I knew that poetry had gotten bolder when, two years ago, my friend Claudia and I found ourselves under a spotlight, slathering red and black paint on poet Gerardo Navarro's body while he ripped off his clothes and shouted the crescendo lines of his Borders of the Mind spoken word performance. I don't know if it was a profound moment in the literary universe, but we remember it with a smile. Groups such as the Nuyorican Poets, who inhabit a cafe in New York's Lower East Side, earn attention with their aggressive street style. They don't just read poems, they scream them on stage, in videos and CDs. So we started a traveling group of poets.
Cowboy poets are poets.
The business of poetry, my dear, is busting frames. People are not that excited about the written word. It no longer appeals to our perceptual challenges. So I do performance. It amounts to getting poetry back into the street where it once was, out of the classroom, out of speech departments, and off the printed page.