The Beat Goes On
Why the live poetry scene is thriving in Philly's African-American community.
City Paper
April 26-May 3, 2001
April is National Poetry Month, but most poets don't know that. For them, every month is, or has the potential to be, a poetry month. And for black poets in Philly, make that every night.
Tuesday? There's Black Lily at The Five Spot. Wednesday? The Groove at South Street Blues and Okayplayer at Evolution.
Thursdays, it's House of Soul at Brave New World and The Flow at Bennie's.
Every second and third Friday, Panoramic Poetry comes to the October Gallery. Linguistics takes over the Rotunda on the first Saturday of the month, Vibes and Verse fills Club Enterprise every last Sunday of the month, and on the first Monday of the month Warmdaddy's holds its open mic night.
The current popularity of poetry nights in the African-American community in Philly is a phenomenon. It's fueled by the success of Slam, Love Jones and other movies of the last few years that glorified the poetry-slam scene. But in Philadelphia the scene's grown beyond slam to take on a life of its own. The vibes of the Roots, Jill Scott and the entire neo-soul movement are changing Philly poetry into something unique, poetry with a soundtrack included. The fusion between music and poetry, especially when a live band is involved, can be captivating.
The new-breed spoken word artists aren't your typical coffeehouse poets, sitting quietly and softly clapping at your college-class haikus. They're in-your-face, guerrilla hip-hop artistic activists and activated wordsmiths, with cultural roots in Afrikan griots and roaming bards. Poet Michelle Myers calls it "proletariat poetry."
Accordingly, the mood at these readings is nothing like the stereotype of a poetry reading. These are happy, loose, loud, enormously fun events where anything can happen.
Take, for instance, the Wednesday night jam at South St. Blues. Formerly the showcase of the Okayplayer session, it was reborn a month ago as The Groove by Stephanie Renee and Bernard Collins, two Philly poets who between them have been in the scene a total of 18 years. Renee calls the spot "Cheers with soul," and a recent Wednesday showed why.
Collins and Renee lyrically vibed off the live band's on-the-spot creations, yielding everything from political manifestos to love songs gone awry. As Collins freestyled a song about getting a gun to shoot his ex's dog, Renee looked out at the crowd with that "Okay, I'm backing away slowly" look and sang "It's just another psychotic episode" softly in the background. The lighthearted attitude lessened the pressure on people performing in the open mic, so they could focus on having a good time and sharing their art rather than on giving a flawless performance.
"It's a training ground," says Collins. "We're trying to create a venue that's warm enough that people want to come, and they feel comfortable to try new things, make mistakes, fuck up and forget on stage, try a piece that no one's heard before."
The segregated nature of these underground open mic spots isn't necessarily favored by everyone. Some poets say it's a function of the city itself, which is also very segregated. Mike O'Hara, a white poet who slams in Jersey and New York as well as Philly, agrees. "The Philly scene is very segregated. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with a venue that intentionally segregates itself, if its stated mission is to work along a given theme. If I feel a venue is pushing an all-black theme, whether implicit or explicit, I bow out of the sign-up list so as not to interfere."
But Michelle Myers, who is part of the Asian-American poetry group Yellow Rage, feels frustrated, as an Asian-American woman, by the either/or structure of this segregation. "I love my black brothas and sistas and I feel they do show their love and respect for me, but as a woman of color I wish the complexity of racial issues could be expanded beyond black and white."
Some poets in town, mostly those who organize more established readings, feel poetry is the one medium where people can come together. Kerry Sherin, director of the Kelly Writers House at Penn, says, "At a typical poetry reading, the audience will be multi-racial and multi-national, and young, medium and old."
Eileen D'Angelo of the Mad Poets Society, a group operating mostly in surrounding suburbs, says, "The point is, African Americans have always been on the cutting edge of artistic venues, from music to art to poetry, so I think the slam balance [black performers and audiences outnumbering whites] is just a temporary phenomenon."
D'Angelo's statement underlines the flip side of all this popularity: Will the scene wind up getting commodified, turning into a mainstream money machine like hip-hop, jazz, rock 'n' roll and other art forms that blacks have created? Poetry is now being used to sell everything from Sprite to toothpaste. MTV had its own slam, and HBO just signed to air the Def Poetry Jam in the fall. Philly poet Black Ice competed in New York in the Jam, and while he didn't win, he became the first spoken word artist to get a deal with a major label, Def Jam.
Ice feels he's in a unique position to see the dangers of the commercialization of poetry, and also the benefits of it.
"They don't give a damn what it's doing for the community and how you feel for the community and saving children, because if they did, the shit that we hear now wouldn't be on the radio. The only reason we're getting this chance now is because they realized this thing can be the next money-maker. And that's cool," he finishes, "but don't sacrifice the art, make sure the art stays pure."
KD Morris of the poetic duo Phyreneyce says, "[Corporate America] will revise and disguise it and sell it back to us in designer packages and you know how much that will cost us. You'll need an agent to walk into an open mic if that happens." Morris runs the monthly spot at Warmdaddy's, and won't perform himself without a contract.
"I think there's a delicate balance in every genre of artistic expression," says poet Tonya Marie Evans, who's a lawyer by day. "You have some people who stay true to the game, and then some who pimp the system. It's up to the artist to maintain a level of respect for the art."
But that doesn't mean that Evans is against business in poetry. She started Find Your Own Shine Entertainment (FYOS) with her mother (also a lawyer) to publish poetry and fiction by African-American writers.
Nnamdi Chukwuocha, one half of the fraternal poetry duo the Twin Poets, says in an e-mail, "[Corporate interest in black poetry] has opened a lot of doors for spoken word. It's like they certified in the eyes of the mainstream that this is now an art form, and it's okay for you to listen, and you know a lot of citizens in amerikkka simply do things because the system says they can."
Some people are excited to see poetry mixing it up with business, because it means that poetry is being accepted by a wider audience. "I don't think necessarily there's a fear that the business side will infringe on someone's artistic talents," says Mad Poets Society's D'Angelo, who also works as a paralegal. "You have to have both the business and artistic side. It can only help us."
Almost all the poets interviewed for this article felt that there was a line every artist has walked between artistic integrity and supporting themselves. And Stephanie Renee isn't so sure that commerce in poetry is such a threat. "I don't know if it will ever become huge, because it requires people to think too much. I think it will always be underground." Poet KOT agrees, saying, "Do I think poetry will come like hip-hop? I don't see it happening. It's too dangerous. You get someone up there speaking, and they can say so many things, I can't see money coming in on that."
Local poet Poetica remembers when there wasn't much of a distinction between this breed of poetry and hip-hop. "Then it was hard enough to be heard in this city, you couldn't afford to discriminate. It wasn't until mainstream began to dictate the confines of the two art forms that they became segregated."
KOT (which can stand for killer of tyrants or keeper of the truth) calls himself a poetic radical and feels his poetry is a tool of resistance. He organizes a poetry reading that acts as a fundraiser for political prisoners at the A-Space, an anarchist community center in West Philly. "I hope people start doing more for themselves. Yeah, go to the Painted Bride, but set up your own poetry thang."
Stephanie Renee was on the same vibe. "I think that it's important to nurture the scene in cozier, more underground venues. It's going to be necessary to have small hole-in-the-wall places. You get tired of appearances, and sometimes you just want to be in an environment where people are creating on the spot."
And there are definitely spots in Philly that are keeping the feel grassroots, The Groove being one of them. Where else can you see band members switching instruments in the middle of sets, drummers and keyboardists coming down to test their skills on the microphone, and hosts reciting poems while lying on the stage? The vibe encourages performers to throw themselves into the melee and see what emerges.
And all of the poets interviewed for this article agreed on one thing: that at the end of the day, it is the poems that matter, the reason you put pen to paper in the first place, and whatever medium, venue or style people are utilizing, we're all just trying to be heard here.