blueprints

The Poem Is a Bridge | 117
Our first reader at our first reading was a young spoken word artist
named Ayodele (M. Ayodele Heath). I like to think of him as an emblem of
Poetry@Tech’s reason for being. Several years earlier, he had been a presidential
scholar at Georgia Tech. That’s a big deal, very prestigious, very competitive,
full ride. But he dropped out. Because he fell in love. With poetry!
There wasn’t much going on regarding poetry at Tech then. Ayodele had to
go elsewhere to find his art. A few years ago, we invited him back to occupy
the McEver Visiting Chair. During those intervening years, he established
himself as one of the prominent slam-spoken word artists in the country
and has since earned an MFA degree in poetry at New England College, in
Henniker, New Hampshire. Also reading was A. E. Stallings, a brilliant young
formalist poet originally from Athens, Georgia, but then (and still, I believe)
living in Athens, Greece. On the bill too was R. J. McCaffery, a young poet
who has since published a few books and is now a lawyer as well as a poet,
a public defender, I believe, in Miami. Al Letson, a performance poet, spoke
a brilliant monologue of a homeless man, which was part of his one-man
show touring nationwide at the time. The reading was at a place called the
Actor’s Express. About three hundred people showed up.
The next readers, at the 14th Street Playhouse, were Coleman Barks,
poet and translator of the great Persian poet, Rumi; Kathleen Stripling
Byer, from North Carolina but recently teaching in Georgia; Turner Cassity,
whose early book, Watchboy, What of the Night?, I remembered reading with
joy as an undergraduate; and John Stone, a cardiologist at Emory’s School of
Medicine and well known not only as a poet but also as one of the first
MDs (in a position to do so) to introduce literature, particularly poetry, into
medical school curricula. (Note: wouldn’t you rather have a doc who knew
a little about poetry, maybe even read and wrote it, than a doc who didn’t?
I would. Except I’d want my doc to be familiar with other people’s work
rather than my poetry: what if he or she didn’t like it?) Sadly, for their loved
ones and for the Atlanta poetry community, both Turner and John died in
the past few years. Rest well, comrades, your books are still here, under
lamps and by daylight, being read.
As I’ve said, all the poets that semester were Georgia poets. (Note: Since
2002, about a third of all the poets who have read for Poetry@Tech and
about a third of the McEver Visiting Chair holders live in Georgia.) At this
point, “we” is Ginger and I, and we figure we can have four readings with
two, three, even four poets at each reading. And pay decent honoraria. Honestly,
no way was I going to invite poets from here and there. I felt anything