Poor poetry - Saturday night a gathering of poets, actors, dancers and musicians celebrated National Poetry Month at the Harwood Art Center.
Music stole the show; poetry was lost in the shuffle.
Not all poetry should be combined with other art forms. In ancient Greece, poetry was performed, but as soon as people started writing it down it became something enjoyed in solitude.
Who today has time to curl up with a book of poems and enjoy such an introspective pastime? Poets want broader audiences.
For the past 100 years, a desire to integrate poetry with visual arts, music and dance has led to innovation in movements like Dada, performance art, sound poetry and visual poetry.
Saturday's event, "Once We Were Winged," produced by Dale Harris, lacked integration. For the first number, Harris read a poem, "I Love a Dervish" while Michelle Johnson performed a belly dance and Sazlar, a Near Eastern music group played traditional music. This was a little like watching a variety show in which three acts decided to perform at once.
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The poetry could not compete with Sazlar. This all-woman Near Eastern music ensemble has been playing together for almost 20 years. Their music has the cohesive quality of musicians whose skills have grown together during years of rehearsals.
In 1986, when Sazlar first formed, members played Western instruments. Today all except Maureen Newsom play Near Eastern instruments: oud, saz, ney, kanun and darbuka. Newsom plays violin.
"The violin is used a lot in Northern Egypt," said Newsom. "It's not used in folk music, but it's popular in Egyptian classical music."
Before joining Sazlar, Newsom played medieval music. She says that playing Near Eastern music is more difficult than Western music because there are more notes in the scalar system and sometimes the extra notes, which occur in the spaces between traditional Western tones, do not sound right to Western ears.
All of the members of Sazlar began as Near Eastern dancers, but because there was no live music in Albuquerque for them to dance to, they started to play it themselves. The music just took over - kind of like Saturday night.
All of the performances had a classical theme from Karen Fox's "Jocasta" to Harris' poem about Icarus. Frank Melcori read Alan Ginsberg's classic "Howl", while Trent Whiteside played cello.
After intermission, Gary Yamane and Ellen Reay performed two duets for flute and piano. These duets, and the opening music by Sazlar, were the only performances of the evening that did not try to use more than one artistic discipline. The audience showed its approval for both with hearty applause.
There is nothing wrong with poetry all by itself. There will always be time to curl up with a well-written book. Senselessly combining elements that have little to do with each other is not going to increase the audience for poetry.
