Poetry New York

Jeffrey McDaniel has a knack for making one feel completely outraged and warm and fuzzy inside all at the same time. His lines are bittersweet and thought provoking. He touches on issues that everyone has dealt with throughout their life such as love, family tragedy, insomnia, racism, and the belief of Santa Claus and God. It's amazing hearing his voice drag across the page annunciating every word. However, it's not the sound of his poetry that makes it worth listening to it's the content and the way he plays with vocabulary. It makes one, or well at least me, sit on the edge of my seat in anticipation because each line is just that good. He's not "slamming", he's simply reading, however, he thinks of himself as a spoken word artist trying to break the boundaries of the stage and the page, and he does so pretty damn well.
In his poem The First Straw from his first collection of poems, The Splinter Factory, he addresses the power of language and compares words to machines that can manipulate and coerce people into thinking and believing anything. The poem is based around the phrase, "the last straw", "because nobody ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw that gets all the attention but by then it's way too late".

Good point.

He also thinks that language is being poisoned or maybe that he's being poisoned by a rhetoric that a lot of us often fall victim to. Either way, it's definitely something to think about when reading or listening to McDaniels when he writes that "lately with this whole war thing, the language machine supporting it, I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants, naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes, Apache, Black Hawk, and West Bank ‘colonizers' are settlers, so Sharon is Davy Crockett and Arafat, Geronimo, and it's the Wild West all over again".
His latest book coming out this spring, Endarkenment, also has that dark ironic humor and intellect that his other works have produced. One of the poems he read talked about his belief or disbelief in God and how politicians or people in general use God in current affairs. The first line goes as follows: "Joan of Arc had a dildo named Jesus, her body was an organ full of wreckage". He then sarcastically writes (a wake up call for all those Neo-conservative Christians?) "the Creator is the maker of Mexican immigrants and Al-Qaeda".

Once again, good point.

Check out more of his writing:
The Splinter Factory
Alibi School
The Forgiveness Parade
And the latest book (coming soon!)...
Endarkenment