Poetry Jam Night at the White House

[bigtree]

The Obamas hosted a poetry showcase at the White House Tuesday night, with a bassist, candles and soul claps to properly set the mood.

The spoken word extravaganza was laced with a DJ spinning tunes in the hallway for wine sipping guests, including acclaimed director Spike Lee and TV broadcaster George Stephanopoulos, as the President and First Lady paid homage to the art of spoken word.

“We’re here to celebrate the power of words and music to help us appreciate beauty and also to understand pain,’’ Obama said.

read more: http://livesteez.com/news/read/The-Obamas-Host-a-Poetry-Jam-at-the-White-House/1911.html





Esperanza Spalding started off an evening of performances at the East Room of the White House on Tuesday. (Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times)


The candles flickered, the bassist strummed and, one by one, the writers and poets seized their moments in front of the microphone.

James Earl Jones served up Othello, his sonorous voice rumbling through the East Room. Mayda del Valle, a poet from Chicago, conjured her grandmother from Puerto Rico. Joshua Brandon Bennett, a poet from Yonkers, N.Y., delivered an ode to his deaf sister, his fingers flying as he translated his words into signs.

It was Tuesday night, time for the White House poetry jam. A pony-tailed disc jockey hovered over a pair of turntables in the hallway, guests sipped white wine and President Obama and his wife, Michelle, celebrated the power of the spoken word.

Mrs. Obama urged her guests to “enjoy, have fun and be loose” as they absorbed performances from Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Jewish and African American writers in an event intended to showcase the diversity of American talent.

read more: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/jammin-in-the-east-room/?hp








When Chicago native Mayda del Valle walked into the ornate East Room of the White House on Tuesday evening to recite a newly written poem about a grandmother she barely knew, it took all of her professionalism to disguise her nervousness.

"Are you kidding me? I can't keep my hands from shaking," she said. "I hardly slept at all last night."



Del Valle in 2004, at the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan (Jesse Winter/RETNA)


Del Valle, a petite woman with a powerful voice, said the 492-word poem she read at the White House, "a faith like yours," was written during the last week. It was about her grandmother, a woman named Segunda, who died in Puerto Rico when del Valle was a small child.

One part of the poem might have resonated with the president, who has ties to both Chicago and a more exotic locale, Hawaii:

some say faith is for the weak or small minded

but I search for your faith everywhere

I need it to reassemble myself whole from these shards of Chicago ice and island breezes so I can rewrite the songs of your silence and pain

read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-white-house-poet-13-may13,0,2311229.story






"We're here tonight not just to enjoy the works of these artists, but also to highlight the importance of the arts in our life and in our nation," said Obama, who wrote some poetry for a literary magazine produced by Occidental College in California where he studied in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Here, via the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/us/politics/18poems.html , is a poem by President Obama that was published in the Spring 1981 issue of Occidental College poetry and fiction journal “Feast.” It is entitled "Underground."

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

[FirstLight]

1. OMG! They're Beatniks!

*snap, snap, snap*

I hear you brother, I'm cool like that

I'd give anything to go to one of those Jams!

[bigtree]

4. DJ in the hall . . .

lights low . . . the bard in chief on the mic

[LeftHander]

2. Oh how cool...I guess the "Toxic Asset" really has left the building...

Bush I don't think did any entertaining other than Hot Dogs and Hamburger state dinners...maybe some Clogging...

[alfredo]

3. Raise your hand if you have the hots for Esperanza Spalding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz8stgH02lY