Poet Works to Replace Junk-Food Attitude Toward the Arts : Poetry: Kamau Daaood, who performs in Tustin tonight, marries words with music--and now video.

Kamau Daaood was just a teen when he began reading his poems in public. Finding early inspiration in a performance of the LeRoi Jones play “Black Mass,” he hooked up with the Watts Writers Workshop and later with the Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra, led by pianist and composer Horace Tapscott--all before the age of 20.

These days, Daaood worries that youngsters in the South-Central Los Angeles streets he calls home are growing up without the cultural opportunities he enjoyed in the late ‘60s.

“I was fortunate to have that exposure,” said Daaood, who will give a reading today at the LP Repertory Theatre in Tustin. The concept of art as spiritual sustenance, he believes, has been replaced by a “junk-food kind of attitude towards nourishing ourselves.”

The Compton resident sees the attitude reflected in the social ills plaguing urban Los Angeles. “The arts could impact that, especially if we start with the young,” Daaood said in a recent interview in Los Angeles. He said he would like to see some of the money now used to beef up police enforcement in the area spent instead on “institutions developing people as human beings. . . .

“We don’t deal with solutions,” Daaood complained. “We deal with Band-Aids.”

In a small way, the poet is working on a solution of his own. With well-known jazz drummer Billy Higgins--who has worked with Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and others--Daaood has turned a storefront in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district into a small theater, dubbed the World Stage, for music and dance concerts, reading, lectures and classes.

About five months old, the stage has seen a few “trial runs” to “feel the space out,” Daaood said. The plan is to launch a continuous series of events and provide “a place where the artists can meet their community.”

Daaood, named best poet/performer last year by L.A. Weekly, is often tagged a local poet, but he also reads his work outside Los Angeles. In 1979, in fact, he performed before an audience of several thousand at the national theater of Somalia, in easternmost Africa. In 1985, he was the subject of an independent documentary, “Life Is a Saxophone,” that was screened widely and shown on some public television stations.

“This tag of local artist can be a hindrance sometimes,” Daaood admitted. While it “signifies a connection with the community,” it can also get in the way of wider recognition that could make it easier to make a living from his poetry. Daaood, who is married and has five children, works full time on the Watts Towers Art Center staff.

Poets, he said, are honored in many societies but are looked on as “strange creatures” here. Even in-laws, he said, can be uncomprehending: “You’re a what ? A poet ?” he said he is often asked. “It’s not a tangible thing to most people.”

Often called “the word musician,” Daaood frequently reads accompanied by jazz players (he will have a bassist with him tonight) and sometimes brings dancers and martial artists on stage with him. His words are often chanted or sung.

“Music music/All is music/Music music/Life is music,” he chants in “Liberator of the Spirit,” a poem for jazz great John Coltrane. And in “It Is the Spirit,” dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “It is not the words that move people/it is the power.”

“Music is a higher language than the spoken word,” Daaood explained. “People can feel what you’re saying.”

The music, he said, “gives me something to feed upon.” The readings take on a partly improvisational feel: “The music points other directions for the work to go. It’s never the same.”

Now Daaood is experimenting beyond music and marrying his words with video technology. Last year, “Songs of the City,” a video combining one of his poems with music, was aired on public station KCET as part of the “Take Five: Arts and Culture” series.

“I believe poetry as a literary art form is very, very limited,” Daaood said. Although “a book will sit on the shelf until someone walks up and finds it,” he believes video will help bring “new life” to poetry in the media age.

Poets Kamau Daaood and Willie Sims read at 8 p.m. at the LP Repertory Theatre, 15732 Tustin Village Way, Tustin. Admission: $5 to $7. Presented by Poets Reading Inc. Information: (714) 441-1820.