with great fanfare, in the middle of the night."

Bob Perelman is a poet, critic, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He published his first book of poems, Braille, in 1975. A longtime San Franciscan, he edited Hills magazine in S.F. and was influential in the growing "language poetry" movement. His books of poetry include Face Value (1988), Virtual Reality (1993), and IFLIFE (2006). His poetry is an often startling exploration of what language-as-a-thing can do. In his poem "Against Shock and Awe," he writes, "But dead people are only free in the most limited way" - a definitive slap-down to warlike intentions. In the mesmerizing "The Dream of the Bed," he takes us into a landscape, and a language, that is a dream:

In the dream there were different cities

to fly between, and in the cities

solid floors to uphold me,

walls and ceilings to act as shields,

doors standing for choice and acceptance.

What vision saw, I saw.

What hearing heard, I as well heard,

and I touched what touch touched.

It was that simple a sum.

Sonia Sanchez is one of Philadelphia's most celebrated poets and public figures. Now retired, she held the Laura Carnell Chair at Temple University and is the author of many books, including Homegirls and Handgrenades (winner of a 1985 American Book Award), Homecoming, Does Your House Have Lions?, and Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums. Her latest is Morning Haiku (Beacon Press).

Sanchez has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the 1984 Lucretia Mott Award, and many other honors, both literary and community. She played an important role in the civil-rights and Black Art movements and has read her poetry all over the world. That poetry is full of history, music, and song. In "10 haiku (for Max Roach)," she evokes the energy of the great jazz drummer:

your sounds exploding

in the universe return

to earth in prayer

She is also a singer's singer, as in a poem on the 9/11 attacks, a poem that first appeared in The Inquirer:

How did you disappear, peace, without

My shawl to accompany you?

Ariana Santiago is a poet, performer, teacher, playwright, and a senior majoring in broadcasting and mass media at Temple - she graduates in May. She'll be serving as a corps member with Teach for America in Atlanta. At 15, she was sharing stages with HBO Def Poets Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Lovelace. An accomplished singer and actress, Santiago is a cofounder, production director, and host of PhilaLIVE, a performing-arts event encompassing all things live from music to painting. She's also artistic director of Babel, Temple's poetry collective.

Santiago is often described as a "spoken-word," slam, or performance poet. Her verse may include singing, dance, or acting as she explores histories both personal and global, as in "For the Women":

This poem is for those Women

who believed in unity

and lost their lives before they

won the fight.

Women who never let go.

Grandmothers who prayed.

Granddaughters who stayed at lunch counters

until they were hauled away.

For the Freedom Riders.

Every black teacher who marched her students into white-only libraries,

cause literacy should know no color.

C.K. Williams has a new book out, Wait, and it continues his clear-throated, challenging, vigorous career. Williams, born in Newark, N.J., teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and he is one of the most honored poets in the land. His book Repair took the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; his 2003 book, The Singing, sang well enough to earn the National Book Award.

About his beginnings, he has written, "Poetry didn't find me, in the cradle or anywhere near it: I found it. I realized at some point - very late, it's always seemed - that I needed it, that it served a function for me - or someday would - however unclear that function may have been at first."

In the title poem of his new book, Williams' expansive, insistent rhythms bring us face-to-face, again and again, with our concrete lives in this world of time and the body:

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax -

not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,

time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail

Yolanda Wisher lives in Germantown (her birthplace) just a few blocks from Germantown Friends School, where she teaches. She got a bachelor's degree in English/black studies from Lafayette College and a master's in creative writing/poetry from Temple. In 1999, she was named the first poet laureate of Montgomery County. She chairs the Germantown Poetry Festival (starting April 17) and is the host of umüvme (you-move-me), a poetry show on Internet radio station www.gtownradio.com

"Poetry in Philly is ubiquitous," she says. "Poetry readings happen everywhere: in bars, nightclubs, thrift stores, and government buildings, on the subway, on college campuses. Your SEPTA bus driver, your teacher, cashier, receptionist, or mail carrier is probably moonlighting as a poet."

She's no moonlighter; poetry is what she lives full time. In "Mentoring Joi" she shows us a teacher whose life is illuminated by her pupil's work:

I catch myself stepping

through her poems

into my own

winter ache of

phantom limbs.