Poetry New York

     "The secret to balance is to fall in every direction at once." With that line the feature poet of the Urbana Poetry Slam successfully appeased an audience hunting for meaning; the line tagged on to the end of a humorous poem about Alzheimer's Foam, the arch rival of Memory Foam. The majority of the poem felt fairly shallow - though not necessarily in a bad way. He carried his audience along a serious of clever quips which didn't really seem to go anywhere, but his audience didn't mind at all. He was as much performer as he was poet, if not moreso. With his poem memorized, Jeremy used hands and limbs and full-body gestures to add to the performance, especially to the laughter of the audience. His enthusiasm and energy never failed him, packaging his nonexperimental language into nonexperimental manipulations of voice and expression. But while he wasn't doing much to push his limits or ours, he was definitely good at what he did. Whether or not there was any connection between the humorous nothing and the serious last line that tried to be everything - seeming to frantically dig down to something someone might care about - the audience was satisfied, grunting in unison, how powerful.

     But even if they miss the meaning, the weight of popular culture references lets his listeners still feel like they're in on what's going on. In an unexpected and crowd-pleasing spin, he performed two pieces of classics meet contemporary pop culture: T.S. Elliot meets hip-hop and Shakespeare meets 8-bit Mario. The game was somewhat used and redundant by the second piece; they would undoubtedly be much stronger standing alone in separate performances. But nonetheless, the idea was fun and a classic crowd-pleaser. Few of the lines weren't directly borrowed, but their meaning and impact were new and fresh in the context of their humorous juxtaposition: an excellent example of letting another poet's words work for you in a new way.

     Jeremy Richards had his audience on the floor for most of his performance. Poet or performer, he was definitely entertaining.