Apr 10, 2015 By Dave Zuchowski for The 4 min read

Four-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert Frost once said “poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Fellow poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls it “the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”

But for all its power, the closest many people ever get to poetry is when they read the verses on a greeting card. From 7-10 p.m. April 17, four distinct, diverse and dynamic authors will come together at Jozart Center for the Arts in California for one night of literary neck-punches and anarchistic chicanery.

Their intent is to prove that poetry is neither an exclusive pretentious hipster clubhouse nor a dry inaccessible academic snoozefest. Their readings will include adult material, and parental approval is recommended for those under the age of 18.

“When you have the chance to get in front of a crowd of people and put your neck on the block, to bare it all and open up and bleed you better bring it from the bottom of your soul,” said John Menesini, one of the poets who hails from the Bronx but who grew up in McDonald (Washington County).

“People are probably less likely to sit around and wait for something now than 20, 30, 40-plus years ago. First impressions matter in poetry — bigtime. You better have a baby up there on stage, you better read like your life depends on it, you better give these people something they can hold onto and remember. You better not suck.”

Menesini said his personal approach to performance is rooted in the caustic honest comedy of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. “If the people laugh, I feel O.K.,,” he said. “But if I can get them to laugh at something abrasive and crude while I make a point, and they’ve truly enjoyed it against their better judgment, then I’ve won.”

Poet Michael Begnal, another of the Jozart poets, is a professor at Duquesne University. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Notre Dame Review and Free Verse.

To make poetry accessible in a time that has turned its back on poetry, he said he thinks that poetry has gone through many different stages in regard to its role in society over the millennia, from poets being essential and acclaimed in the social fabric, to poets and poetry being marginalized and ignored, to varying degrees at different points in history.

“While it may be perceived as being on the latter end of the spectrum in the present moment, there is also a huge and burgeoning poetry scene right now in America and throughout the world,” he said. “Only it’s never discussed in mainstream outlets, so it is kind of like an underground.”

Another Pittsburgh poet, Margaret Bashaar, is a graduate of Chatham University. Her first full-length book, “Stationed Near the Gateway,” is due out from Sundress Publications in 2015.

Menesini describes her work as “the stinging bite of a fresh razor through baby skin,” and also writes that her “first full-length collection cuts into your viscera with elegant, surgical precision. The poems are wet with bloods, and their fresh clotted footprints beckon you to follow. . . . “

The final poet on the docket, Jason Baldinger, a Pittsburgh poet, compares the need to write to compulsions we all share in one form or another.

“It almost becomes futile to put these things into words, which comes off as a copout, but realistically writing has become such a part of how I see and express myself that it becomes impossible to answer why,” he said.

“There is a voice that is deep in all of us that needs indulged, there are lost fragments of dreams that require verbalizing, there is the crushing of modern life that needs answered and relieved, there is memory to keep close, there are fleeting moments that need drug back into the fold of the living.”

In addition to bringing local artists and performers of merit to the Jozart stage, the board of directors also include edgy, avant-garde artists with daring and provocative material from time to time. Four Poets is the latest incidence of the non-profit’s all-inclusive programming perspective.

Four Poets are at the Jozart Center for the Arts, 333 Second St. in California. Admission is free.