Poetry Carries a Big Shtick in PBS’ ‘United States’ Program

The joint is jumpin’.

Hear the throbbing beat of America’s poetry via television. Again it’s PBS locating the strong pulse, as it did last year in “The Language of Life With Bill Moyers” and last week when airing filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ poetic farewell, “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t.”

The occasion this time is “The United States of Poetry,” 2 1/2 rhythmic hours (across four nights) of adventurous programming designed to redefine and extend this language to the Beavis and Butt-head generation by merging free verse and meter with something approaching MTV.

Why does yours truly love “USOP”? Let him count the ways. You can see it, you can feel it, you can smell it, you can just about dance to it.

Each “USOP” program is keyed to a theme, delivering a series of visceral sensations expressed mostly in music “videoese”--some weird, some obscure, some wonderful, all interesting. Mingled with these are occasional printed passages from such departed poets as Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings and Ezra Pound. And each program is preceded by this audio factoid from William Carlos Williams: “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”

Not much in “USOP” ain’t a poem.

This is America singing. The poetic energy is high, the range of poets extraordinary, from Nobel laureates to twangy cowboys to populist rappers to coffeehouse word-slammers to former President Jimmy Carter, who published his first book of poetry last year. The message to those who equate poems with decadent affectation: If Jimmy can write and appreciate poetry, anybody can.

“USOP” comes from the Independent Television Service. Its co-creators are Joshua Blum and Bob Holman, who is artistic director for Nuyorican Poets Cafe on New York’s Lower East Side, and the director is Mark Pellington, who created MTV’s “Buzz” and has made music videos (including Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” for which he won an MTV Video Award in 1993). The three of them previously collaborated in 1991 on “Words in Your Face,” a half-hour PBS showcase for young poetry talent.

To make “USOP,” this trio plus producer Anne Mullen and a dozen crew members imitated Jack Kerouac (whose own beat poetry is recited here by a beat-looking Johnny Depp) and hit the road for three months, traveling in a caravan across 36 states to film 82 poets, 67 of whom made the final cut. Their regional dialects and rainbow of locales speak to the diversity of America’s universe of poetry, making “USOP” so enjoyable that it zips by almost too quickly.

Yet what exactly is being enjoyed?

The question remains whether such efforts to make poetry more accessible to mainstream audiences can succeed or whether they are self-defeating. Does the razzle-dazzle of production overshadow or nullify the poetry being celebrated? Do the visuals in “USOP” support the poetry or vice versa? Are we seeing with the eyes of the poets or with the eyes of the producers? Are we sharing the imagination of the bard or of the program maker?

Projecting the greatest clarity in “USOP” are poets whose works are least adorned, such as Leonard Cohen, outfitted in shades and his traditional black clothes while whispering a stony recitation of “Democracy,” one of his scores of poems that he has set to music.

Poets here had the option of having input into the performances of their work. According to Pellington, some wanted literal renderings and others the opposite. Whatever the case, just how fully or deeply can we hear the poetry when the pictures and music are so commanding?

Mini-videos here range from pulsating high concept (New Yorker Emily XYZ performing her two-voice poem with actress Myers Bartlett as they sit in the back of an open convertible in front of rear-projected images) to the simplicity of Cohen and a solitary Joseph Brodsky seated at a table as it rains outside his window (“Wish you were here, dear . . .”).

The man reciting in American Sign Language, meanwhile, is Peter Cook. The bent figure in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy--laboriously inserting paper into a typewriter, slowly punching the keys and struggling to mouth the words he’s created--is Larry Eigner, a gnarled package obscuring an artist. The cute third-grader stumbling over his own poem in Salmon, Idaho, is Sawyer Shefts, hair red-orange, face a galaxy of freckles.

A uniformed black maid acts out Thylia Moss’ “Nagging Misunderstanding” as the high-emoting Michigan poet speaks the words: “This is the way to make the white woman’s bed. . . .”

Montanan Sheryl Noethe performs her nostalgic “Goodwill Thrift Store, Missoula” from inside a secondhand shop. And in San Antonio, Naomi Shihab Nye recites the passages in her poem “Blood,” about her Arab father, who is at her side: “A true Arab knows how to catch a fly with his hand, my father would say. And he would prove it. . . .”

The beatniky poet Sparrow shouts from a rainy street, somehow standing waist-deep in an urban landscape of umbrellas, his stocking cap pulled down to his eyes. Across the country in Wolfpen, Ky., along the banks of Troublesome Creek, where he lives in a log house, 88-year-old James Sill looks through his window at the beloved hills, woods and flowers he memorializes in “Heritage” and says, “I cannot leave, I cannot go away.”

The most haunting segment here may be Dennis Cooper’s “Two Whores,” which finds him sizing up a young male prostitute leaning seductively against a brick wall in the night’s wee hours: “He was skinny and maybe 20, with eyes you could steal. . . .”

A touch of street life, a touch of grandeur. This “hopeless little screen,” as Cohen sees television, may not be so hopeless after all, for “USOP” is great viewing. But just how great for poetry remains to be seen.

* “The United States of Poetry” airs from 10-11 p.m. tonight and from 10:30-11 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on KCET-TV Channel 28.