The Poetry Dollars (Bowery Poetry)

What is the shortest distance between a poet and the world of humans who might like poetry, but have been taught it is obscure and boring? And what poetry would result from making a living out of that connection?

The answer is THE POETRY DOLLARS, based on the very real life experiences and work of Paul L. Mills, a.k.a. Poez (www.poezthepoet.com), who during a ten-year career starting in 1977, invented himself in the form of a "poet-performer," appearing with a fusion of drama, music, and improvisation, first in the streets of Boston and New York, then in coffee houses, nightclubs, concert halls, theaters, on radio and television, as a straight stand-up performer, in off-Broadway theater, and with a modern dance company, at such well-known venues as The Bottom Line, CBGBs, Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater, and The Bitter End in New York, and Le Theatre du Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, sharing the bill with, among others, beat era novelist William Burroughs, 60's jazz vocalist Mose Allison, and Richard Hell of the new wave rock band Television.

There has never been anyone else like him.

The New York Times described a Poez performance as "a sonic fantasia."

The New York Daily News called him "a voice musician . . . a young man with a flow of words like a river . . . like a jazz instrument";

Le Figaro as "etonnant et imprevu," all before 1983.

"The first performance poet I had ever seen, decades before anyone coined a phrase like 'spoken word'. . . . More than twenty years have passed, and this poet holds his own clear space in the amazement of my memory." (Jackie Sheeler).

"A rogue poet, lone wolf, his own mission. . . . He really got to me. Brilliant . . . iconoclastic . . . savvy . . . bitter." (Bob Holman).

This book is indispensable to anyone interested either in the history of spoken word and performance poetry, or in its future development, because this is pioneering work that, decades ago, went in directions that contemporary artists have yet to surmise. THE POETRY DOLLARS is the inevitable consequence of a web page posted by New York City poetry icons Bob Holman and Jackie Sheeler, Whatever Happened to Poez? during the 15 years Mills spent, after disappearing from the New York scene, as a civil rights lawyer in Los Angeles. Now he is back, married to his former girlfriend, singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, with this book from Bowery Books and YBK Publishers.

The work consists of three parts. Part I is an essential instruction guide for anyone who wants to follow his path into the street. Part II, fictionalized memoirs of a career in performance poetry. Part III, the poems themselves.

Author Paul L. Mills is a former rock journalist, whose exploits were recounted by David Felton in a Rolling Stone cover story, and whose work for Boston's Fusion Magazine was hailed by syndicated Boston Globe columnist George Frazier's The Lit'ry Life as "brilliant." He is a 1990 graduate magna cum laude of the Columbia Writing Program.