A great beat, and you can laugh to it
BY MARL;I GUZZETTA
Beatnik schmeatnik. The craft of spoken word poetry is alive and well with Jack McCarthy, who has become something of a slam icon - a kind of Johnny Cash of spoken word poetry - since he began reciting in the 1990s. This week, he comes to Nantucket with potent wordsmith Stephen Dobyns, recently chosen by Billy Collins to be anthologized in "The Best American Poetry 2006."

Jack McCarthy is the Johnny Cash of spoken word poetry, and he's reciting on Nantucket this Sunday.

AMassachusetts native, McCarthy got into poetry slams after taking his teenage daughter to a reading at the Cantab in Cambridge, hoping she would catch the slam bug. It bit him instead.

He began attending readings and reading, himself, before enthusiastic audiences at the Cantab, the premier venue for performance poetry in the Northeast. In 1996, McCarthy was part of the Boston slam team competing at the National Poetry Slam in Portland, Ore. - while there, filmmaker Paul Devil, who was filming the documentary "SlamNation," spent a lot of time following McCarthy.

The Boston Phoenix has named him "Best Standup Poet," the Boston Poetry Awards have called him "Best Love Poet," and the Cambridge Poetry Awards dubbed McCarthy "Best Spoken Word" and "Best Humorous Poet." He is currently compiling a 50th reunion poem for his Exeter class and is also trying to deliver on a promised set of essays. But his real love is reciting.

"I am a creature of the open mikes," said McCarthy, who often likes to begin sets with "Songs of the Open Mike" - a nod to all the hosts of open mikes around the country. The poem sings and skips with McCarthy's humor, perfectly displayed in the line: "A while back my coworkers were going out to celebrate meeting in October our target profit for the year. And I wanted to shake them and say, 'Listen! This is a celebration of the combination of how much we do and how little they pay. Why don't we work for half as much and then we can celebrate in May.'"

The key to successful spoken word poetry is making it accessible, according to McCarthy, who finds that humor is of particular good use in that aim.

"I have one poem in particular - it surprised me when I wrote it, because I thought I was sitting down to write a 'my most embarrassing moment' kind of poem that would be funny the whole way through," he remembered. "It ended up bringing me to the death of an infant, my son. When I perform that poem, I have learned, that if I introduce it by saying, 'Here is a poem about infant mortality,' the audience's walls go up immediately. But because it starts as a funny poem, the audience opens up and stays with me. ...I can get the audience to go with me in a place that's far from funny."

That poem has taught McCarthy much about arranging spoken word performances, which require the poet to be more engaged and level with his audience than an author of "page poems," he said. His poems memorized, McCarthy maintains eye contact with his audience and will often single out and approach specific audience members to "keep the audience on its toes."

"In a page poem, if you lose the thread, you can always re-read a line or two. Generally, page poets write knowing and expecting and requiring that you to do that little bit of extra work to understand what they're saying. In page poetry, it's the reader's responsibility to stay with the poetry," he said. "In performance poetry, you can't afford to have that happen. It is the poet's responsibility to bring the listener along."

Nantucket Slam Poetry organizer Len Germinara said McCarthy's greatest strength is that he is "standupcomedian funny."

"It's a story he tells himself that he went to AA and began sharing in meetings through poems and found that his poems were being posted on Web sites and translated into different languages and circulating all over the world before he ever considered himself a writer," Germinara said. "Now, he's in the middle of a tour, and he can go anywhere he wants to; he's an amazing performer."

While Stephen Dobyns is, like McCarthy, known for the humor he brings to readings, he is apt to take the listener along to a darker, more macabre place.

A story often circulates in psychology textbooks about Abraham Lincoln, who was traveling with a colleague by carriage when the two men heard a pig, caught in a fence, squealing. Lincoln demanded the coach to stop, so he could walk back and free the pig; his colleague questioned the reason for such a charitable act. Lincoln responded that the act was entirely selfish; if he hadn't helped the little animal, he said, he would be up all night mulling over the sound of its screams.

Dobyns' poems often occur at the instant of the pig squeal, and he makes the reader complicit in his horrified stare - often with dark humor.

In "Toward Some Bright Moment," for example, he relates the Kitty Genovese-esque beating of a dog by a blind woman on a crowded Manhattan street - during which no passersby try to stop her. It is such a fantastically uncomfortable moment, and Dobyns relates it with such emotional accuracy, that it is entirely up to his reading voice to lift the poem from despair to dark humor.

"He's one of those unflinching eyes," Germinara said. "Do you ever listen to Imus in the morning - that 'I hate everybody' mentality that marks him as a curmudgeon. ... Dobyns has that same quality."

Having received his MFA from the University of Iowa's illustrious MFA workshop in 1967, Dobyns is a National Poetry Series award winner and a Melville Cane Award winner (Cemetery Nights). He has published 11 books of poetry, 20 novels (including a series of 10 mysteries set in Saratoga Springs), a collection of short stories and a book of essays on poetry.

McCarthy befriended Dobyns during a poetry reading in 2000, and the two created something of a mutual admiration society. "Jack McCarthy is one of the wonders of contemporary poetry," Dobyns once said. "He writes - and often performs - dazzling narratives full of wit and humor, sadness and hard thinking. He should be cloned."

Even though McCarthy now lives in Seattle, the two have Massachusetts in common - Dobyns lives just outside of Boston - and have made plenty of admirers living and performing there. Having learned about the upcoming Nantucket event, mainland Massachusetts slam poets (and people from as far away as Florida) have already reserved spots to participate in the slam which will preceded the reading.

The competition will award $200

to its first place finisher, $100 to second and $50 to third.

"Jack McCarthy is so well loved in the community, and there are so few chances to hear him now on the East Coast - he comes back every six or seven months - that people will travel to hear him," Germinara said. "The fact that he's coming with Stephen Dobyns, who is primarily known as a writer of fiction and fantasy, but also an accomplished poet, is an extra draw. ...It will be a real community meeting as much as it is a contest and reading."

The last time McCarthy read on island, on Easter Sunday, the Nantucket organizers had to turn people away.

The imminent popularity of this reading supports one of McCarthy's observations from his readings all over the country - people are getting increasingly more enthusiastic about spoken word poetry and slams. "The audience is moving in the direction where there is a hunger for the delights of the spoken word," McCarthy said. "I've seen faces light up and heard people say 'I didn't know anything like this existed.'"

I

POETRY SLAM
When: Sunday, Oct. 22, 2 - 5 p.m.
Where: Nantucket Atheneum
  (Great Hall), 1 India Street
Cost: The Nantucket Poetry Slam
  "passes the hat" before
  the headliners
For more information,
  call 228-1110 or (774) 836-5035.
  For more on Jack McCarthy, go
  to www.standupoet.net.