I’ve never had the chance to fully write out my thoughts on this little thing of ours over here in New Jersey. It’s hard to gage what something is or its success when you’re in the midst of it. When you create something and it balloons into something that exists on its own accord, you need to take a step back to analyze what it is in the first place. That’s what this will try to accomplish. A little origin story with a little waxing poetic about what it all means and maybe I’ll get close to describing it. But really, if you wanted to fully understand what this movement is the only way to fully understand it would be to pop out to a show.
But first some prologue…
The New Jersey Poetry Renaissance is a working class literary movement that emerged in New Jersey following the pandemic. Typically, there were two avenues poets could go down. There was the academic and more literary paths where the majority of it was just submitting poetry to magazines with the occasional reading. These readings are typically quiet and reserved. And usually punctuated with elitism and weird degree based posturing. On the other hand, poetry slams which had once been birthed in a Chicago bar by Marc Kelly Smith back in the 80s and were rebellious and daring in their day had become played out. A bar game to make poetry more enjoyable by the working class had been ruined by its own success. Slam teams from around the country now competed for huge cash prizes and that made them find formulas to win. What resulted was just a decade of corny trauma poems that sounded the same.
Other scenes and bubbles had popped up like the Wanna-Be Bukowski club or the Outlaw scene whatever the hell that was. In 2021 I was hosting a poetry show at a record store / coffee shop in New Brunswick, New Jersey near Rutgers that I thought was a shoe-in. It was the first show I was hosting since returning from Missouri and it was called The Chamber Cantos but it failed. People were still staying home and no one was ready to pop out. Subsequently, the show was shut down, the venue closed and that little project ended after ten readings. I had a long train journey home to the Jersey Shore, switching at Rahway station down to the Bayhead line. I feverishly smoked cigarettes looking at the high-mooned sky and thought that maybe my times of hosting or doing poetry readings was over.
But just then over the coarse of a half hour waiting for the train transfer I was contacted by three venues to host three separate shows. One at a coffee shop. One at a dive bar. One at a weed smoking lounge. I figured one of them would work and I would drop the other two. As you know that’s not what happened…
So What Really Happened Then?
A whole circuit formed and soon I wasn’t hosting three shows. I was hosting five, and then seven and then ten. Cord Moreski was hosting his show in Asbury and we had this weird chain of venues where people could pop out a lot and grow as performers. We began to book comedians and musicians and this just added to the snowball effect of this strange moment in time.
The NJ Poetry Renaissance is a solid mix of poetry, working class heart, and punk rock ethos. We stopped calling them poetry readings but instead we call them poetry shows. A reading sounds too antiquated and boring for this moment. Instead we call them shows. Because every single show is more than just a series of performances with an open mic attached to it. Every single show is an event. It’s a party. It’s a fucked up dysfunctional family but everyone is accepted and the community is the most welcoming I’ve ever experienced.
What really happens is if you expose people to poetry in an engaging way without the layers of pretentiousness or literary-minded ambiguity what you find is that people are here for it. Poetry is the most accessible art-form because it doesn’t require anything. You can write a poem with anything on anything. Any person can walk in off the street to one of our shows and sign up for the open mic and give it a try.
With the success of Voices in The Garden and all the noise we’ve been making in the Garden State, this “renaissance” is spreading and influencing scenes in New England, Missouri, Ohio, Florida and beyond.
So what does all this mean?
Well first of all, the NJ Poetry Renaissance is changing performance poetry and elevating it to new levels If you take poets and have them get up on stage often what you find is just like comedy and music, poets get better with practice. The sound of the poetics coming from our shows is distinct. It’s rebellious. It’s in your face. It’s New Jersey.
We’re not going anywhere and we will continue to spread poetry to the youth and working people. I believe poetry is for the beggar and the king and everyone in between. The NJ Poetry Renaissance is going to change American poetics forever.
You just wait and see.
Hey thank you for reading. If you did please consider donating to the NJ Poetry Renaissance we’re 100 percent community funded.
Literally teared up. Been around a long time through every type of poetry event you mentioned … we tried to get momentum in east village 90’s… no one could get traction. Long and short story lol . What you’re doing is amazing. I’ll support in anyway. Thank you.
Ohhh!!! This is all most interesting. Thank you so much for the update!