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Motion in poetry
Four young Austin poets San Francisco-bound
Two years ago, Chris Floyd rarely attended his first-period English class at Reagan High. He slept in or was unprepared or just didn't make it. But his English teacher, Angela Gatto, spotted his reams of scribbled-in spiral notebooks and persuaded him to submit a poem to an in-class writing competition. The day she announced him as the winner, he was, somewhat unsurprisingly, absent; later that day she found him in the hall and gave him his award, a pocket thesaurus and a writing journal. Now 18, with a ready smile, a fondness for lengthy acronyms and a hairdo that ranges from tight cornrows to a lofty Afro, Floyd, or Gator as he's known to his buddies, continues to tote the thesaurus. After a year off from school, he re-enrolled in Reagan last fall as a senior, and, drawn to the poetry exercises organized by Gatto, he has pulled his schoolwork together and become the class president. On Wednesday, he, another Reagan High student and two other Austinites flew to San Francisco to represent the city in the National Youth Poetry Slam that runs into the weekend. They had survived a series of citywide slam-offs, last month beating out a dozen competitors in a packed, raucous evening at Ruta Maya International Headquarters. In San Francisco, home, once, to another generation of beats, these young Ferlinghettis will face off against more than 30 other under-21 slam poetry teams from across the country. (Last year the Austin squad finished fifth.) The competition, part of the 8th annual International Youth Poetry Slam Festival, begins today, with the Grand Slam Finals on Saturday. Slam is, essentially, a competitive form of poetry. The poets perform, from memory, one of their own compositions, which can last no longer than three minutes. Judges award scores based on showmanship, enunciation, message and wordplay. (Imagine a Frost-Yeats smackdown, no holds barred.) The content is not always for drawing room sensibilities. Much of the verse delves into social and personal issues such as fathers in prison, teen motherhood, parental abuse or relatives who cut themselves. A group poem about the burning of the Midtown Live nightclub draws on the transcripts of police communications from that night. "Society tells people to be quiet," said Ron Horne, who organizes the local slam competitions and runs the Texas Youth Word Collective, which has been introducing poetry exercises into local schools. "Everybody's got something to say; you've got to have the courage to say it." Gator learned about the slam contests last fall after Horne left a video copy of the previous year's slam poetry with Gatto. "He just said, 'I can do this,' " Gatto said. "It just kind of turned him around. First-year Chris would have said 'I got my problems and everyone's got their own problems and there's nothing to do about it.' Now he wants to become a community activist." He has a rap group called Public Offenders, which "anyone who wants to see change" can join, he said. (Inspired by the group Public Enemy, the name stands for Poverty United Building Love in Inner Cities Our Future For Every Nation Does Effect Reality Situations.) "Our music is about reality," Gator said, explaining he strays away from the violence and segregation commonly associated with rap. A poem that plays on the acronym for Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished ultimately turns it into a positive word.) "Off the bat I was feeling it," he said about the poetry. "I think I was meant to talk about this harsh reality, know what I mean? My mom's in prison, I'm without a father." At least a half-dozen other students participate in weekly after-school poetry workshops at Reagan. "Their writing skills have improved, their student participation," said Wendy Goodwin, an assistant principal at Reagan. "It's given them a sense of ownership in the school." The teammates have each taken different routes to poetry. Jay Rojas, also known as Pilarsito, and a member of Public Offenders and the after-school program, said he picked up the bug from Gator. One of his first poems, which tend to sound like plaintive laments, was about some of the tensions between blacks and Mexicans. "Life is unexpected and unavoidable, like hiccups," he explained. He and Gator are joined by Shannon Leigh, 17, who started attending open mike nights several years ago with her mother, another organizer of the Texas Youth Word Collective. Leigh was inspired to compete by the 1998 movie "Slam," about a gifted young rapper who lives in a housing project dominated by gang violence. She was part of Austin's first youth slam team, a squad that drew little attention several years ago and which her mother called the "all saints" team because students came, largely, from Catholic private schools. (Leigh won the citywide under 21 slam in 2003 and 2004.) Her pieces, often political, and sometimes performed with a virtuosic ferocity, tend to grab audience members. "It hits people much harder because it's coming from me," says Leigh, who calls herself a "sheltered white girl." Phil Aulie, 19, who became the city champ this past March, decided to participate in a slam competition after one of his friends showed him a flier. His material relies on concrete images and specific situations the audience can relate to. Standing before the squealing neo-souldiers (Austin's Neo-Soul Lounge is a group of spoken-word aficionados) of Club Sahara last week, Aulie, in a warm-up to this weekend's competition, launched into his poem about a girl just a little too hot for her own good. "You've got me panting like a dog in the Sahara sun, heavy breathing like I just ran a New York marathon. . . . You make my sinuses smoke and simmer, my eyes well up with tears until they get that special glimmer," he said, with not a little relish. "Rewind!" the souldiers demanded, and Aulie promptly repeated the lines. Then, describing her superficiality, he added, "And you, like most hot sauce, only make me sick." In the dark, beneath the thrum of pink neon lights, the souldiers moaned their approval. So much for the weary blues. asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643
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