Video Killed The Poetry Star
On The Second Poetry Renaissance Documentary
There was a period of time where Youtube poetry videos dominated, the rise of Button Poetry set off a wave of similar platforms and that time has passed. It’s all Tiktok and Reels now. Most young people aren’t discovering poetry from picking up a book or reading your poem about your garden in a print mag. Instead they are doom scrolling and the AI God of the almighty Algorithm when it isn’t dividing the nation and turning your step-dad into a Nazi sometimes throws a poem in there. It’s good math. I don’t think it matters much what brings you into the fold. Poetry was a purely verbal folk art form for the majority of its existence anyway. I was of the first generation that encountered poetry by video. It was before Youtube dude.
In the early 2000s, my mom was doing what she always did— working her ass off— she would drop off my younger sibling and I at my Nana’s at five am to go to work at the convenient store and we’d hang there until school started. Danny my little sister was all about cartoons. And the 5 am block on Cartoon Network was always on— not the good anime they played at night like Dragonball Z or Yu Yu Hakusho just mostly Hanna Barbara reruns or some shit. I was ten or eleven. Music had begun to consume my world. My mom was into alternative and emo music and I was in the pre -Napster musical revolution— I would borrow every CD I could to rip the music onto my computer so I could download it on my shitty 512mb SanDisc Mp3 player. I didn’t care about the cartoons anymore. I needed music. Nana wasn’t into music. Her taste stopped developing after the Beach Boys.
In her bedroom I would watch MTV and VH1 mesmerized by bands like Audio Slave & the whole Nu-metal thing that for some reason they were still trying to jam down everyone’s throats. But for a few months and I don’t know why my Nana had HBO. It didn’t last and looking back on it, I am still unsure how (probably swindled by some Cable bro) but before school one morning I found a rerun of Def Poetry Jam. It was the first time I encountered poetry that wasn’t fucking Beowulf or some old English poem we learned in class. It was alive. Mos Def brought on poets like Amiri Baraka, Taylor Mali and John S. Hall. I was enamored. Sometimes if Def Jam wasn’t on and all the music videos were trash I’d see a documentary on a poet that PBS would air. It was wild to see these people celebrated for making pretty words.
If you would have asked me then if I ever thought that I’d be in a documentary I would never have believed you. In 2022, I met Steve Rodgers & Alexandra Newman, the producers of Here’s the Story & Driving Jersey. The saw the beginnings of the Poetry Renaissance forming and wanted in. They followed our shows for several month & then we did a big curated show with an open mic at the Barron Art Center in Woodbridge NJ. What resulted was Voices in the Garden. It aired in February of 2023 and sent everything into overdrive. This little working class art movement that started in a dirty Italian bar on the Jersey Shore hit America. And we pissed off a lot of people. But that’s just the cost of doing business. The thing has spread to seven states and that number is only going up with half a dozen more starting to materialize.
The whole movement is going on four years old now and has become this sentient entity of itself. I have stepped back from hosting to pass the shows onto all new hosts. In August, we had a packed house at Jersey Shore Art Center and we shot again. This time the energy was bigger than the one before. You could feel it. It was palpable. Back stage, I told the performers that there was two shows going on— the one in front of the theatre and the tv cameras. The goal was to hit both. No one disappointed.
Tomorrow the sequel Voices in the Garden II: The Midsummer Night Dream airs on PBS at 8pm. and if you’re local we are having a premiere party at our home venue My Way Cafe, 823 Broadway, Long Branch. It's going to be the show of the year and I hope you join us.
I hope to see you there. As always if you want to support the thing my Venmo & PayPal are @damianrucci