Live Poets Society: Salt Lake City poets push art form's rebirth

There are your brooding poets, your poets whose tubercular, star-crossed lives, when made into movies, are full of anguish. And then there is Michael Dimitri.

Here he is at an open mike night at a Salt Lake coffee house called The Greenhouse Effect on a recent Sunday, sitting with other poets and friends in a small room bubbling with bonhomie. When it's his turn to perform a poem, he bounces up and down on his toes; when other people get up to recite their work — sometimes affecting the hip-hop style of slam poetry, sometimes mumbling into their notebooks — Dimitri snaps his fingers to signify that he likes what he hears.

Maybe your dead poets (Romantic poet John Keats, as portrayed recently in the movie "Bright Star," for example) were sometimes cheerless, but Dimitri and his friends are cheerleaders, eager to snap their fingers for every Utahn who wants to share a poem.

And there seems to be more Utah poets than ever. Their ranks include poets who slam and poets who gather at public libraries to quietly read their poems to each other, poets who are published in elite journals and poets who Tweet their poems in 140 characters or less.

Sometimes, says Utah Arts Council literary program director Guy Lebeda, it seems that these days there are more people writing their own poems than reading the works of others. Lebeda says that often when, say, a visiting poet from some university is reading from her work, the audience expects there to be an open mike afterward. Journey among the disparate tribes that make up the nation of Utah poetry and you will stumble upon both platitudes and profundity but above all a desire to say something.

Americans have an ambivalent relationship with poetry. According to a 2006 study conducted for the Poetry Foundation, many of us who buy poetry books as gifts don't read poetry ourselves, as if poetry were a vegetable we know we should like but don't.

Sometimes when local poet Natalie Young peruses used-book stores she finds poetry books that are inscribed from a gift-giver but look like they've hardly been opened.

Despite this reluctance, Young and several fellow poets who originally met at Utah State University have just launched Utah's only poetry-only journal, Sugar House Review. Its inaugural issue includes contributions from "New Yorker" poetry editor Paul Muldoon and the late Ken Brewer, a former Utah poet laureate.