Saturday Afternoon in Fort Greene: The Fifth Annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

Today we went to the fifth annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival, our fourth year at this event. Despite ominous weather, the festival was saved by MC Laurie Cumbo's encouraging the audience to join in a periodic "sunshine dance," and so the rain held off during the great readings by the kids in the New York Writers Coalition summer creative writing workshops in the park, music by the talented Yacouba Sissoko, and sparkling performances by three of our favorite writers: Touré, Staceyann Chin, and Colson Whitehead.

The event has gotten a lot of press coverage since the first time we went there in our first month back in Brooklyn in August 2006. In 2007 on MySpace and in 2008 on this blog we wrote longish posts about the event. With extensive pre-event coverage by the New York Times Fort Greene blog, The Local, and elsewhere, we know that more professional writers and certainly better photographers than us with our shitty cellphone will cover this event.

We were also hampered by a ballpoint pen that gave out after the second young reader, so we can't write detailed stuff about the individual kids and their work. (Lesson to you kids who are fledgling writers: take it from a longtime amateur, don't forget a backup pen or pencil!) And we had no way to keep track of the kids' names as they were called up, but hopefully someone else can do it.

Two years ago our MySpace blog post began:

Brooklyn's Fort Greene has been home to giants of American literature like Marianne Moore (on Cumberland Street) and Richard Wright (on Carlton Avenue). An earlier resident of the neighborhood, Walt Whitman wrote a Brooklyn Eagle editorial calling for the construction of a local park, "[as] the inhabitants there are not so wealthy nor so well situated as those on the heights…we have a desire that these, and the generations after them, should have such a place of recreation…"

Late Saturday afternoon, several hundred New Yorkers flocked to that place, Fort Greene Park, for the third annual Fort Greene Summer Literary Festival, presented by Akashic Books, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC) and others.

Gathered on a hill overlooking the lush foliage of the park, audience members sat on folding chairs or on picnic blankets or just stood listening to five established writers of poetry and fiction and about a dozen young Brooklyn residents, aged 8 to 16, who read work composed in Saturday creative writing workshops taught by NYWC members.

Laurie Cumbo, executive director and founder of the nearby Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), served as a genial and charming MC, gracefully overcoming any jet lag she may have felt from a plane trip from South Africa the night before. Cumbo kept an event-filled program moving briskly, and her introductions and appreciations of everyone who came up to the rather rickety-looking raised platform to read or perform were both informative and enthusiastic. . .

Last year, in August 2008, we began our blog post like this:

We arrived right on time at 3 p.m. today at beautiful Fort Greene Park for the Fourth Annual Fort Greene Literary Festival. Having been to last year's event (you can read our 2007 coverage on Louise Crawford's Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn) as well as the one in 2006, we knew we were in for a treat. And we weren't disappointed.

Much credit for the Festival goes to the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC), a neighborhood Fort Greene fixture at 80 Hansen Place, and under the direction of the dynamic Aaron Zimmerman, its founder and executive director, and many others, last year provided more than 1000 creative writing workshop sessions at more than 45 locations throughout New York City. (Thanks to NYWC for photos above and kids' photos below; you can see more at their website.)

Kudos for their work on the Festival also go to these presenters: chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council and Fort Greene resident Johnny Temple's indie publishing firm Akashic Books, "dedicated to the reverse gentrification of the literary world"; the Fort Greene Park Conservatory, who've done so much good work (those of Brooklyn natives know in what bad shape the place was before they came along); the well-known agency Global Talent Associates [GTHQ]; and The Walt Whitman Project - a great Brooklyn organization known for events like tomorrow's reading, "Walt Whitman in the Neighborhood," at the Clinton Hill Art Gallery.

This year's featured writers were four current or former poets laureate. . .

Well, that saved us the trouble of rewriting all that stuff, most of which still applies. But after three years, Laurie Cumbo has become more expert in her MC duties (in the first year, she kept calling all the women, even the little girls "Mrs.") and today she was a masterly master of ceremonies, moving things along so fast that the time flew by.

Things have gotten much tighter and more polished, though not less heartfelt and true to the spirit of the event. This year we were on the concrete by the Prison Ship Martyr's Monument, with an imposing backgdrop for the readers and musician, as well as more comfortable (and drier) seating for the audience than the grass provided.

And Laurie really is fantastic. As we said, she showed us in the beginning how to do the sunshine dance, basically sitting in our chairs and moving our arms in a big circle to mimic the roundness of the sun, and she kept saying it was a beautiful day.

Frankly, we were a little grumpily skeptical, since we were sweaty in the humidity after walking from the DeKalb Avenue subway station and annoyed that the restrooms nearby weren't working so we had to go all the way back to the playground on Myrtle Avenue and Portland Place. There were lots of empty seats because people, not unreasonably, probably stayed home due to the probability of more rain.

So what was so beautiful about the day?

First of all, the sweet, enticing music of Yacouba Sissoko, a master kora player from the Djely griot tradition in Mali, who preceded the day's readers.

And of course the kids' poems and stories were beautiful. Laurie brought out the best in everyone, including the three famous guest writers, all of whom have Brooklyn neighborhood ties.

Laurie especially shone when she encouraged and eventually teamed up with an adorable, somewhat shy six-year-old - the youngest of the four writers of the talented Regist family (Talaia, Tema, Tristan and Tayon) - to recite his third and final poem. It was touching and adorable.

The NYWC Youth Writers Workshop readers listed in the program included Shyanne Bennett, Samori Covington, Marissa Eskine, Anwen Burns, Evan Campbell, Michael Farell, Danielle Farell, Mark Anthony Farell, Paul Francois, Joseph Francois, Karen Marks, Savyanna Moody, Jarrett Moore Tyrell Moore, Anjelika Amog and Aidan Amog.

Also, David Nduka, Kayla Quarless, Ashley Quarless, Tema Regist, Talaia Regist, Tayon Regist, Tristan Regist, Aliah Richardson-Gilkes, Najaya Royal, Zoe-Lynn Sheares, Gabriel Treitmeier-McCarthy and Anneliese Treitmeier-McCarthy.

(Links above are to their poems on The Local blog.)

We've seen many of these kids in previous years, so it's kind of fun to see them g
et not only bigger but see the changes in their work. Some of the vocabulary used in the poems and stories seemed more sophisticated than we'd noticed before: more SAT-type words, precise and adult.

There were "wish" poems (lots of kids wish for super-powers, apparently, though some have greater ambitions, and wish to possess their own planets), poems with the themes of peace and justice (social activism is high among this group), funny list poems, poems using anagrams of their name with each letter a quality or trait of the poet, and even some fairly sophisticated rhymed verse.

Obviously the New York Writers Coalition workshop leaders in the summer program, always adept, are doing more kinds of work with the children than we'd seen or heard three years ago. Hopefully they are very proud after the great performances.

The thing that struck us the most, as someone who's published too many books of stories, was the predominance of fiction this year. There were stories from the little ones as well as the older writers, many very funny, some scary, others "slice of life."

The narratives employed dialogue and description skillfully, with the young authors trying out both first person and third person points of view. There were surreal stories, charming autobiograpical stories, and stories that made us in the audience laugh out loud.

Um, that was also true of the three bigger and older writers. We'd give the kind of biographical info in the program or in Laurie's introductions to them, but does anyone who likes good writing not know who they are? We've already read a total of four of the three authors' books and hope to read more. Oh, and each of them is really good-looking and a good dresser. It's kind of unfair. Now that we think about it, the kids were all cute and well-dressed too. . .

At least year they had some good writers who dressed like schlumps. (In other words, like us.)

After the kids read, we again heard from Yacouba Sissoko, whose mastery of the kora, a 21-string harp-lute, creates magical music that can move from being fiery to soothing.

By then a lot more people had gathered for the literary festival now that the threat of rain looked distant.

Thanks to the Fort Greene branch of the wonderful Rice restaurant, we were treated to free milk or soy milk and cookies or little granola chunks, delicious and lovingly wrapped in little plastic bundles.

And in these hard fiscal times for cultural organizations like the New York Writers Coalition, we were invited to donate funds into the "Write Your A** Off" tote bags as people came around the audience.

We last saw Touré four years ago at a book party at McNally Jackson (then McNally Robinson) for our mutual friend Danyel Smith's novel Bliss. It was great to be able to tell him how much we enjoyed his journalism and the stories in his collection The Portable Promised Land.

Today he read a hysterically funny story about a hapless African-American superhero headquartered right here in Brooklyn. Touré's protagonist tries to fight racism but he's powerless against institutional racism (his kryptonite) and abjures beating down evil-doers in favor of crossing his arms and saying "Now you know that ain't right." Flying over Brooklyn, the best he can do when he corners cab drivers who don't stop for black women and their children is to report them to the powerless Taxi and Limousine Commission.

As a result, he gets no respect from neighborhood homeboys, his frustrated wife ("You ain't done nothing you promised at the Million Man March"), or the fellow guests on the Ego Negro cable TV show. The story was clever and bright without shading into cuteness overdose, and we enjoyed it a lot.

We also enjoyed Staceyann Chin's reading of two sections of her recently-published book, The Other Side of Paradise, which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called a "fresh, forthright, affecting memoir."

Always a great performer, Staceyann read an account of a childhood Christmas in Jamaica when she and her older brother Delano, pretty much abandoned by their mother, hilariously debate some religious principles - Delano tells her that the people in Sodom committed a crime worse than blasphemy but won't explain what "being a funny man" actually means - and try to avoid being a "Christmas-monger," hoping for presents from American missionaries. The final scene of this excerpt, at the Christmas church service, is both poignant and outrageously funny.

The same can be said of the second, shorter excerpt from when Staceyann is older and the discovery of some "dirty" magazines with photos of naked blonde women celebrating their private parts and orgasms leads her to a disastrous attempt to explore her own body. Again, it's both comical and tragic, but mostly the spirited, indpendent nature of the narrator shines through.

Colson Whitehead's work is elegant, sharp and erudite, and the first thing he read - a tribute to a poem we learned almost by heart decades ago, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - was all of those things plus very, very funny. Purporting to be advice to Prufrock from an earthy, crude, street-smart pal, the piece had echoes of the poem throughout.

To us, it was a delight: the references to rolled trousers, peach-eating, "let us go then, you and I," etc. We'd love to have this narrative the next time we teach "Prufrock" to our community college lit classes. It's actually good literary explication doubling as a comic tour de force.

We've read, and enjoyed, Sag Harbor, so we were already familiar with his next reading, an excerpt from chapter five of the novel in which the young narrator, the geeky Benji, gets a haircut and reflects on past haircuts from his father which looks perfect, but just for a few hours, before they become utterly misshapen, wild, and disordered.

There's a wonderful riff and reminiscence here, on the fucked-up-ness of what has passed for normal; Benji is horrified to find his fifth-grade class picture under a pile of comic books and realize how he really must have appeared to others a few years before. The whole book is filled with similar wonderful passages, knowing and subtle and supremely intelligent.

Laurie asked the three authors to come up for a picture with each other, her, and the NYWC Youth Writers Workshop participants who were still there at the end of this year's Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival. To us, it was the best one ever. And the sunshine dance worked! We're grateful to everyone who appeared onstage and to those who did the hard work behind the scenes to make this such a great event.

Thursday Evening at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum Bookstore: Launch Party for "From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls"

We were only able to stop in briefly this evening at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on Orchard Street (where our father and grandfather used to have many customers for the men's slacks and jeans they manufactured).

(We'd say something nice about the Tenement Museum, but to us they are better known for their mistreatment and oppression of their workers than anything else.)

We wanted to celebrate, if just for a few moments, at the New York Writers Coalition's launch party for this great organization's latest publication, From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls. So we had time only to say hi to some of the teenage authors of the book, all of whom are students at Urban Academy High School.

We'd gotten the book in the mail earlier this week through the kindness of Aaron Zimmerman, the dynamic founder and executive director of the NYWC, which provides free and low-cost creative writing workshops throughout the city for New Yorkers from groups that have been historically deprived of voice in our society.

NYWC is one of the partners in the New York City Neighborhood Story Project, a documentary book project replicating the highly successful and innovative New Orleans-based Neighborhood Story Project.

As the NYWC website notes,

Through writing, interviews, and photography, neighborhood writers create portraits of New York City, then edit the stories with the neighborhoods to ensure authenticity. We publish the book and have block parties to celebrate. The first group of New York City writers comes from the innovative Urban Academy High School.

The 18 month project at Urban Academy began in February 2007, and engaged young people from throughout New York City in intensive instruction in creative writing, oral history, urban anthropology and photography. The students honed their skills through participating in creative writing workshops led by NY Writers Coalition, by conducting interviews with the support of instructors from StoryCorps, and meeting the young authors of the New Orleans Neighborhood Story Project books.

We loved From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls and will be using it, tomorrow evening in fact, with our own Borough of Manhattan Community College creative writing workshop students at the Brooklyn College campus. Some of them come from the same places -- Kingsbridge, Millbrook Projects, Inwood, Harlem, Upper West Side, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Lower East Side and Canarsie -- that the book's authors do.

(Hey, so do we. Sort of. The Philadelphia Inquirer review of And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street began by saying, "Richard Grayson is a funny guy from Canarsie, Brooklyn" - though we actually hail from just across the border in Flatlands - and during the second year of our MFA program at Brooklyn College, we worked as a delivery boy for Canarsie Laundry, driving loads of once-dirty duds all over the neighborhood.)

Anyway, a book like From Kingsbridge to Canarsie - edited by Kesha Young, the NYC Neighborhood Story Project's director - can tell you what these neighborhoods are really like.

Julianne Reynoso, for example, takes you on a tour of her part of the The Bronx, Kingsbridge Heights, and can tell you about neighborhood hangouts like Delis and Breakfasts, which

also known as just "Peter's," is a small store right next to Middle School 143. A most-of-the-time-grumpy Asian man named Peter owns it. All of the students from OLA [Our Ladies of Angels] and 143 go there, and he locks all the doors to the drinks and makes sure that if you want to buy something, one of his employees gets it for you so you don't forget to pay. We would always buy the giant baked cookies or blue slushies after school before heading out across the street.

Zaira Simone tells you more about the real Brooklyn than you'll read about in hipster blogs:

When my brother moved to Seaview in Canarsie and I needed a break from the crazy people in my mother's neighborhood, I would get right on the bus. These rides are about an hour long, but I needed relief from the Pratt Institute yuppies and the Lafayette Garden people. . .

Pratt yuppies are the new residents who have established cafes, bistros, and boutiques. They are the artsy, youthful class of gentrifiers who attend Pratt Institute. I have seen them buying marijuana from the local drug dealers and playing craps in front of their apartments. Some members of the community, predominately landlords, accept their presence. However, they refuse to assimilate into the community or communicate with others on a personal level. Even their favorite hangout, "Sputnik," is exclusive and rejects the people who live in the projects. Throughout the past two years, there has been only one Latino working in there. . .

The neighborhood that I once knew was changing, and I didn't fit. . .

Seaview is very diverse. Many of the residents in the neighborhood are working-class families. The majority of residents are Italian, Jewish, West Indian, and Asian. The neighborhood is also now integrated, whereas in the early '70s it was not. Between the early '70s and late '90s, it was hard for many Black families to move into the area because it was occupied by many Italian families, who, in some ways, had the power to choose who moved into the neighborhood. During this time, not much real estate in Canarsie was being sold to Blacks and other minorities. However, many Jewish real-estate owners began to rent to Black families, specifically people coming from the Caribbean. many of these owners believed that they would gain much revenue from renting to new immigrant families, because many were refusing to move into federal housing.

Seaview is green and quiet. The architecture almost seems to replicate that of Colonial times. There are houses painted in yellow and cream, with huge lawns of cedar trees and beautiful flowers. There are Black people who drive SUVs or classic Porsches. Beautiful Grenadian construction men reside there, bickering about the World Cup while renovating their stairs.

As someone who still misses the Seaview Theatre and the great charbroiled burgers with Spanish onions from the old Seaview Diner next door on Pennsylvania Avenue, we can tell you that Zaira's descriptions are as accurate as they are compelling.

In another section of the book, Upper West Sider (we lived there too!) Faith Harris interviews her Aunt Dee:

You said you lived in Spike Lee's brownstone. Did you know him personally?

Yes, I met Spike. That's when he was attending NYU, and he was doing his first film. I think it was Joe's Barbershop [Jose's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads]. I used to talk to his father, who's a musician. I got the apartment because at the time, I was working as a paralegal in Bed-Stuy for an attorney, whose name I would rather not mention. I was also going to Brooklyn College. It made more sense for me to live in Brooklyn than to live in Manhattan, so I rented from Spike's dad for about a year. It was a brownstone with a really nice apartment.

How does it feel to live where there are a lot of gangs?

When I was growing up on 116th Street, heroin was number one. My neighborhood was the hot spot in the whole country for heroin. Living on 116th Street was not a big transition because I was used to living in a very rough neighborhood. I was just not comfortable with a lot of gang activity.

Who do you live with now?

I live with my daughter, Nayo, and I have a kitten named Brooklyn.

What are some of the hotspots in the neighborhood where you like to go?

I like to hang out in Harlem. If I hang out in the neighborhood, I go to a little Italian restaurant on 91st Street. I know the owner; he's really nice, very friendly. The food is great; the prices are reasonable. It has a nice atmosphere. That restaurant has lasted more than any other, so he's doing something right. You know, we like to go to Tex-Mex every now and then.

Yeah, I also I like the Italian restaurant with the virgin Shirley Temple.

We not only like this book - we love it. The other five authors - Jennifer Arzu of Millbrook Projects in the Bronx, Noelle Tannen from Inwood, Sofija Kulikauskas in Harlem, Bed-Stuy's Alyssa La Caille and Makeda Gaillard-Bennett - also have gems on every page. Muchas gracias, New York Writers Coalition, NYC Neighborhood Story Project, Urban Academy, and everyone connected with this book.

We can't resist ending this post with Sofija's poem "Back at Ya, Boys":

Pssst!!!!
Stud muffin
Hey fella!
What's up sexy?
Hmmm...
He's so fresh
Ay papi chulo
Yo cutie!!
Ayo sexi!
DAMN!
What a stud!
Que gaupo papi
He's a hottie!
What a hunk.

What a book. Get a copy of From Kingsbridge to Canarsie: Reflections by 8 NYC Girls and you won't be sorry. It's really wonderful.

Saturday in Fort Greene: The Fourth Annual Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival

We arrived right on time at 3 p.m. today at beautiful Fort Greene Park for the Fourth Annual Fort Greene Literary Festival. Having been to last year's event (you can read our 2007 coverage on Louise Crawford's Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn) as well as the one in 2006, we knew we were in for a treat. And we weren't disappointed.

Much credit for the Festival goes to the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC), a neighborhood Fort Greene fixture at 80 Hansen Place, and under the direction of the dynamic Aaron Zimmerman, its founder and executive director, and many others, last year provided more than 1000 creative writing workshop sessions at more than 45 locations throughout New York City. (Thanks to NYWC for photos above and kids' photos below; you can see more at their website.)

Kudos for their work on the Festival also go to these presenters: chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council and Fort Greene resident Johnny Temple's indie publishing firm Akashic Books, "dedicated to the reverse gentrification of the literary world"; the Fort Greene Park Conservatory, who've done so much good work (those of Brooklyn natives know in what bad shape the place was before they came along); the well-known agency Global Talent Associates; and The Walt Whitman Project - a great Brooklyn organization known for events like tomorrow's reading, "Walt Whitman in the Neighborhood," at the Clinton Hill Art Gallery.

This year's featured writers were four current or former poets laureate:

New Jersey's famously controversial Amiri Baraka, a legend and a favorite of ours since the summer of 1969, when we saw a production of his plays "Dutchman" and "The Toilet" in the basement theater at Brooklyn College's Whitman Auditorium;

Bed-Stuy's "Janitor of History," Louis Reyes Rivera, a living bridge between African and Latino American communities whose work we first caught late at night years ago at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe;

Hal Sirowitz of Queens, also the best-selling poet in Norway and someone whose very funny work we've known and loved long before he got famous, back in the downtown scene of the late '70s and early '80s, writing for mags like Benzene and Zone;

and the best-selling (The Pursuit of Happyness, with Chris Gardner) and award-winning Quincy Troupe, former State Poet of California, now living in Harlem, who we first knew as a teacher at Richmond College (since merged with Staten Island Community College to form the College of Staten Island) when we were getting our M.A. in English at that school by the St. George ferry landing in 1973-74.

While the theme for this year's adult writer Festival guests was poets laureate, it just as well could have been, as far as we're concerned, Grand Old Men of People's Poetry. We suspect the organizers might be criticized for a lack of women writers, but they dominated in previous years, and these guys are not exactly the Establishment. And we've gone to a lot of events this summer where people were onstage, but this was the first one where all the performers whose next birthdays will range from age 60 to age 75.

Considerably younger - and the highlight, again this year, for us - were the two dozen or so kids from NYWC's summer New York Youth Writers Workshop at Fort Greene Park. Last year's MC, Laurie A. Cumbo, executive director and founder of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), again did a wonderful job but was particularly adept at putting the kids at ease (we overheard her telling them beforehand that "any butterflies in your stomach will fly away just before you go on") - as well as pronouncing sometimes challenging, if beautiful, names.

We came early enough to score a coveted seat in the shade and got to look at the makeshift stage all afternoon amid the ginkgos, maples, and weeping willows, with the mellow golden tones of the imposing art deco Brooklyn Tech building as the backdrop.

Laurie first introduced a great performance by the Indoda Entsha Percussion Ensemble, whose core group has been together for 17 years under the director of E. Preston Riddick aka A'ma Sakura Ka. They play a powerful and seductive blend of traditional West African, Afro-Cuban and hip-hop music, and today the men in the band were joined by five female dancers in bright African garb who got things off to a lively start.

Then the kids from the NYWC workshop came up to read; some of them we remembered warmly from last year's Festival.

Aleisha Small, first up, read two coming home narrative poems, "Mystical Keys" and "The Stormy Night," followed by Paul Francois, whose longpoem "Bad Day," in his matter-of-fact style surrealistically invoked the kind of flying bacon we've heretofore encountered only in the visual art of James Rosenquist.

David Nduka delivered two poems, one about basketball and James Brown, the other about a cat who attacks the President! . . . and starts a riot! Aliyah Jones' first poem began, I am a bird soaring in air / I hate being eaten. We know the feeling.

Bengum Abam-Depass's contribution was a list poem of things he likes, like visits to Texas and lots of adjectives, while Christopher Small's "My Mom" was a tribute to the woman "who protects me" and "mostly talks on the phone." Alberta Devor read a plaintive poem in the voice of a tree who has "grown taller than all of my friends."

Next up, Tristan Regist reprised the "stormy night" theme, this time darker - all hope is lost - and then read a beautiful poem about the "sound of fear" in which he said fear "smells of cayenne pepper." Then Aidan Amog recited a jaunty ode to the scooter of his dream. Both Aidan's poems employed sophisticated tropes and complex syntax.

Anneliese Treitmeier-McCarthy's long poem, befitting her status as one of the older kids, was a thoughtful and eloquent look at "Wartime in a Child's Eyes," narrated by a girl huddled in a basement during the bombing of her hometown. Anneliese was followed by the much littler Talaia Regist in a pink polka-dot dress, whose poems were about growing wings to fly to Florida to visit grandma and a reflection on "Happiness." Happiness for us was listening to her poems.

Josiah Livingston, a cutie in dreads and shorts, read "The Things I Care About," in which the environmentally-conscious young poet celebrated "all the polar bears in Antarctica." Immediately afterward, the scholarly Ijangmarie Abam-Depass read a love letter to her Montessori pre-K and a narrative showing how good can come out of even broken glass.

Joella Fraser, in a little red dress, read "I Open the Door." What do you think the speaker saw when she did that? Hint: it's really, really scary. She followed with a piece called "Don't Tell Me" that reminded us of Jamaica Kincaid's classic monologue "Girl."

Osose Ebesunum, one of the older girls, read a whimsical narrative about being hit by lightning and being transformed into, in turn, a flying girl, a mermaid and the crown princess of a secret city. Her "Ode to Snow" asked, "Why don't you come every day?" Um, it was a good poem but as with some of Amiri Baraka's work, we disagree with its sentiments.

Raquel Hoisen, another older poet (still under 13, we'd guess), told about a fish who was simultaneously imaginative, belligerent and claustrophobic and then in "A Troubador's Song" used not only sophisticated rhyme but skillfull anastrophe (Lost the enemy was).

Najaya Royal, one of last year's standouts, whom we also saw earlier this summer at the Women's Health Festival in Bed-Stuy, read her now-classic (to us, anyway) "Teardrops" and "If I Were a Song," which invokes the hope found by field slaves in their inspiring music, a theme that would later be taken up by the adult Louis Reyes Rivera.

Joseph Francois, another poet we enjoyed last year, used rhyming couplets to good effect in "The Day I Fell Down" and call-and-response (Could someone say amen?) in "If I Could Fly," while Ashley Quarless fetchingly read a moving poem in the voice of a dying tree.

Gabriel Treitmeier-McCarthy contributed a poem about his cat and another one about a fearsome storm that nevertheless ended with a line that relieved our fears: However, I survived. Future rock star that he is, Gabriel daringly eschewed the steps and jumped off the platform following his solo.

Although that was a hard act to follow, Kayla Quarless was up to it with her "I Am Sad in Winter" (see, not everyone likes snow) and "Don't Tell Me to..." (go to bed/ turn off the TV/ shut the computer/ teach my sister social studies). And then Tamara read one of the afternoon's most sophisticated lyrics, "Where Are the Stars?" and the sharply-drawn "Behind the Door."

Anjelika Amog (in case you haven't figured it out, a lot of these poets are siblings, like William and Dorothy Wordsworth or Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti) recited "Boredom," avoiding the fallacy of imitative form by enlivening the poem with lines like boredom smelling like week-old cheese. She also included skillful use of slant rhyme, and her next poem, equally complex, employed allusions to childhood chants like "Rain, rain, go away" in the middle of the narrative.

Jediael Fraser read "Nervousness," which evokes tasting "your own taste buds because they're huddling together" and "clouds laughing at you and booing you offstage." Needless to say, Jediael went offstage to applause and cheers following his second poem, which employed an ABAB rhyme scheme and whose setting moved from Prospect Park to Disneyland to the bright lights of Broadway.

Last but not least was Shyanne Bennett, who at first seemed as if she embodied some of what the speaker in Jediael's "Nervousness" was experience but soon settled into a beautiful long poem that was married an emo sensibility to a spiritual awakening for "weary eyes, tired eyes."

Laurie Cumbo then asked all of the poets to come forward to the stage for a group photo and a final round of appreciative applause by the audience. As Laurie warned parents that the adult readers' work would probably contain, not surprisingly, "adult content" not suitable for young'uns, the Indoda Entsha Percussion Ensemble were brought back on for a reprise performance.

Starving, we trekked over to Myrtle Avenue - a street we still recall as "Murder Avenue" from back in the bad old days (though we do miss our stalwart Myrtle Avenue el) - for a slice of Sicilian at the always-friendly Little Louie's pizzeria on the corner of Adelphi. We came back satisfied - and with a can of Diet Pepsi - for the performances of the poets laureate.

Louis Reyes Rivera read excerpts from his 155-page epic poem in progress, Jazz in Jail, an allegory in which Jazz gets together all the forms of music engendered by the African Diaspora and is put on trial for conspiracy. Reyes Rivera used the rhythms and tricks of jazz, hip-hop, doo wop and bebop - as well as varied voices in selections like "Where Silence is Brass" and "Amicus Curiae" to blinding effect.

Strongest of all was Reyes Rivera's final section in the voice of Mother Blues, a lament in the form of legal argument indicting history for misappropriating the music of the slaves, from the fields to, well, 20th century New York City:
Ask Alberta Hunter why you find her so blue
She said she'd be be paid for the sounds she made
But never got paid her due

(We were lucky enough to see Alberta Hunter sing at our beloved Cookery on West 8th and University in the Village after she'd finally, in her 80s, been rediscovered following too many years of obscurity as a nurse on Roosevelt Island.)

Hal Sirowitz, up next, walked unsteadily onstage and had to read sitting down. Putting the audience at ease with his first poem, which explained that his Parkinson's disease has not affected his performance in the bedroom, he also proved that his dry delivery in that trademark Brooklyn/Queens accent, still makes his poems funny, even if you've heard them a dozen times before, as we have.

His "Mother Said," "Father Said," and "My Therapist" poems are justly famous but basically all of his poems are not just wryly amusing but are a special species of Jewish wisdom literature:

Quincy Troupe, up next, read some of his newer work (he has lots to choose from, having authored 17 books) like "Switchin in the Kitchen," which employs fast-footwork wordplay and "rapology" to segue from "the sick war, invented by chicken hawk cheney-bush wags" to "pigology" and "filo-plumes."

Most exciting was the last part of his long poem, "My Solo," which preaches the gospel of neo-hoodoo from the point of view of a contemporary griot who invokes historical figures from Miles Davis (whom Troupe has written three books about) to Marie Laveau.

Amiri Baraka was the last poet of the day, reading some of his "Poems for Newark" such as "Something in the Way of Things (In Town)" with its fierce concern for social justice and its cultural commentary:
Remember Steppen Fetchit how we laughed
An all your Sunday school images giving flesh and giggling
With the ice pick high off his head
Made ya laugh anyway
I can see something in the way of our selves
I can see something in the way of our selves
That's why I say the things I do, you know it

Fiercer still was his attack on "peanut-head yellow Negroes" who talk as if they have a hundred pickles in their mouth in "Local Peanuts." It never mentions Newark Mayor Cory Booker's name, but it's pretty devastating and provocative.

Baraka said his last poem would be
"Somebody Blew Up America," the controversial poem that caused him to be removed as poet laureate of New Jersey. We started to get up, not wanting to be offended and trying to get a head start on everyone else leaving, but stopped on the side to listen to him as the poem gathered force.

Baraka's performance was masterly and masterful; we think, whatever its questionable assumptions, the poem stands as a tour de force which indicts of much of the powers who've controlled the West over the past few centuries, but you can judge for yourself via this performance on YouTube:

After that, Laurie Cumbo said she wasn't going to try to follow up except to thank everyone for coming and that books and other info were available at the Akashic Books and Brooklyn Public Library tables. For us, this was the best Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival yet.