First Friday has food trucks aplenty, but none serving “poet meat.” That will change January 2 as Las Vegas First Friday Poets creates a stage for established talents and bold rookies in the verse-spinning scene. LVFFP reimagines an event that ran in the monthly culture fest from ’06 to ’08, and producer/performance poet Lee Mallory hopes it will energize the community and “focus the full power of what poetry can be.”

Why is this the right stage? First Friday represents this beautiful cross-section of locals, tourists, everybody that we can appeal to as an audience and change their minds about poetry; that it’s not boring, irrelevant stuff—moon, tune, June—that is just embroidered language and has no meaning in their lives. … Vegas is really a place of illusion and artifice and pretense and, some would say, falsity, ... [and] poetry lifts us, but it also grounds us in the face of all this fantasy.

What kind of poetry are we talking? From hip-hop to general spoken word to energized, high-quality performance poetry. It can run the gamut. My motto for years and years has been: Anything goes as long as it’s good. Which means if somebody wants to get up there and read a Shakespearean sonnet and make it count, with sincerity and depth and according it all the respect that it deserves, that’s great. If they want to present free verse. … If a retired nurse wants to stand up and read haiku.

Why is sharing in this medium important? You can do so many things with poetry, but the biggest thing you can do is use it as a way to get us back together, to bind us together again as humankind.