Poetry, music collide at Border Crossings

Courtesy of Doug Coombe Professor Richard Tillinghast poses with (from left) Shumit DasGupta, Josh Tillinghast, Pat Farrell, Joel Robbins and Toby Summerfield of Poignant Plecostomus.

The seed of the Beat Generation, scraped and plucked from jazz of 1950s Greenwich Village and North Beach, erupted and grew, and its issue sprung eventually into atmospheric territory. Pulled into the whirlwind, Worldwide Web of 1998, the ward of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac produced fleshy fruit. And fruit, for the most part, tastes sweeter than seed.

In the mid-20th-Century United States, jazz poetry was a brave new experiment, unproved and wobbly. Forty years later, the scat-like state of emergency that Ginsberg so admired continues to exist with a more robust, sturdier core. No longer are music and verse separated; poetry does not attempt to emulate jazz. Instead, the two expressions combine and highlight each other.

Such is the state of poetic-song that will be explored at Border Crossings, A Festival of New Jazz/Rock & Poetry. Festival creator Richard Tillinghast, literary giant and professor of creative writing at the University, wished to unite an assorted, singular collection of musicians and poets who "want to turn listeners on to the magic that happens when you bring good poetry and good music together." He found his ensemble by word-of-mouth, fortuitous meeting and experience; he cocked a critical ear toward performers that captured an audience's attention on campus, examined their capacities to progress and to interfuse with others. A few phone calls later, and Border Crossings was booked with artists ready to beguile, or at very least impress, festival patrons. The event includes both the youngblood and the established, the ultramodern progenitors of the new Ann Arbor fusion festival: Arwulf Arwulf, Brenda Cárdenas, M.L. Liebler, Barry Wallenstein, Poignant Plecostomus, the Magic Poetry Band, the Sonnenlicht Project and Tillinghast himself. The tally boasts five poets, 10 musicians, one aural banquet.

At first glance, the midwest's Ann Arbor seems an unlikely forum for a neo-Bebop poetry carnival. Recall that in late 14th- and early 15th-Century Italy, many artists and laymen scoffed at the idea that northern Italy could foster serious artwork. It did, however, with the appearance of Donatello, del Castagno and Mantegna, who ushered in what is known as the Early Renaissance in Europe. The Ann Arbor area too has its native maestro and patron: the University of Michigan. Thus the ambiance here is conducive to an event such as Border Crossings, which, in Tillinghast's words, "celebrates this amazing Renaissance of the arts in Ann Arbor."

The festival will begin with the lissome, interlingual ministrations of Chicana poetess Brenda Cárdenas. At Border Crossings, she plans to perform six poems backed with music by Poignant Plecostomus, the superlative Ann Arbor fusion band. Cárdenas' poetry ranges from a sultry, colloquial sonnet read to blues music to a nostalgic narrative ode to "Spanish Sound Waves," a series of four poems that pay tribute to the Spanish letters "v," "b," "rr" and "ñ." Prepare for a lush, rhythmic experience.

Local hero Arwulf Arwulf flings to the listener an earthy, pithy collection of poetry. The ever-metamorphosing musical aggregation Sonnenlicht Project, which derives its name from Anton von Webern's work "Das Sonnenlicht Spricht" ("The Sunlight Speaks"), joins the poet at the festival. Arwulf focuses on "ritual instead of entertainment," on a medley perhaps less blithe and more brassy. One of the major lures of Border Crossings is that there, he finally can perform a sampler of "Reproductive Rights for All Women," his latest CD. Arwulf will also read the pensive "Prayer to Demeter, Hymn to the Earth," fragments of works sown together and "E.A.T.," a jazz-infused elegy to the chewing Cabbage Patch Doll of ill repute.

City College of New York professor and Poetry Outreach Center director Barry Wallenstein is no novice in terms of interesting combinations. For 26 years, he has coordinated the Annual Spring Poetry Festival at City College, which includes poets as young as six years old.

"The work is substance milled or ground from the wall stone of this realest of all possible worlds," Amiri Baraka said of Wallenstein's orbiting poetry, "The urban muddle of street and inspiration, of will and desire all lashed together as material life." Wallenstein will be accompanied by Fender Rhodes player Pat Farrell, guitarist Toby Summerfield and tenor saxophonist Matt Bauder.

M.L. Liebler, the Magic Poetry Band and a sitarist conclude the festival with an exercise in political-social commentary. Nominated for two Governor's Awards, he echoes Carl Sandburg populism and mingles it with hard-bitten, John Lennonistic, vigorous (but non-didactic) verse. Magic Poetry Band provides melodic enhancement through rock pulsations and gnarled, elegant world music. Liebler will render both original old poetry and stuff from his new book, "Brooding the Heartlands," ending the festival with an electrified blender-beat.

Border Crossings tries to sever the boundaries between lyric and music, between those who enjoy the poetic and those who shrink from it. In an viable way, it seeks to please many. Hence the employment of tremendously creative people from divergent backgrounds, with dissimilar stylistics. Yet the fact that these performers practice with and feed off each other testifies to a resolute semblance of congruity. They all are motivated, animated artists who strive to contact listeners at live gigs, to breach the barrier extant between individual and assembly. Border Crossings is about the coming together of youth, not about confounding.

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