“To have great poets,” Walt Whitman wrote, “there must be great audiences.”

If “great” implies “large,” he was wrong: We live in a golden age of poetry in which there is hardly any audience for it. And when big crowds do gather for poetry, the results are not always pretty.

Saturday night’s “Brave New Voices 2010″ on HBO is a one-hour follow-up to last year’s seven-part series “Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices,” which chronicled the efforts of contestants in the 2008 National Youth Poetry Slam. “Brave New Voices 2010″ skips the reality-show lead-up of the original series and jumps straight to the climax: the grand slam finals that took place this summer in Los Angeles with teams from New York, Denver, Albuquerque and the Bay Area.

The show, co-hosted by Common and Rosario Dawson, is a slightly awkward mix of showbiz glitz and adolescent literary angst. But then again, slam poetry has always occupied an unusual position, having more in common with rap music and stand-up comedy than with literature. For the most part, it’s loud, fast and emotionally simple. It emphasizes the performance over the text, and seeks the strongest possible audience reaction, often at the expense of subtlety and complexity. It’s sometimes delivered so quickly that you can’t even make out the actual words, which doesn’t really matter because it isn’t the words so much as the feeling conveyed that signals the poem’s success.

We know what we are in for, then, when Dawson immediately asks the crowd, “You all ready to cry tonight?” And the answer is yes! Many in the audience — and many of the poets — are ready to cry, and to laugh, and to jump out of their chairs, and to loudly let it be known when they like what they hear. The illusionist Penn Jillette, who serves as one of the judges, observes that slam poetry blurs the distinction between liking a poem because it’s well written and liking a poem because you agree with its message. And the messages of these poems are, of course, uniformly unobjectionable: There should be peace; human beings should stop destroying the planet; blood relatives should love one another; sexism and racism are bad. Who could possibly demur?

But by the same token, who could possibly get excited about such sentiments? Well, this auditorium full of teenagers could. But viewers will hear some flat lines, some predictable lines and, well, some memorably awful lines, such as “Music is magic and magic music” or “You were so young then, mischievously playing in my puddles” or — brace yourself — “See their songs suckle on society like the stained lips of rape children to their wavering mother’s breast.”

Still, these young poets have worked hard — more on their delivery than on their literary skills, perhaps, but the performances are energetic, heartfelt and frequently impressive. And even if the poetry is not, for the most part, very good, it is encouraging to see several hundred young people gathered to hear and appreciate poetry of any quality.

But it’s impossible to watch “Brave New Voices 2010″ without mixed feelings. This is particularly true near the end, when the night’s highest scores are bestowed on a young woman who is so eager to start crying that she does so before she begins reading her piece — indeed, her face is streaked with tears even before she makes it onto the stage.

Dawson does all she can to enforce the feel-good atmosphere, at one point describing the gathering as a “sea of poets, who are just loving each other and supporting each other.” As the evening moves along, she encourages higher and higher scores from the judges, more than once making comments like “We got a garbage 8.9 — we’re going to throw that out.” She shakes her head disdainfully at any judge who dares to deliver anything less than an out-and-out rave.

But viewers who persevere will see something rather wonderful. The Denver team, in the evening’s final performance, changes the emotional tone of the evening radically by delivering a poem called “Score,” which directly confronts the problem of insisting that every poem be recognized as a masterpiece. “I dare you to give this poem a 7,” they shout at the judges. “I would rather have your respect than your applause.” And to the audience: “If you weren’t cheering so loud then you would hear the point behind the poetry.”

At that moment, for the first time all evening, I felt like jumping out of my chair and cheering.

Brave New Voices 2010 (one hour) airs Saturday at 11 p.m. on HBO.

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Rosario is going to be a guest on “The Tyra Show” with Eve Ensler this Friday, February 12th! The show airs in syndication – so make sure you check your local TV listings for exact air times in your area!

Rosario is going to be a guest on “Live with Regis and Kelly” next week! Her appearance is scheduled for Tuesday, February 9th! The show airs in syndication – so make sure you check your local TV listings for air times in your area.

Rosario Dawson, Giada De Laurentiis, Jim Belushi and Lance Bass will guest star in new episodes of Playhouse Disney’s hit Emmy-nominated series “Handy Manny,” beginning MONDAY, DECEMBER 7 (9:00 a.m. ET/PT) on Disney Channel. Dawson (“Sin City,” “Rent”) guest stars as a marine biologist, De Laurentiis (“Everyday Italian”) plays the owner of a pizza parlor, Belushi (“According to Jim”) joins in the fun as a drawbridge operator and Lance Bass (“Dancing with the Stars”) returns in the recurring role of klutzy “surfer dude,” Elliot.

The new episode schedule is as follows:

Monday, December 7

“A Whale of a Tale/Julieta’s Loose Tooth” (9:00 a.m. ET/PT) – Manny and the tools are enjoying a day at the beach when a marine biologist (voiced by Dawson) approaches them with an emergency – an orca whale has washed up on the shore. Manny and the tools build a makeshift whale-sized stretcher to assist with getting the giant mammal back into the water. In the second story of the episode, when Julieta’s loose tooth falls out and tumbles into the sink and down the drain, it is up to Manny and the tools to retrieve the lost tooth and return it to Julieta so she can put it under her pillow for the tooth fairy.

From Toon Zone

Nickelodeon Culminates SpongeBob’s 10th Anniversary Celebration with Star-Studded Prime Time TV Event SpongeBob SquarePants ‘Truth or Square’ Premiering Friday, Nov. 6 at 8:00 p.m.

Rosario Dawson, Craig Ferguson, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais, LeBron James, P!nk, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Robin Williams Appear in Hour-Long Special Featuring Never-Before-Seen SpongeBob Flashbacks, Plus Cee-Lo Green Performs All-New Opening Theme Song.

Nickelodeon culminates the 10th anniversary celebration of pop-icon and top-rated kids’ series SpongeBob SquarePants with the premiere of “Truth or Square” a star-studded one-hour prime time television event airing on Friday, Nov. 6 at 8 p.m. (ET/PT).

Celebrity guest stars Rosario Dawson, Craig Ferguson, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, LeBron James, P!nk, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Robin Williams appear as themselves in live-action sequences throughout the special, which follows SpongeBob and the Bikini Bottom gang as they reminisce through a series of original, never-before-seen flashbacks. Ricky Gervais narrates the special and Cee-Lo Green (Gnarles Barkley) performs a cover of the SpongeBob theme song to an all-new stop-motion opening title sequence.

From Reuters

Hey everyone! I know these are late but I finally added screencaptures of Rosario from Saturday Night Live to the gallery. I’ll have clips up soon but I thought I’d post these for now:

Rosario will be making the talk show rounds in the coming weeks to promote “Seven Pounds”. You can catch her on the following shows! Please remember to check your local TV listings for the exact air times in your area.

December 12, 2008 – “Tavis Smiley” (PBS)
December 15, 2008 – “Live with Regis & Kelly” (syndicated)
December 16, 2008 – “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” (NBC)

It’s a quintessential Hollywood moment: a star on a soundstage, the focal point of every person and every piece of equipment in the room. The star on this particular January day is Rosario Dawson, the 29-year-old actress who earned her cred as an Uzi-wielding prostitute in Sin City. She’s being filmed against a greenscreen in extreme close-up, highlighting her sculpted cheekbones and olive skin. “We’ve got this joke in vice,” she murmurs in a voice that’s uncommonly sultry for a police detective. “Love costs 10 bucks. True love costs 20.”

In her studded black tunic and high-heeled boots, Dawson is apparently Tinseltown’s idea of how to clean up the streets. “She looks like she can kick some ass,” observes Brent Friedman, the chief screenwriter, who’s watching on a nearby monitor. But even though we’re in a Hollywood zip code, this is no film or television shoot. The rented space looks more like an oversize garage than a studio soundstage. Instead of the usual army of grips and gaffers, the production is staffed by a skeleton crew. And the parking lot outside? Barely big enough for 20 cars.

All of which can mean only one thing: another Web production. Two years after the success of Lonelygirl15 — the groundbreaking YouTube serial that turned out to be not the DIY diary of a 16-year-old girl but the work of three wannabe auteurs in Beverly Hills — Web video has finally captured Hollywood’s imagination. Last year, former Disney chief Michael Eisner launched Prom Queen, a daily 90-second teen drama; Judd Apatow has joined Will Ferrell on Funny or Die, a sort of YouTube for comedy; producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz had a modest success with Quarterlife, a Web show about self-obsessed twentysomethings, only to see it flop on TV. But Gemini Division, the sci-fi serial Dawson is shooting today, will be the first Web series to feature a bona fide Hollywood star.

Sure, the YouTube explosion was fueled by amateurs, but it will be showbiz professionals who cash in on Web video. That’s because most big corporate advertisers want a safe, predictable environment — not the latest YouTube one-off, no matter how viral. Once the major brands get on board, millions of ad dollars will follow. Which is why when the writers’ strike idled most of Hollywood last winter, talent agents fielded calls from clients eager to try their hand. At the same time, the fact that a three-minute clip can be shot for as little as $2,000 means Web video will be more open to ambitious neophytes than television ever was — witness the guys behind Lonelygirl15, who now have a second hit Web series called KateModern and a deal to develop more for CBS.

So far, however, this is a gold rush without any gold. Nobody knows how the business is supposed to work — what kind of stories to tell, whether to tell them in 90 seconds or 20 minutes, whether to build a destination site or distribute episodes across the Net, how to generate revenue, how to do it all on a shoestring. The Gemini team is betting they can figure it out. “People ask, ‘What’s your business model?’” says the director, Stan Rogow, during a lull in the shoot. “And I say, ‘This morning’s or this afternoon’s?’ It’s only partly a joke.”

A wiry figure who wears his long silver hair brushed straight back, Rogow is dressed in softly faded jeans and an extravagantly collared white shirt open halfway to the waist, a set of aviator glasses tucked neatly into the V. In an earlier life he was “the king of tweens,” the producer who made Lizzie McGuire for Disney and turned Hilary Duff into a star. Gemini Division is the first of eight Web serials he has in the works at Electric Farm Entertainment, the production company he’s formed with Friedman, the writer, and Jeff Sagansky, a former copresident of Sony Pictures Entertainment and head of CBS Entertainment before that.

Right now they need a distributor, and they’ve been talking with everyone from NBC Universal to MySpace about putting Gemini Division on their sites. Whoever they partner with would sell advertising and maybe even help fund the production. MySpace isn’t offering money up front, but it does sell ads and split the revenue with producers. Eisner partnered with MySpace on Prom Queen, as did Herskovitz with Quarterlife, but Rogow is hoping for a more lucrative arrangement — which is why he has spent half the afternoon squiring around a pair of suits from NBC. The deal he’s discussing would put Electric Farm well on its way to recouping the $1.75 million or so it will cost to make the 50 three-minute episodes Rogow plans to shoot. But the deal’s not done yet.

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