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Silence is seldom golden. Neither is Michael Datcher's long one- act play \"Silence.\" The title character, Birmingham Silence (Jenoyne Adams), is a famous performance artist who's conducting a brutal boot camp for disciples who want to teach at her studio. She claims to have narrowed the pool of candidates from thousands to just four--all, like herself, African American women. She'll pick only two. The setup sounds like \"A Chorus Line\" set in the performance art world. Silence was also an abused child. Her minister father applied pliers to her tongue and taped a pacifier into her mouth to keep her quiet. How Silence overcame all that to become an artist who has been profiled on \"60 Minutes\" is never explained.

That's the charm of it all. Just as avid readers of romance novels justify their interest by claiming escapism, [Jan Karon] and her [Mitford] brood offer fans an opportunity to mentally fly to a better place, one where folks named Dooley Barlowe and Emma Newland and Miss Sadie always find ways to come together for happy endings. [Michael Datcher] doesn't present himself as a child prodigy who, through his own gifts and guile, fought his way out of inner-city Los Angeles. Instead, he painstakingly presents himself in all his juvenile stuttering, thieving anti-glory, pulling himself up sometimes through luck, sometimes through apparent divine intervention, always stumbling and yet trying to learn from mistakes.

The poets included homeless people, Muslim activists and graduate students. Some brought children. Their verses described memories of rape, the Reginald Denny beating during the Los Angeles riots and \"brothers with white girls.\" Some were funny. Some were sexy. Many were angry. [Michael Datcher] searched for a forum to read his poetry when he moved to Los Angeles, but he said mostly white people attended readings, and their cultural references were different from his. The intimacy comes in part from the workshop's nurturing mission -- [Ruth Forman] and other formally trained poets are asked to help young writers who want to say more than they know how to express.

MASTER P: Well, you know, I'm thinking life, you've got to look at, we've stereotyped hip-hop - stereotyped our culture, but everybody in my world are trying to grow, they're trying to gain that knowledge and that's where my life is at right now. I have a child and I think anybody that have a child, you make him want to change. I don't care if his black, white, Latino or Asian. When you get to that part in your life where you want to make a change and I think that's where am at. It's like, you know what, instead of telling the kid to do something negative, you know, which should be an easy thing to do, and I'm saying, you know what, let me give that kid that knowledge. I want to show him that there is something else out there in life. Because any guy that's in jail - a guy that's in poverty, they're saying, you know what? If I get out of this situation, I want to make it better. I don't care who you are. Whether you're a rapper, a gangster or a thug or whatever you call yourself, all those people out there are trying to pave a way to survive for their families. So my thing is right now, I think it's a lack of knowledge out there. So what am I to do now at this next level of the game, I got a book coming out called \"Guarantee Success: When You Never Give Up,\" which I might put that out September 4. I'm also going to put out a CD and DVD that's about - it's called \"Hip-Hop History\" but the thing about this is it's going to be no cuss words. I want to show kids out there that you could do something positive and make it. And I think that's the most important thing that we have to get out there. If you don't show something positive, people are afraid, you know...

Funded by the Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department and the National Endowment for the Arts, the World Beyond Poetry Festival will disperse $15,000 in honoraria to a broad range of poets and writers during five days. Among the nearly 100 performers scheduled, including many prominent locals, are some of America's most recognized poets, including Amiri Baraka, Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daaood, Ruben Martinez and Eileen Myles. The festival will also include such cultural icons as Dennis Hopper and Sonny Barger. A significant element of the festival will be the debut of the World Beyond Poetry Award. Four nationally recognized Los Angeles poets will be honored with the award on Saturday, June 10, at L.A. River Amphitheater. They are Gloria Alvarez, Wanda Coleman, Kamau Daaood and Russell Leong. A recorded schedule of the World Beyond Poetry Festival will be available at the Beyond Baroque switchboard, (310) 822-3006, starting June 4.

Raising Fences recounts the efforts of Los Angeles-based writer and poet [Michael Datcher] to latch onto this marketing wave while it still contains enough bounce to put him safely ashore. The story that he initially claims to want to write about is of the little-known and seldom-recognized \"picket-fence dreams\" of young black urban men who are eager not for the mean, pointed streets of the 'hood but for the more rounded cul-de-sacs of middle-class suburban communities and the responsibilities of being husbands and fathers. To his credit, Datcher realizes that this particular metaphor has lost some of its potency over the past few decades, particularly among white Americans, but it is still \"secretly riding the bench in black neighborhoods nationwide.\" There are a few problems with this particular approach. The first is that Datcher is not a particularly thoughtful or dramatically interesting writer. At one point, for example, he expresses a desire for a woman with \"a love for books so strong she gets [sexually excited] reading Fanon.\" Political revolutionaries probably have as great a capacity for love and an appreciation for the pleasures of Eros as any other group of people, but I seriously doubt that reading Frantz Fanon's books could ever actually sexually arouse any revolutionary, male or female.

That was five years ago, and now [Michael Datcher], 33, has a book deal and is married to that soul mate he once saw only in his dreams. His new memoir, \"Raising Fences: A Black Man's Love Story,\" is a blues journey through adolescent experimentation with sex and the grappling of a young adult with promiscuity, faith in God and overt and subtle racism. The product of a rape, he had been given away by his mother and adopted into a loving single-parent home. Still, Datcher knows it would have been easier with two people carrying the load. Datcher's story could be a case study. The first time he saw a live-in father was as a sixth-grader in a magnet school in an exclusive Long Beach neighborhood. As he was preparing to enter high school, Datcher's mother moved the family to suburban Cerritos, about 30 minutes from Long Beach, to get her growing son away from inner- city ills. Tough is opening yourself to criticism. And tough can also be proposing to your woman in a poem in front of friends and associates from his Crenshaw Boulevard neighborhood in South Los Angeles. That's what Datcher did four years ago, wetting the eyes of associates, and successfully making his then-girlfriend [Adams] feel special.

Getty Museum Hosts Leimert Park Spoken Word Artists Jenoyn Adams, Michael Datcher and Peter harris dropped some potent prose, Phyllis Wheatley style, as the crowd experienced every verse of the varied poems. While Harris explored feelings toward a wandering father and Datcher mixed social statements with decorative linguistics, Adams added a touch of femininity and a force from mother nature's warrior sister, mama revolution. The campaign for outreach centers in the community is a program geared to explore cultures that are not often recognized. Another aspect of \"I'll Make Me A World\" is to bring cultural events to communities. The Boston-based non profit organization is promoting self-expression throughout the nation. The PBS special, \"Africans In America,\" is a program supported by the Getty, which was also promoted at the reading, is an example of \"I'll Make Me A World's\" promotion.

A. J. Bowser reviews \"Raising Fences,\" an autobiographical novel by Michael Datcher about the author's search for his patriarchal roots in the faces of men in his neighborhood.