Precision Poetry Drill Team does Howl

This event took place on March 26. 2008 at the Bronx Library with poets from Urban Word NYC. Check out the electronic crawl above the poets. I had the librarian program it with the opening lines from "Howl." My adaptation of Howl was also performed by another group of Urban Word poets at Lincoln Center Outdoors Festival last summer. This multi-voice scoring was first performed at the High Mayhem Festival in Santa Fe on Oct. 7th, 2006, on the 50th anniversary of what was long thought to be Ginsberg's first reading of "Howl." I have found it to be an effective way to introduce young poets to Beat Poetry. Jack Kerouac wrote in "The Dharma Bums" -- "I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night.'' Recently a recording of Ginsberg reading "Howl" at Reed College in March of 1956 has surfaced.

The pedagogy I employ in working with young poets is based on the concept of scoring classic poems to be recited as multi-voiced performance pieces. We work under the title of Precision Poetry Drill Team. By learning to perform poems such as the “The Tyger,” or "Howl," the students experience the poems first as a poet or performer. The chorus or multi-voiced recitation of the poem allows the group to quickly come up to professional performance level.

Student groups that I have worked with in addition to the performances of "Howl," have performed a festival for over 20,000 people, been featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered, and have been hired by the Santa Fe Opera to write and perform an original piece on the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. There is a chapter in "How to Make a Living as a Poet," on the concept of the Precision Poetry Drill Team and examples of how to score poems for multi-voices.