Greenville, SC, article
Shining stars of poetry's newest incarnation strive to experience life's lessons
By Eric Connor
STAFF WRITER
Greenville News
Eirik Ott and Hilary Thomas drove their minivan 1,700 miles, from Denver, to be here at Dougal Maguire's Irish Pub.
Two poets on the open road, sleeping on an inflatable mattress, vowing a temporary life of destitution to share their art and try to discover America in a new way, not by destination but in method.
Some nights are better than others, when the "merch table" is swarmed with inspired audience members who want to take home with them a piece of the visceral experience they shared.
Tonight isn't one of those nights.
Three time zones of travel have netted the nationally acclaimed slam poets $200, split between them from tonight's show and another in Asheville, minus $70 for a flat tire. Getting enough gas money for the journey to Chicago will be tricky.
Ott, known on stage as Big Poppa E, and Thomas have shared their craft before millions: Big Poppa on HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" and BET and Thomas as the youngest poet to tour with Lollapalooza and on the poetry slam documentary "SlamNation."
Tonight, the audience is slim, maybe 11 people, not including the idle bartender. They are enthusiastic, but need some coaxing.
The usually smoky bar is a little more breathable; the 50 or so who regularly show up for Greenville's monthly slams are AWOL on a night when two of poetry slamming's shining stars are performing.
Herein lies the unpredictable ebb and flow of art at its most basic, the chaos behind creation.
In a slam, the crowd votes for who they want to hear. They bark back like hecklers on methamphetamine. The process is wholly majority rule, and like democracy's first experiments in ancient Athens, oratory is survival and the masses can deify or ostracize .
This lifestyle the Austin, Texas, duo has chosen is a throwback to the days of Kerouac, when America could be discovered with a wooing roadside thumb and a welcoming '55 Chevy.
On their 27-state, four-month beat journey, Big Poppa and Thomas have become accustomed to the incongruous personalities of each city, the manic-depressive swings of the audiences' tastes.
For every Greenville, there is the unexpectedly raucous Iowa City. Be it $35 or $350, though, each stop — from Texas to Michigan to California to South Carolina to New York and back — is worth it.
"We're on a tour of America you can't get in any guidebook," says Big Poppa, a goateed, 36-year-old newspaper writer on indefinite sabbatical. "We're seeing America through the insides of these cafes and bars and coffee houses."
The new age of poetry
Slamming hasn't so much transformed poetry as it has given the modern poet a novel method to share the latest incarnation of the art form, says Kwame Dawes, a poet and University of South Carolina literature professor.
Spoken-word poetry, the more demurred description of the genre, is communicated through the language of hip-hop in a seemingly informal style that, in fact, is regimented by the rules of performance and competition.
"In that sense, it is very formal because it is performance poetry," Dawes says.
Slams are sometimes esoteric but more often decipherable and blunt in a uniquely American way: four-letter words, self-serving satire, strikingly personal, accepting all and rejecting nothing.
Its essence is rooted in blues, jazz, hip-hop, in rhythm and performance and rowdy holla' back, in the bawdy lustfulness of Shakespeare and the cadence of Langston Hughes.
This is the age of succinct expression — the sound bite as sufficient political platform, the CD with one good song — not the ego of the Me Monster that stands at a mike and holds its audience captive.
"At a regular open mike, you don't get to decide who goes up next," says Thomas, a 27-year-old bespectacled blonde who plays the elegant foil to Poppa's rabble-rousing guyness. "Someone will get up there and read for 20 minutes, and you're like, 'Oh my God, I wish this would just end.' They get to have some say over how the night progresses."
She fancies herself a "soap-box pastor" with "a sermon to offer that really speaks to what's truest about our experience in the universe."
Those truths, so to speak, take different forms.
Thomas explores the impressionism of glass fragments chewing at her soles, love as a patient orange, or the haunting familiarity of leaving a town and returning to your home where "not a leaf has changed" and the "driveway still floods when it rains."
Poppa is a walking oxymoron: a former Goth punk who leans toward stand-up comedy, a gangsta wuss, a poet who hates coffee, a sensitive straight guy.
He drops hip-hop slang that is soooo 2001 ("da bomb"), partly because he's the self-proclaimed "whitest guy ever to appear on BET" and because it disarms his audience for the serious material, the knock-out punch you never saw coming.
Beneath the contrived bravado , he is an adept translator of the plight of the sensitive guy.
The guy who stands aloof from the mosh pit and is OK with that, the guy who doesn't want to complain about that horrible disaffection between a son and his father but is compelled to write at least one nice poem about his dad.
Both Poppa and Thomas have committed themselves to writing a haiku — Japanese poetry, three lines, five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables — every day.
Thomas says it started out as a competition between friends, then turned into a daily devotion to simplicity. It also began the — dum, dum, dum — best-of-three Haiku Death Match.
One will emerge as champion, the other will commit seppuku on stage. The subject matter is ... anything.
An example, from Poppa: "I've had to pee for / four hours, but I don't want to / leave this nice warm bed."
The art of living
Poppa starts the show with his meta-slam poem, an ode to the god-like power a performance poet commands over a room. He explains that tapping his head means that something is deep; he sits on an audience member's lap and kisses her forehead because ... he can.
"There is no poetry," Poppa declares as he ambles through the energized crowd that isn't, "there's only life. There are no poets, only us, making sense of the world around us."
As art-is-life author Henry Miller said: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am."
Poppa and Thomas are living such an existence, in its most-basic form, off the grid, unplugged, except for the microphone.
Poppa says the two purposefully took "a vow of poverty" to tour the slam-poetry circuit venue by venue, the large and the small, the packed and the virtually empty.
Their stuff is in storage back home in Austin. When they don't sleep on the inflatable mattress, they find a fellow poet's couch and, hopefully, a washing machine. The $5 CDs and self-published books, more often than not, earn them enough gas money to get to the next show.
In a couple of weeks, Poppa will be back on the college circuit, making a couple grand a show, enjoying the perks of airplane travel and hotels. Thomas is returning to Southwest Texas State University to finish her degree.
Both can make a living wage on the college circuit, akin, Poppa says, to the salary of an assistant manager at Taco Bell, with travel perks.
This journey, however, isn't about making enough to pay a cable bill or the rent or to install a new sound system in the car.
It's about living on the margins, filling your belly with beer and vinegar fries and praying that petroleum prices will drop enough to buy your girlfriend a birthday present.
"Sometimes, you've got to just break away from it to actually see things," Poppa says. "We're allowed to do something most people never get a chance to do, which is let go. Just let go of everything that doesn't mean anything, unplug your (expletive) phone, stop watching TV and communicate with human beings."
Poppa found it hard to let go. Just a few credits shy of his journalism degree, he was offered a job as assistant entertainment editor at the Reno Gazette-Journal in Nevada.
He says he made the decision to give life as a poet a try when he envisioned a conversation he would have with himself years later.
"I had to imagine myself at 60 trying to explain to myself why I didn't give this a chance," he says. "In this society, it's hard to devote energy into doing this. It wants you behind the desk, 40 hours a week for 30 years. Society doesn't reward you doing this."
Sometimes, however, the disciples of slam do, whether it's with money or a shout out that's less Smash Mouth, more Nirvana.
The interaction is what keeps the pair going. They live to plant a seed in an impressionable mind, to change a life in an invisible way, perhaps never seeing the fruit.
Though when the gas-money gods shine upon them, Thomas says, the experience is that much more rewarding.
"When it's working, it's unbelievable," she says. "It fills you with this sense of rightness. I can go out here and have this be my life, even if it's for a few weeks or a couple of months."
When the show's over, the two rush to the merchandise table, placed strategically by the exit, to commiserate but mostly to beg.
A Lincoln here, a Hamilton there; the rightness comes less in green than it does in the "thank-yous" and the "I-can-totally-relates."
The room recedes into quiet. What little smoke that filled the air has dissipated. They pack their stuff back into the box and turn their eyes toward Chicago.