Spitting Verse

The universal language — and therapy — of poetry takes off

Thursday, March 30, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Christopher Anderson⁄The Gazette Poet Alisa ‘La La’ Jones of Fort Washington takes the stage to perform oneof her original works at a charity benefit on Tuesday. Click here to enlarge this photo photos by Christopher Anderson⁄The Gazette Mother and daughter slam poetry performers SeKeithia (left) and Deserie Johnson, both of District Heights, performed this week for charity.

Poets call spitting or flowing a universal language, transcending race, age and socioeconomics. Like numbers, it’s one of the few languages they say anyone can understand and speak.

‘‘There’s definitely a buzz for poetry,” said Komplex, a Baltimore poet who works with student poetry groups at Fairmount Heights and Largo High schools.

Long past traditional poetry where words were arranged in lines with rhythmic patterns and rhyme schemes, contemporary verse emphasizes the depth of the message.

And within that, the strands of spoken word styles are many.

‘‘Old school has a lot of logic in it,” said seasoned Laurel poet E-baby (Eric Smith). ‘‘The new school, you can hear the hip-hop in it.”

‘‘It wasn’t so easy to find a venue [in the county] years ago,” said Capitol Heights poet Deserie Johnson. Performance spots are cropping up now from Infusions Cafe in Largo to Coffee’n’Creme in Fort Washington.

Even churches like Soul Factory and Ebenezer ANE Church are started to use poetry to reach the masses.

Performances are often set in intimate coffee shops and earthy urban clubs furnished with plush sofas and bistro tables. Under soft lighting, sometimes the band sitting behind the poet plays softly in tune with his or her flow. Sometimes the poem is more dramatic if they don’t.

Men and women who hold straight-laced jobs in accounting or law by day, converge to share the stage for their art form.

The poets, from all races and economic standings, are young and old.

Lottie Mae McDonald, for example, an elderly District woman, is known around the region as Grandma Slam.

Johnson and her 18-year-old daughter, SeKeithia, have been performing poetry for a decade. SeKeithia recently released her own CD as well.

Fellow poets cheer one another on ignoring differences and choosing to focus on the thing that makes them similar: Spitting verse.

‘‘You could be a neon green midget with one leg and lisp, and perform a poem and get love anyway,” Komplex said. ‘‘That’s one of the things I love about it.”

And the members of the audience are just as varied as the poets.

‘‘I’m seeing a lot more high schoolers showing up in open mic spots so thing are really picking up,” E-baby said.

Area poets say much of the recent buzzing attraction in the region is a byproduct of the 1997 movie ‘‘Love Jones,” which built open mic into the storyline and HBO’s Def Poetry series.

‘‘That created a big shift in getting the youth involved with it,” said Christopher Fields, a Fort Washington poet.

Poetry’s rise in the county is in line with a growing attraction across the country. Covers for open mic performances have been $5 for years, but poets are now beginning to go on tours, selling out facilities at $40 a ticket.

The rewards of reciting verse are mostly intangible, but then there are some benefits that have no price.

‘‘A lot of times we as poets think we are writing for ourselves, but when you perform you find you are not writing for yourself because so many people relate to it that you just put a voice to what they’ve been feeling,” Johnson said.

Komplex, 29 and a well-known local poet, remembers holding one woman’s hand from the side of the stage as she read a poem on being raped as a child. It was something she had never discussed with friends or family.

‘‘It allows you to really express some things you might not be able to talk about to your peers or adults in a manner that’s constructive,” said Komplex.

‘‘Poetry is therapy,” said Fields who is part of a team of poets and musicians called Mad Jazz Poets. ‘‘Bleeding into the microphone is just as healing as hours on a therapist’s couch.”

Slamming the verse

One of the most animated forms of spoken word poetry are slams where poets battle it out in verse for a prize.

In a typical slam, a handful of people randomly picked from the audience score the poets.

The poet with the most points in the end wins the cash or prize.

‘‘It’s not about the poet [with slams] as much as it’s about the judges,” said Komplex, a former slam poet.

With slams even the brave and experienced don’t come to ‘‘spit” without prepared material. It would be akin to playing basketball without sneakers.

Poetry slams are often looked down on within the culture because it discourages camaraderie, E-baby said.

‘‘There’s a lot of love between poets when it comes to open mic and featuring,” said E-baby, who is working on his second spoken word CD. That love, he said, is a sharp contrast to the hostility among poets when the competitions or slams come into play. ‘‘For a poet who has never slammed before, that would be new to them.”

Slams do have their place, however, especially among the county’s young people that are increasingly drawn to the art form because of the competitive dueling.

As an example, SeKeithia , a senior at Suitland High School, is representing Prince George’s County in the 2006 National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas this August along with three other teens from the county.

Whether it’s slam or open mic style, poets say their work allows them to touch lives they would not normally be able to reach.

To find out more visit:

www.madjazzpoetry.comwww.ebabypoems.comwww.komplexonline.comwww.deeprootz.bizwww.unleashedtalent.org