Arts Agenda - Tongue ties

Atlanta’s spoken word scene experiences a rising mix of voices

On the first warm Saturday of spring, and the first weekend of National Poetry Month, the lot behind Bluemilk’s Paradigm Artspace on Spring Street is filled with light jazz and folding chairs.

As twilight hits full-on dark, the wide alleyway accommodates a crowd that defies easy classification. Townies, suburbanites, blacks, whites, twentysomethings and old hippies mingle as if Atlanta really were a city too busy to hate.

This is the first night Slam City has moved outside. The twice-monthly spoken word poetry night is usually held in Paradigm’s gallery space, bringing together a group of talent with diversity seldom seen in these parts.

Ayo, the evening’s emcee, takes the microphone in front, warming up the audience with a taste of his own work.

“Black folk made the word ‘church’ a verb,” he intones in a sermon that summons the pews, prayers and demons of an African-American Sunday service.

The congregation — by now more than 50, crouching on pavement and leaning against brick — is eager for more. Ayo, the pastor of poetry for the evening, delivers, with performances by an amazing variety of poets over the next two hours, including a round of competition to narrow the field for Atlanta’s team at the National Poetry Slam later this year.

Atlanta’s flirtation with spoken word poetry has been mercurial, with various open-mic nights flaring and fading at venues around town. The past few years have been particularly tempestuous.

“Two years ago this time, one could find himself waiting in line for up to three hours on any given Wednesday at the Yin Yang Cafe just to get on the list,” says Seed, aka Stephen Lynn, a frequent performer in Atlanta’s poetry scene. “This was the premier spoken word venue in Atlanta, partly because of its underground vibe.”

Although Yin Yang closed last fall, its demise didn’t signal the end of spoken word in Atlanta. In fact, the scene has somewhat blossomed in the past six months. Now, more than a dozen venues host spoken word events weekly or monthly, ranging from an all-girls night at an Old Fourth Ward lesbian bar to a Sunday morning inspirational reading in Southwest Atlanta. And the popularity of events like Slam City is helping to boost Atlanta’s national reputation as a budding mecca for spoken word.

The roots of rhythm?
?Spoken word poetry saw its first surge among Beat writers in the late ’50s, becoming a staple of their restless coffeehouse culture. The form came back into fashion in the mid-’80s, shedding its black-turtleneck-and-beret stereotype to find root among young, urban artists out for self-expression and respect. About that time, Chicago construction worker Marc Smith invented the Poetry Slam, taking a traditional open-mic reading and turning it into a formal competition. Poems were scored by judges picked randomly from the audience, and poets were given a three-minute time limit to showcase their best rhymes.

Slam teams soon started popping up around the country, and Chicago hosted the first National Poetry Slam in 1990.

Today Slam — and spoken word in general — remains a step-sister to hip-hop, a foster child to academic poetry and a problem kid for a pop culture that doesn’t quite know where to classify the populist phenomenon.

Seeing Seed perform a spoken word piece is equally hard to pigeonhole. Taking the mic at Slam City, the goateed and waifish artist enchants the audience with a mixture of song and pantomime. His conversation between a grandfather and grandson about temptation isn’t poetry precisely — it’s spoken-soul-blues-rap performance art, if such a combo is possible. The 22-year-old creative writing and theater student at the University of Tennessee performs around town two or three times a month, and was on Atlanta’s first-ever team at last year’s 11th annual National Poetry Slam.

Nurturing nucleus?
?Sending a team to the national Slam has long been an obsession of Ayo’s. By day, Ayo (real name, Marvin Heath) works for a satellite company. But, as he puts it, “I’m a different person at night.” His performance name, “Ayodele,” is Yoruban for “a joy arrives in the house.” When he takes the mic at Slam City, his joy is indeed apparent.

Ayo got his start with spoken word in 1995 when he attended a reading at Caffeinds in Buckhead, hosted by itinerant poet Chris Chandler. After attending the National Poetry Slam in Chicago in 1999, placing seventh out of 200 in the individual competitors category, Ayo returned to Atlanta with a mission.

“I saw how much fun that was so I was determined to come back and start a team here,” he says.

What he started was Slam City, an open-mic night for spoken word performers, as well as a competitive Poetry Slam intended to select a team for national competition. And Ayo got his wish. Slam City sent a five-person team to competition last year and is now in the process of narrowing down contenders for the 2001 team.

“I think Ayo is not only one of the finest artists I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing and working with, and he’s also a truly beautiful person,” says Karen Wurl, a playwright and longtime voice on the city’s spoken word scene who was a member of Atlanta’s team at nationals last year.

“Atlanta’s spoken word community is growing but not at the expense of community,” says Seed. “There is a well-defined spoken word nucleus in Atlanta. We know each other, we know our work, we know our lives, and we support each other. That’s what keeps the nucleus so tight, and Atlanta still manages to embrace and nurture new voices.”

Good thing, too, because there’s a lot of new voices out there.

History repeating?
?”It’s neat to me how over the past year poetry has really taken off,” says Nico Don, one of the masterminds behind Infinite Possibilities’ open-mic night at the historic Royal Peacock on Auburn Avenue. Infinite Possibilities, along with a handful of other open-mic nights, started just after Yin Yang’s closing. The Wednesday event brings spoken word poets as well as hip-hop and soul performers to a venue once played by the likes of James Brown and Aretha Franklin.

A recent Wednesday drew an appearance from the host of another open-mic night in town, Nanya, who performs at a bi-weekly Slam at MoorEpics Poetry Planet on Mitchell Street.

“I never know what I’m doing,” Nanya says after taking the mic, “so we just going to flow with the band and take it from there.”

A trinity of Bob Marley portraits lords over the Royal Peacock stage — rendered larger than life in Rasta red, green and yellow — and the Herman Mitchell Trio proffers a soulful groove straight from 1978. Nanya launches into an improvised spoken word chant, a repetitive Erykah Badu-esque piece that’s almost hip-hop. The driving poem about a girl on a downward spiral is melancholy and sexual, but not hopeless.

Like many of the open-mic nights around town, Infinite Possibilities sees slightly more men than women eager to share their talents. “We have some bad-ass girls who come every week,” Don says. “I wish we had more.”

Ladies night?
?Having space for the girls was exactly what Erin Oh and Karen Gabarrant envisioned when they started Cliterati, a spoken word night held every second and fourth Thursday at Tower II on Ralph McGill Boulevard. “We wanted a place that would be very women-friendly and very lesbian friendly,” says Oh, who was inspired to host the event by a stint living in San Francisco, where she took part in a women’s-only reading group called Sister Spit. Gabarrant and Oh had checked out the open-mic night at Charis Books in Little Five Points but wanted a space that was geared more toward literary readings rather than music.

At Cliterati, performers sign up for five-minute time slots, with usually 10 or 12 readings in a given night. Although the mic is reserved for women, Oh says a main goal of the event is to make everyone feel welcome.

“We are very inclusive of trans folk in our mic,” she says. “In fact, we don’t usually refer to it as a women’s mic, we call it ‘grrrls’ mic. That’s mainly to be inclusive of people who may not be biologically women.”

And yes, men are welcome to come and listen as well.

Slam’s next move
?Making everyone feel welcome is also a main goal for Ayo at Slam City. “One of the things I’ve noticed about spoken word in Atlanta is that it’s very segregated here. At Slam City we have a pretty good mix between races,” he says. “We try to maintain balance between all types, between straight and gay, between black and white, young and old. It’s a lot of work, but I try to keep it as fair and as diverse as possible.”

In spite of the popularity of open-mic nights around the city, Ayo questions if the trend will last. “Give it a year-and-a-half, and we won’t have this many spoken word events. I think that right now the market is a little oversaturated.”

Once he returns from this year’s National Poetry Slam, held in Seattle in late July, Ayo says he plans to scale back Slam City to once a month. But he’s hopeful that the Slam scene in Atlanta will continue to grow. In order to send more than one team from a city, he says, there must be more than one venue with regularly occurring Slam nights. Ayo is looking especially to the readings at MoorEpics as the city’s next frontier for spoken word, a possible seed for a second Slam team at next year’s nationals.

Wurl’s outlook for the scene is a bit more hopeful.

“I do think spoken word will come to be better appreciated,” she says. “I see a trend already among poets, that a lot of us take this very seriously as our profession. We hold ourselves to certain standards in our work and in our behavior, and the respect we have for the work, for each other and for our audiences is being returned to us.”

tray.butler@creativeloafing.com???