InsideOut News
House of Words
[b]On the night of November 18th,[/b] the Museum of Contemporary Art was transformed into a house of words.
That night, 150 of our dearest and closest friends gathered together with us to celebrate and share in the joy of InsideOut receiving a 2009 Coming Up Taller Award from the President's Commission on Arts and Humanities.
In the words of First Lady Michelle Obama, Honorary Chairman of the Coming Up Taller committee, "The Coming Up Taller Award is the Nation's highest honor for after-school and out-of-school arts and humanities programs that serve young people. The President and I strongly believe that arts and humanities education is essential for nurturing creative thinkers who will be our Nation's future leaders."
MC'd by former Free Press columnist/local word-builder and InsideOut Board Member Desiree Cooper, youth poets from our nationally-acclaimed Citywide Poets program kicked out the spoken word jams and seized all of our attentions with poems about cultural rites of passage and birthday songs sung to the tune of elegies.
Events like this are testimony to the fact that although poetry is a solitary act that begins with one poet putting one pencil to paper, in the end the poem itself, in its final and spoken form, moves beyond the self and reaches out into the larger community. As InsideOut Board Member Marc K. Shaye pointed out in comments left to us on our five-foot wide message board hung up at MOCAD that night, "Moving us to new heights with your exciting words. Moving us to hidden emotions with your passion."
Yes, this is what happens when poetry comes to town, when InsideOut is welcomed into the White House. It welcomes us all. And in the words of the great Sufi poet Hafiz, in words written some 600 years ago, "Our words become the house we live in."
Ours is a house, and a community-ship, built to last.
To see event photos taken by InsideOut's favorite photographer, Elayne Gross, visit
http://www.elaynegrossphotography.com/.
Created Dec. 14, 2009 Article #1656
