April 27-May 3, 2006 issue

Words Up

Politic and poetry collide at Tara Bracco’s annual reading bash

Ten years ago, Tara Bracco, then a recent college grad, was miserable. She’d just been dumped by her first love, she was sleeping on her friend’s floor, and she had no clue what to do with her life. But instead of taking a shitty temp job, she decided to figure things out on a cross-country tour: Armed with $600 and an Amtrak pass, she traveled through upstate New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, writing and performing new poems about gender equality and love. “I felt cradled by coffeehouses,” she said recently when she met with TONY – appropriately enough at Mudspot café in the East Village.

Outspoken and politically-minded since her days as a self-declared high-school drama freak on Long Island, Bracco got hooked on performance poetry while she was a student at Marymount Manhattan College. Her countrywide journey allowed her to fuse her budding activism with her love of performance – and inspired her to work in the nonprofit sector when she finally settled back in NYC. She even spent a week at the Center for Popular Economics last summer – for fun.

And for the past four years, the self-proclaimed punk poetry princess has been returning the love she found in the nation’s coffeehouses by nurturing local talent. On Thursday 27, she presents her fourth annual “Poetic People Power” event at the Nuyorican Poets Café, a project that combines literary performance and political activism in honor of National Poetry Month. Each year, Bracco chooses eight poets to write new works on a single issue (This year’s theme is “Raise the Wage”). She acts as director, producer and host, structuring the poems into “sets.” The readings draw a mixed crowd, from hard-core political activists to poetry-reading circuit regulars.

Bracco, 30, produced her first reading in 2003, in support of Poets Against the War. It went well, but she worried that the antiwar community would disperse when the war got off to a smooth start, so she decided to diversify into other causes. “Had I known how long [the war] would last, I might have kept organizing those events,” she says. Instead, she used that first reading as a springboard to an annual series. Since then, while working various day jobs, she’s produced two more “Poetic People Power” evenings dealing with, respectively, voting and democracy, and the environment.

To spark ideas for her poets’ assignments, she compiles a resource list of websites, articles and other media. “You can’t be truly enraged if you’re not informed about the extent of the problem,” she says. “Two-time participant Erica DeLaRosa says she appreciates the help. “It’s a great motivator… . The commission pushes me to learn more about how these issues affect the world that I speak for.”

Bracco says she chose the “Raise the Wage” theme because the working poor are among America’s most disenfranchised – and least outspoken. “When people’s basic needs aren’t cared for, you won’t hear voices speaking out. If I’m only eating a bagel a day, how does that make me feel empowered to change things?”

The Puffin Foundation recently gave Bracco a grant in support of this year’s event. “The prestige and funding passes on to these new artists,” she says. “It’s not a ‘me’ project.” This attests to the warm and respectful atmosphere she strives to create for her poets. Chris Martin, a recent winner of the prestigious Hayden Carruth Award and a participant in Bracco’s readings since 2004, says, “Before Tara, I’d never done a reading where I hung out in a green room.”

In the future, Bracco plans to produce a “Poetic People Power” CD, website, book and documentary – projects that will build toward her goal of creating an international community of political poets. “What we’re doing is real and impactful. I have people writer me after the event and say, ‘I went home and wrote a poem.’ ” She pauses, then lifts her hands and says, “Remember in seventh-grade chorus class, when we all hummed one note? I envision an activism that’s a sustained hum. When one person drops out, you don’t notice, because everyone else continues.”

April/May 2006

BEAUTY AND THE BRONX

For Majora Carter it’s not easy being green

When Majora Carter got the call telling her she’d received the prestigious 2005 MacArthur Foundation Prize, she couldn’t believe it–literally. “I thought I recognized the phone number as a friend of mine,” she says, laughing, “so I gave him some attitude.” Carter’s attitude, however, is exactly what earned her the so-called “genius grant” in the first place. Relentlessly committed to initiating to environmental improvements in her native South Bronx, Carter has been slowly realizing her vision to “green the ghetto,” an endeavor she hopes will one day transform her smokestack surroundings into an Emerald City of parks.

The 38-year-old’s path to activism was a rocky one. In the ’70s, Carter watched her tight-knit urban neighborhood deteriorate into a smoldering wasteland. “The whole block smelled like burning,” she recalls. Industrial plants moved in, people moved out, and when she graduated from high school, Carter jumped at the chance to jet. After studying film at Wesleyan, however, she moved back home in the late ’90s and soon heard about the city’s proposal to build a major waste-transfer station in the South Bronx, an area already handling 40 percent of NYC’s trash. It was then that she and her friends decided enough was enough, so they fought the plan—and won. “Suddenly, it was attitude city,” she says of her political emergence. “No one ever asked residents what they didn’t want, but no one asked them what they did want, either.”

To address these issues, Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001. Through this community organization, she has planned a “greenway” where residents can work out and helped to open the neighborhood’s first waterfront park in 60 years—a project that began after her dog, Xena, led her to the hidden Bronx shoreline through an illegal junkyard. Giving pointers for young activists, Carter advises, “Use the energy that you have, and recognize that you get a lot of crap for being younger. No matter how small you are, you have to act like you’re enormous.”