Poetry New York

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            Wednesday night The Bowery Poetry Club presented “The Page Meets the Stage” featuring Sage Francis and Jeffery McDaniel’s. Sage Francis, a well known underground hip-hop artist and spoken word poet commanded the stage with his sizeable presence as McDaniel let his poetry speak for itself. These contrasting individuals used each other’s complementary energies to build the crowd into a frenzy and put on a show full of political punch lines and fist pumping lyricism. 

            McDaniel read from his published books such as The Splinter Factory and Endarkenment covered everything from love, to government corruption, to the Amadou Diallo tragedy. He exuded a calm, collected exterior with a hurricane of words to knock the audience out of their seats. McDaniel used the power of his words to exemplify his powerful messages and disregarded performance as a tool. It seemed as though when reading, he because so entranced with the poetry that he ignored the audience completely, resulting in a performance stemming from the depths of artistic passion. The piece that really stuck out to me was one in response to the circumstances of Amadou Diallo’s death. He spoke of white privilege, an issue hard for a white man to do without sounding racist, in a provocative manner that was both witty and cynical. McDaniel painted a scene of him in a car chase with the police and having to hide his crack rock. When caught he put on his best white man’s accent and said, “Excuse me officer, BLAH BLAH BLAH…” Mocking the law enforcement system and giving an example of how the most guilty white men can just play their “white card”, and get off with a slap on the wrist. McDaniel’s composure when reading this spicy piece surfaced the essential feeling needed to adequately represent the situation: being nonchalant. McDaniel’s performance was stunning, so stunning in fact that I bought one of his books at the end of the night.
            Sage Francis, a well-known underground hip-hop artist, performed several a cappella versions of song from albums like “A Healthy Distrust” and “Personal Journals”. The first piece Francis performed played off McDaniel’s theme of a broken home. He prefaced this piece with an anecdote of a conversation with his grandmother when he was a child. He said that she essentially told him that God was just like Santa Claus: he doesn’t exist. Francis explained that he then immediately prayed to insure that God still knew he believed, and later realized the message his grandmother was attempting to convey was that God is used as a tool in the same way Santa Claus is. She was attempting to open his eyes to the way others can manipulate your mind and the song “Sun vs. Moon” does the same. It broke down illusive barriers and revealed taboo truths about what the common person believes God is. Francis’ presence on stage is undeniable and somewhat intimidating, especially in sequence with his intense lyrics. But in order to keep the mood lighthearted he often followed a serious piece with a goofy jig at the end. I couldn’t have asked for a more entertaining performer. Francis is an amazing poet and his demeanor on stage brings that much more intensity to his work in addition to softening the blow of his words a little bit.

            These two dramatically different poets complemented each other eloquently. Francis brought the intensity and McDaniel, the simplicity. They really did justice to finding the balance between page, and stage.

 

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