There
are wild mood swings. One minute it’s a somber kid with too much metal in his
face. Then there’s a slightly out-of-focus Vietnam vet. Religious nuts, fey
singer-songwriters, schizophrenics, jittery college students, even some
yuppies. Pure Kona Poetry may be Rochester’s best and longest-standing forum
for spoken expression.
           Norm Davis has been the ringmaster
and midwife for 10 years. “Nobody expected it to go that long,” he says.
“We had no plan to begin with.” Still, week after week, year after year, a
dozen or so poets get up and push their words into the air. Sometimes the
audience barely outnumbers the readers. Sometimes it’s packed.
           Davis is proud of the variety of
poets who’ve read at Pure Kona. “We’ve had rappers, performance
idiots,” here he nods toward his co-host Rick Petrie, “political
poets, love poets, haiku poets, angst-driven teenagers, storytellers, complainers,
ranters, ravers, and a few academics.
           “We don’t impose any structure
on the reading,” Davis says. “You’ll look out there some nights and you’ll see
bikers, born-again Christians, soccer moms, some skateboarders, and a couple of
high-school kids. The gay community has been very supportive of us. We’ve
provided a venue for them to speak out too.
           “It’s totally different from
week to week. It’s a surprise to us what we’ll get.”
           For instance, Major Tony Nelson, who
Davis describes as “the homeless chicken-wing legend, the poet laureate of
Rochester’s streets,” will be the featured reader July 3. It’s unlikely
he’ll be getting an NEA grant any time soon. Still, he puts on a good show,
better than many writers with government money in their wallets.
           Most well-funded arts organizations
would look with envy on the numbers Davis has racked up. Every week for 10
years, an average of 15 poets get up and perform their work. Roughly 200
readers have had feature spots. And about 1,300 people have taken part in the
open-mic portion of Pure Kona’s events. Though, as Davis says, Pure Kona has
“never asked for a penny’s worth of grant money,” they’ve managed to
distribute roughly $10,000 to local poets. Every week, the hat gets passed for
the featured reader and between $20 and $50 dollars gets collected. Over a
10-year run, this adds up.
           Pure Kona has been in six locations
so far. Starting at Java Joe’s, it then went to Moonbeans, Christian’s, the
Rocket Coffee House, and the Hungerford Gallery. Currently, the Thursday night
weekly reading is at Daily Perks. Usually the readings get moved when new
management takes over a venue. “We’ve been dead so many times,” Davis
says. But every time, he finds a new spot and the words start pouring out
again.
           Davis sometimes calls the reading
series “a ministry.” “Readers do it to get over their fears,” he
says. “People will listen to what you have to say. It doesn’t have to fit into
any category.”
           Rick Petrie puts it this way:
“I need to do it. I need to read. I always feel better afterward.”
           Performance poetry can certainly be
self-indulgent. There’s always the Kerouac clones and Mommy-look-at-me! types.
Still, Rochester has a long and healthy history of respecting the spoken word.
This is the place, after all, where Frederick Douglass, Charles Finney, Susan
B. Anthony, and Aimee Semple McPherson ripped the roof off with their fiery
rhetoric and over-driven voices.
           Yes, there will always be the
Nth-generation Beat rip-offs at a poetry open mic. Yes, some folks will be
wearing the all-black poet costume and exposing us to all their precious
feelings. But there will be real voices too; strong, idiosyncratic, wild voices.
There will be music made out of words and real truth made out of apparent
gibberish.
           “I like the sound level,”
Petrie says. “I prefer the sound of voices. I like listening better than
reading. It’s better in the air.”
           “It gains something in the
translation,” Davis says. “Truth comes through.”
Pure Kona
Poetry,
every Thursday from 7:30 to 10 p.m., Daily Perks, 389 Gregory Street, 244-3485.
Free.
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2003.
