Frank Messina

Based out of New York, poet and author Frank Messina has been extremely active in the movement to revive poetry as a life performance art form, attempting to get audiences to associate such an endeavor with excitement rather than boredom. Of the various burbling streams in the wilderness of live poetry performance, Messina has stuck a toe in most and has taken lengthy swims in a few, such as the always controversial jazz poetry pool. Some of the players he has enlisted as collaborators at such live events or recording projects include free jazz violinist Billy Bang and honking Philadelphia tenor man Elliott Levin, who are also poets in their own right. Messina is the author of the well-received book of poetry Disorderly Conduct and his work has appeared in publications, including Oxford Magazine, the Published in Heaven Poster Series, Oxalis, Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review, Frank of Paris, The New Press, the Newark Writer's Journal, and Promethean Press. He was a 1993 recipient of the Woolrich Poetry Award and Fellowship of Columbia University and the 1995 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Yet seeing his text in print and picking up honors has not been the be-all, end-all for a poet who is so interested in live sound. By 2001, Messina had recorded more than 100 of his spoken word and music compositions, releasing the Biting the Tongue CD in 1998 with the violin bing-bam-boom of Bang and a follow-up, entitled Absorb, the following year. Other important musicians who have made guest appearances with Messina include composer and performer David Amram, quite a profound influence in terms of combining text and music, and the duo of Scott Murawksi and Mark Mercier from the band Max Creek. Messina's recordings have placed on the Top 20 spoken word charts, one of them...