By Lawrence Krayn

As much as he’s an adept spinner of prose, Elliot Fant is a societal inquisitor. We first made acquaintance about a decade ago. At a Superbowl party over beer and food, and interspersed with debates on sports, race, and politics in the South Ironbound, we quickly identified each other as out of the box thinkers. After a rendezvous at a Penn Station bar, Cadillac rides over eclectic ’70s soundtracks gave way to in-depth conversations and artful collaborations. The time was the mid ’10s, and Downtown’s millennial art’s crowd was hard at work trying to establish itself.

Ten years of ascension since, Fant, also known as “Pome” (Poet of my Environment), has come to a unique place of prominence in New Jersey. While sadly the Penn Station bar where we first toasted is now a Starbucks, the poet has traded insecure nights on cold couches for a Market Street loft. He is affiliated with Sean Battle’s Evoluculture, and runs successful open-mic and poetry nights throughout Essex County and beyond. His latest book, The World as Eye See it, a unique collection of thought-provoking, sharp-witted stanzas and bitingly real images, has sold into the thousands. He has appeared at various speaking engagements and on podcasts including my own. He is currently in Nigeria, featured as part of Lagos Poetry Festival’s “Lipfest ’24”, along with fellow Newarker contributor Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal and others.

So when I last interviewed him, one might’ve thought that topics would center on glamor and accolades. Quite the contrary. Sitting on a bench in Penn’s main lobby one crisp evening this autumn, his focus was on our youth. Specifically, our conversation centered on the Pennington Court housing project, and a program he had been participating in as part of Newark’s Centers of Hope.

Centers of Hope is an after school program that provides various youth services and strives to foster community engagement. According to Fant, he first got involved via New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s teaching artists program. Having already had involvement with NJPAC by way of performances, being a full-time educator and resident of the city, Fant was an easy choice. Since then, he’s teamed up with Jee-Hoon Krska and Keys 2 Success, the Dodge Poetry Festival, and Newark Arts to bring programming to children and to offer them platforms for artistic expression. He helps them to write and perform poetry.

Fant’s work at Pennington Court runs much deeper than the occasional performative culmination though. He’s there weekly, sometimes on two evenings in addition to his day job at Link Community Charter School. And his work goes far beyond simply coaching poetry performances, as he quickly realized. “The first day I was there…gunshots went off. I had just left for the day. As soon as I left, I’m getting in my car to drive home, and it sounded like a machine gun…But, to me, I grew up in harm and danger…the difference is, when I was young…I didn’t know that those programs even existed. I had this festering love for writing and creativity when I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, but no outlet, and no one to help me hone those skills.”

Fant takes great pride in being able to provide the type of mentorship that wasn’t available to him, and doing so is a multi-faceted excercise by necessity. “You’re trying to give them a topic or theme to talk about, and they’re asking me how to spell…three and four letter words…In order for me to even think about teaching them poetry, I’ve got to [also help with the basics.]”

Academics is part of the process, emotional guidence is another. He explained to me that in his opinion, young people often internalize academic insecurity as anger, so its important to help them realize their potential. He postulates that children, suspecting that someone could be challenging their inteligence, may resort to developing aggressive personas as defense mechanisms, which leads to dysfunction and misunderstanding in their communities, and also real aggression. “So often, I saw that growing up.”

But the threats are not imagined. As part of “The Fear Project”, which he ran last summer, he asked kids to write about what triggers feelings of anxiety. “I’ve read poems…talking about being afriad of dying, or a family member getting shot…Stuff that a nine or ten year old shouldn’t even be thinking about.” He says that expression through poetry is important as an outlet and better channel for unsettled feelings, which can mitigate future “powderkegs” and help children to find a voice. “Just knowing how to articulate yourself, and communicate what you’re feeling in a productive way, that can really save these kids from a lot of the stuff that they’re undertaking.” Last Spring, he presided over “The Love Project”.

Fant is not patting himself on the back just yet. He says that while it would be a shame for someone with his skillset to standby and do nothing, how much of an impact he’s actually having will be uncertain until the children marticulate to higher grade levels. A big part of that impact lies in simply showing up. “All I’ve ever tried to do is to be consistent. So many of these kids have had adults in their life, particularly adult black men, let them down. The way to foster trust is to be available…so,if you say you’re going to do something, you do it. If you [make promises], you have to [follow through]. They’ve been let down so much…it kind of aides in their cynacism when they walk into a classroom environment, they don’t want to give the effort, because [they perceive it as] you’re gonna be here today, gone tomorrow, as soon as things get hard, you’re gonna quit on us.” He takes pride in being a constant. He gets joy from seeing them happy and thriving, getting recognition for their creativity.

The challenges are not uniform. As many have made note of in recent years, there are different sets of issues when dealing with boys in particular. “Guys more want to play sports, and so when you have to sit down and you can’t move, and they’re at that age when they want to move all the time…that’s just a byproduct of young boys feeling like this stuff has no purpose in their life, becuase they are taught to be soldiers, to be tough.”

Both he and I are into sports, but we’ve both embraced art and writing, albeit after considerble struggle. I asked him how he dealt with the challenges involved with boys. “Trying to get them to understand that being vulnerable is the tough thing to be. It’s much harder to be vulnerable about the things that you love or the things that you fear. There is a level of toughness in that that far exceeds just the lashing out to prove a point type of toughness. So trying to reconfigure the brain of youth and young adults, and adults…that has been over-consumed with all these mixed irresponsible messages that are in music and entertainment in general…making you want to go outside and start a fight because this stuff has gassed you up into something you’re really not…I give the kids the space to be free of chiding from me for what they write. But I also leave the door open if there is something going on, and you need someone to talk to in a real way, the door is always open.”

As the holidays approach, Fant is eager to work on more projects and expand the program. One possibility is conducting drives, allowing the kids to give back to the community while continuing to hone their skills. Much of that depends on what direction the City and various stakeholders want to go in. There are also other artists who work with children in other neighborhoods around Newark, with plenty of room to grow.

For Fant’s part, he’s accomplished a ton and continues to strive, but bringing poetry back to its roots may be his most rewarding and enduring endeavor yet.

Lawrence Krayn Jr. is a Newark resident and lifelong New Jerseyian. He graduated from Rutgers University-Newark with a B.A. degree in Political Science, and received his J.D. at Rutgers Law School-Newark. A practicing attorney by day, Larry spends much of his spare time engaging in creative projects. He has been a musician for many years under the moniker “IL Lusciato”, and hosts a weekly live podcast on current events, entitled “The Logic and Larry Podcast”.

For more information on Elliot Fant’s work – check out his Instagram – @p_o_m_e

Featured Image: Elliot Fant – Instagram: P_O-M_E