“I really think poetry is a living thing now for all of us,” said Coon, whose organization accounted for the smattering of senior citizens among the bohemian twentysomethings. “Poets writing for the ear and poets writing for the page -- both are opening modern literature for human beings.”

Inside, a rapt audience listened as Seaton, a poet with 13 books, and Blair, a past slam champion, took turns at the microphone. Seaton read from a page in her hand; Blair performed from memory, like a singer.

“A little-known fact is that we originally called this ‘Page vs. Stage,’ but we never meant it as a completion,” said Taylor Mali, a published poet and past slam champion who oversees a series of Page Meets Stage events at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York.

Had it been a competition, though, Blair would have won easily. Seaton’s poems were wan little things, subtle and faintly musical, and she didn’t put much oomph into the reading. By contrast, Blair was not only a master showman, but his verses were also complex and skillful – page-ready, in other words.

“I don’t think about performance as I write,” said Seaton, a former director of the creative writing program at the University of Miami. “But I do think about sound. I read the poems aloud as I write. I am so intimidated by the stage, but today I’m having so much fun with Blair, I’m reading better than usual.”


A struggling Chicago poet named Marc Smith invented slam poetry in 1984. Determined to rescue poetry from effetery, Smith showed how to attract an audience by injecting passion, politics and – most of all – competition into the live performance of poetry.

And Smith, though no longer associated with the National Poetry Slam, has succeeded. Considering the passion displayed in West Palm Beach, both on stage and in the audience, it’s not easy to remember that only 20 years ago critics were seriously posing the question: Is poetry dead?

The grim joke among the poets gathered at the Key West Literary Seminar in 1992, for example, was that only 400 people in America read poetry – and they were all poets. That year’s seminar on the work of Elizabeth Bishop, by the way, was by far the most poorly attended in Key West history.


Compare that sad memory to Saturday night’s National Poetry Slam finals at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. As the four finalist teams performed, the audience of 800 expressed its enthusiasm with all the decorum of a crowd at a Miami Dolphins game, though with less public drunkenness and fewer fistfights.

As Henry Sampson, NPSI vice president said, spoken word should get most of the credit for the revival of poetry, including traditional poetry. “Hip-hop, spoken word and slam poetry all evolved separately,” Sampson said. “But they do enhance one other, and page poetry benefits, too. It’s all a great breeding ground of words and rhythm.”

The National Poetry Slam is the largest group competition in the world. It consists of teams performing three-minute poems for judges randomly selected from the audience. The judges rate each performance on a scale of one to 10 – a one is “Britney Spears,” while a 10 is “Shakespeares,” organizers helpfully explained. The crowd frequently boos any judge awarding less than a “9.”

Slammed by syntax. Pummeled by a poem.

The world heavyweight championship of words delivered with attitude is headed for West Palm Beach in the form of the 20th annual National Poetry Slam Aug. 4 to 8.

And yes, fans, this is a competition every bit as heated as baseball or boxing.

"This is blood, sweat and tears poetry delivered live inches from your face," says Henry Sampson, co-director of this championship edition. "Our poets take the very best elements of stand-up comedy, dramatic monologue and performance-based poetry and deliver it with the energy of hip-hop, punk rock and jazz."

Sixty-eight teams are set to compete in preliminary rounds held at various West Palm Beach Clematis Street nightclubs Aug. 4-6 followed by a single-elimination of the top 16 teams in semifinal bouts Aug. 7. A final four will hit the stage at the Palm Beach County Convention Center and compete for the $2,000 top prize Aug. 8.

The four and five-member poetry teams, usually ranging in age from 20s to 40s, get three minutes to perform each original poem with no costumes, props or music allowed. The five judges for each four-team slam are chosen at random from the audience with Olympic-style scoring: 10 points is tops.

"If you have an opinion and a pulse you can be a judge," says Eirik Ott, the marketing director for the Austin, Texas-based National Poetry Slam. Ott was a member of the 1999 Slam Championship team from San Francisco.

"Our final was in front of 3,000 people in Chicago," Ott recalls. "Imagine the roar of a rock show, but it was poetry. There are over 100 venues that host slams throughout the year in this country plus slams throughout Europe, so being the best, world champion is powerful mojo."

Tony Jackson hopes to feel that mojo in West Palm Beach. His Austin Poetry Slam Team finished third at last year's Final in Madison, Wis.

"We as individual artists do this all year long, but we have three to four months on a team where you're actually bringing your skills together," says the 36-year-old software engineer. "We write together and come up with team pieces," he explains. "Typically, you've got four slots in each competition and you can perform with other team mates or by yourself."

Like any competition, there is strategy to consider. Top teams have a bag of A material so they can be nimble enough to read the room and the random judges that have been chosen. Audience members are encouraged to hoot and holler their opinions at each competition.

"You have to look at the audience and figure out what the best thing is for that audience," says Jackson, "whether it's a dramatic reciting of a poem to a comedy routine. What will people in West Palm Beach respond to the best?

"You're also looking at what has done the best so far at that competition. If someone does something serious and heart-wrenching you might go that direction if it plays well or you can do comedy if that plays well. We found in Madison that other teams couldn't bring the laughter that we could and comedy did well because it was younger crowds," Jackson said.

A West Palm Beach team competing in the national slam is called The Stage. That's the poetry slam home team at R.J.'s Restaurant on 45th Street. The team captain and slam master is Therese Hill, a 14-year veteran of the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office.

"We're going to have fun," says Hill, whose nickname is Chunky. "I have been to the nationals six times. I placed fifth in the nation in 2004. I went to the individual world poetry slam in Canada in 2006 and placed in the top 20."

Hill's current team comes from a variety of occupations. They each competed to be a member of The Stage.

"We have an actress/playwright Rachel Finley; a teacher in the prison system, Derinaa Parker; a paralegal, Desiree Karnis, who also coaches youth poetry teams; and Jashua Sa-Ra, a teacher of African drums, poetry and dance," says Hill. "We've been working together as The Stage for three or four months."

Hill first saw a poetry slam in Fort Lauderdale in 1998. "I was drawn to the fact that there is a mass audience who will listen to what you say. And maybe in that mass audience there's one person who needs to hear your message."

The final was awarded to West Palm Beach, says Ott, for a couple reasons. "The cultural makeup was a main point because it's black, white, Cuban, Dominican, Haitian -- a real melting pot -- and that's what poetry slams are all about.

"Another reason," Ott continues, "is that for the past five years some top slam teams have come from the Deep South and we've never had a final in the South. "And we've never had a final near a beach. How can you not want a final in a place called West Palm Beach?"

Paul Lomartire is a freelance writer based in South Florida.

Bouts, and best bets

The preliminary and semifinal bouts will be at the following venues: Dr. Feelgood's (219 Clematis); O'Shea's (531 Clematis); Respectable Street Cafe (518 Clematis); The Lounge (517 Clematis); Monarchy (221 Clematis); 10@2/Roxy's (309 Clematis). One insider who wished to remain anonymous says these four preliminary slam bouts are the ones to watch:

Madison vs. Nuyorican (NYC) vs. Boston vs. Houston (7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 4, The Lounge)

New York City's Nuyorican Poets Cafe fields one of the strongest teams in the nation year after year, and this year they are going toe-to-toe with the exhilarating team from Boston's Cantab Bar. these are two titans of slam poetry throwing everything they have at each other, and it is sure to be a bout full of verbal artillery.
Charlotte vs. Berkeley vs. San Diego vs. Seattle (7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 5, Monarchy)

Any slam bout with Charlotte is going to be a devastating show, but this one pits the two-time national champions with superb teams from Berkeley and Seattle. San Diego is a relatively new team, but the word is that they are smoking hot, too, so this bout could be the hottest bout of the entire prelims. Not to be missed.

Austin vs. Forth Worth vs. Dallas vs. Minneapolis (9 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 5, Monarchy)

This bout features three heavyweight Texas teams with a long histories and strong rivalries plus a young group of smoking performers from Minneapolis. Each team knows this is the hardest bout in their prelims, so each team will be bringing their best poems and their most ferocious performances. Should be smoking!

Richmond vs. Boston Lizard Lounge vs. San Antonio vs. NYC Urbana (7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6, Monarchy)

The NYC Urbana team always brings the fire and have won more than one national championship, and they are going against really strong teams from Richmond and Boston's Lizard Lounge. Tough bout, and way too hard to call.

FORT LAUDERDALE -- With You I Want To Live, a pink neon sculpture by British artist Tracey Emin, is a bit of a triple-threat. In its own right, the work reflects Emin’s millennial-tinged obsessions with ardor - its pleasures, its unavoidable pratfalls. She is, after all, also the author of Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a pup tent stitched with the 102 names of people she shagged or with whom she simply slumbered.

The piece is also the title of a show, now at the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale and culled from the private holdings of four South Florida collectors. Scrolled like a quick jot on a notepad, the sculpture suggests this maxim: Why buy something if you’re not smitten with its presence?

Pointing to art as a vehicle for quick and certain profit seems sort of reckless at the moment (not to mention unimaginative), and it’s just not enough to explain our appetite for love affairs, whether they are with man, woman, or the 41 artworks on display and on loan from the collection of art dealers Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea. (A second gathering from The Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Collection is also on exhibit).

Installed in the museum’s second-floor galleries, the Locksley and Shea collection mirrors a 40-year involvement with groundbreaking artists and with a calling that both men find as essential as oxygen.

“I think that the collecting gene begins with necessities. It begins with needing a bowl from which to eat,” says Locksley in a Q&A printed in the exhibition’s catalogue. “The need to have the basic tools to prepare food and to live, which man, by nature, decorates. That evolves into collecting.

“Some people want to possess beauty...,” the 78-year old adds. We want to own it; we need to own it.”

The show is indeed a grand one, housing some of the most important and varied makers of 20th and 21st century art. Whether you love their offerings (Mark Bradford’s collage-and-acrylic homage to the Los Angeles skyline; the spare elegance of Robert Morris’ plywood installation,), or they elicit a response along the lines of “meh” (Damien Hirst’s acid-inspired dot painting; Takashi Murakami’s super-flat ode to Louis Vuitton), most of it holds a place in any thoughtful dialogue about contemporary art.

The show opens with an absorbing study by two young Berlin-based painters, Maike Abetz and Oliver Drescher. Tausend Plateaus is a large-scale acrylic canvas as ambitious as it is delicately rendered.

The picture is stuffed with the iconography of art across the ages and includes the Greek wood-god Pan, the Muses,and medieval gargoyles alongside a riff on da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and a fiery Sacred Heart. With a pair of young lovers at its center and a smattering of Fender guitars, the painting reminded me of the art-pastiche-rock of Sonic Youth, particularly its 1988 release, Daydream Nation, which is similarly frenzied and lush in its attack.

Tausend Plateaus introduces the wide span of aesthetics found within the show’s interiors and illustrates how Locksley and Shea cultivate relationships equally with contemporary masters and up-and-comers. The collectors bought works by Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, for instance, before anyone took either artist seriously.

Locksley’s intensely personal relationship with his acquisitions is also evidenced in the rarely seen graphite drawings of Andy Warhol’s flowers, made exclusively for Locksley by the Pop artist in 1975. The collector describes his relationship with Warhol as bizarre in that he would visit the artist at night at his studio on New York’s East 47th Street. There they would chat, alone, with the lights off and Factory denizen Billy Name hiding in a nearby closet.

Some of what’s on deck has never been viewed: a stunning Native American rain wall, comprised of 11 polychrome panels and once owned by Donald Judd, and a hulking mixed-media piece by NewYork street-and-graffiti artist Swoon, which was commissioned exclusively for the exhibit.

Of note are random meditations on the overlooked locales and people of American cities, such as John Sonsini’s vibrant oil portrait of four Mexican day laborers. Despite hints of urban concerns throughout the exhibit, there’s not much of a direct address to thematic unity. The passion for collecting, the show’s chief premise, for example, is never deeply explored through its artworks, and what does appear just seems like a sample of Locksley’s and Shea’s greatest hits.
Grouping works by movement or era - as with the minimalist canvases made by Robert Mangold and Brice Marden in the early 1970s - functions adequately, but a meatier approach would have perhaps assembled motifs such as beauty, and our enthrallment with its presence and its absence.

Also, it must be said, too many lengthy placards explaining the providence of artwork slows things down. Do we really need to read about how the Luo brothers blend old and new Chinese culture when their wood panels clearly mash together tigers, lotus blossoms, Coke cans and Sly Stallone? My guess is no.

Yet these are small gripes, really, because the summer months typically fill South Florida’s galleries with art geared toward schoolchildren or with dull-to-horrid juried exhibitions. It’s a delight to have a show of this caliber to visit, and not just through our heat-crazed season but straight into next spring.

Emma Trelles is an arts and culture writer based in South Florida.

With You I Want to Live: the Gordon Locksley and George T. Shea Collection is on display through March 22, 2010, at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale/Nova Southeastern University. Hours: Open daily from 11 am-5pm, except closed Mondays and holidays, open until 8 pm Thursdays, and open from noon to 5 pm Sundays. Admissions: $10 adults, $7 seniors, military members, children 6-17. Information: Call 954-525-5500 or visit www.moaflnsu.org.

It is often a delight when a museum reaches into its permanent collection and unearths hidden treasures that are rarely, if ever, seen. It’s a practical impossibility for any art institution to display all the works acquired throughout the years.

This leaves the curatorial staff charged with the disheartening task of labeling some works worthy of display and others not. But always, in the back of their minds, they’ve cataloged those underplayed works awaiting an opportunity to give them their due.

This is the case with Expanding Boundaries: Lyrical Abstraction Selections from the Permanent Collection now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The show includes nearly 50 works by artists including Natvar Bhavsar, Stanley Boxer, Lamar Briggs, Dan Christensen, David Diao, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Dorothy Gillespie, Cleve Gray, Paul Jenkins, Ronnie Landfield, Pat Lipsky, Joan Mitchell, Robert Natkin, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Garry Rich, John Seery, Jeff Way and Larry Zox.

The museum’s chief curator and organizer of the exhibit, Wendy Blazier, knew of “hundreds of works – beautiful paintings that we had not had the opportunity to show. And there were a group of these strong abstract works from the '70s and '80s that showed a seminal period for a group of young, emerging painters.”

Their style was referred to as Lyrical Abstraction. The phrase was coined by Larry Aldrich, the founder of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Conn., in 1970 as he began to notice certain themes repeating themselves in the work of young painters.

At the time, Aldrich remarked, “it became apparent that in painting there was a movement away from the geometric, hard-edge, and minimal, toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions in colors which were softer and more vibrant. Painters were creating, in significant numbers, works that were visually 'beautiful'…”

These young artists, emerging on the heels of Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and Minimalism, exhibited a sheer sense of joy for the physicality and sensuousness of painting. Yet, they felt restricted by the flat, mathematical-like flat surfaces in vogue at the time. Plus, the art world was increasingly demanding breakthroughs and there was ongoing talk that painting was “dead.” What else could be done with this dying medium?

But these painters saw an opportunity for reinvention by incorporating the prior three decades of American painting into a new, fresh and bold statement. They paid homage to the structure and intellect of conceptual art, but they incorporated sweeping, gestural brushwork into their abstract compositions – infusing their work with the emotional energy of New York School painters such as Pollock and DeKooning.

Often, using the new acrylic paints, they worked to imbue a sculptural, surface dimension to their canvases. As Blazier explains, “These artists loved painting. They scoffed at the serious nihilism of the minimalists.” They merged the abstract and conceptual with bold color, making their work a medley of ideas, brushstroke, color, and emotion – hence, “lyrical.”

In Paul Jenkins' A Sound of Surf (1970), one views large fields of sweeping color emerge from a minimal, whitewashed canvas. The watercolors beautifully bleed downward creating interesting pools of nuance. Here, as in all the works, you clearly see what Blazier calls “a marriage of sensibilities between the action of gestural abstraction, the quite nuances of color field, and the rational structure of minimalism.”

Combining intellect and emotion, the works on display bear testimony to Picasso’s remark, “There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something.”

Painting had been pronounced dead in the early '70s and has been repeatedly deemed so in every period since. How unsettling for painters it must be that this misquoted remark, first made by French painter Paul Delaroche in the mid-1800s in reference to the advent of photography, lives on, despite the evidence of notable great painters emerging time and again after his utterance.

The truth is that paining is not dead, nor will it ever be. This charming exhibit serves as a gentle reminder of the triumph that is American painting.

Jenifer A. Vogt is a marketing communications professional and resident of Boca Raton. She’s been enamored with American painting for the past 20 years.

Expanding Boundaries: Lyrical Abstraction Selections from the Permanent Collection is at the Boca Raton Museum of Art through August 30th. Tickets: Adults $8, Seniors $6, free for children 12 and under. Summer Hours: Weds, Thurs, Fri 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, Sat and Sun 12-5pm. Closed Mondays, Tuesday and holidays. Call 561-392-2500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org.

HOLLYWOOD -- Bowman Hastie, a writer and editor in Brooklyn, discovered by chance that his Jack Russell terrier had artistic talent.

An observant Hastie noticed his dog, named Tillamook Cheddar, or Tillie for short, scratching on a writing pad. Curious as to the patterns Tillie was creating, Hastie pulled out some carbon paper from a drawer and placed it between the papers of the pad.

Tillie went to work scratching away, and when Hastie removed the carbon, he was astounded at the artistic quality of what had resulted. Thus commenced Tillie's art career, and with the advice of an artist friend, Hastie then added color to his dog's palette.

The terrier's scratchings are recorded on a pigment-coated piece of vellum, which is then attached to a sheet of lithograph paper backed by mat board. Tillie then uses her teeth and claws to apply pressure, creating the lines and patterns which dominate her masterpieces.

Today, Tillie is billed as the “world’s preeminent dog artist.” She has been featured in national and international magazines, on television shows as far away as Japan, and even had her own exhibit in a New York City gallery.

Now her accidental art is the focus of a museum show at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Friday night, Tillie and Hastie were welcoming visitors to the center as the dog dashed excitedly around the galleries. The Tillamook Cheddar Mid-Career Retrospective 1999-2009 is part of the center's summer theme, which revolves around art associated with canines.

For instance, also featured at the center is The Pneumatikos Series, six large (4-foot-by-3-foot) charcoal drawings of dogs by Virginia Fifield, a Hollywood-based artist. Pneumatikos, Fifield explains, means "breath of the spirit" in Greek, and is used to mean the presence of God.

"Through realism and scale, my intent is to first draw the viewer to the image…but then into a deeper contemplation of the true nature and spirit of the subjects of these drawings, to provoke consideration and questioning of our illusion of ownership, dominance and control of the world and the beings that share it with us," she wrote.

Fort Lauderdale gallery owner Mary Ellen Charapko, who represents Fifield, said the artist's works "emit an inner spirit that will stop you in your tracks. Fifield has the ability to draw you into their apprehensions, moods, desires and inner beauty.”

Two other rooms at the center are filled with paintings, photographs, drawings and videos of pets. It’s a Dog’s Life is a collection of dog-themed, contemporary works from the private collection of Francie Bishop Good and Davis Horvitz. Another room is a community-based show titled We Love Pets, in which the community was invited to display images of pets.

The dog-related exhibits run through Sunday, Aug. 16.

The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood is located at 1650 Harrison St. in Hollywood. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m., to 5 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free for members, $7 for adults and $4 for students, seniors and children ages 4-13. Gallery admission is free to all on the third Sunday of every month. For more information, visit www.artandculturecenter.org, or call (954) 921-3274.