Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 18, 1995 TAG: 9509180118
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That's how Roanoke poetry slam emcee Simon Adkins described Danley's winning the 1994 individual championship.
Two weeks ago, the petite and pregnant Atlanta native walked into the Iroquois Club in Roanoke and floored the crowd of about 50 people, mostly other poets.
"Bert and Ernie are lovers," she shouted from her seat after Adkins' introduction. "Don't tell me y'all didn't know it. Two grown men living in a studio apartment."
The poem turned out to be a satirical jab at people who would cut off federal funding for public television.
It was the lightest topic of Danley's performance, but it still showed her at the top of her form, and performance poetry at the top of its.
Danley's presence at the Iroquois is just one indication of how poetry slamming has spread with kudzu-like speed and ferocity. And not just in the South.
What began nine years ago in Chicago as one poet's attempt to bring poetry back to the people has proliferated into a broad but well-connnected national network of slam groups stretching from Key West to Boston to San Francisco.
And Roanoke's 3-year-old slam is right in the thick of it.
Maria Kusznir, a Roanoke lawyer and poetry lover, first read about slamming in a 1992 Smithsonian magazine. It's a competition in which always frank and sometimes downright nasty judges score the performances.
Kusznir organized Roanoke's first slam at the Iroquois on Election Day of that November. They've been slamming away on the first Tuesday of every month since.
Roanoke sent its first team to the national poetry slam competition in 1994. It finished in the bottom half of the field. But this year in Ann Arbor, Mich., the team - made up of Adkins, Julia Delbridge, Patricia Johnson and Nick Glennon -finished seventh of 27 teams.
Danley is only the fourth out-of-town poet to be featured in Roanoke, but Roanoke slam veteran Delbridge has others lined up through December.
Kusznir is bubbly over the whole thing.
"Isn't it great? And to think I started it all," she said, mocking her own pride at the slam's success.
Delbridge says Roanoke's slammers are getting better all the time. And it's mainly due to Roanoke's connections to other slam scenes. The more Roanoke slammers get exposed to the best performers from outside the area, she says, the more they learn.
Danley's blend of writing and dramatic skills is a good example. She works the audience like a preacher in a tent revival. She has a conversation with them, runs around among them, even sings to them.
Her topics, outside of Bert and Ernie, are mostly about the trials of being a black woman. And they reflect the big trend in slam content now: healing poetry.
"To me, good poetry can bust a lot of stuff out of the closet," she says.
Roanoke has some successful performers in its own right.
Patricia Johnson finished seventh in the individual competition the year Danley won it. Johnson also has toured the country with a group called Poetry Alive!, performing for children.
Delbridge, who has a master's degree in English, has performed on the Lollapallooza alternative music tour and been featured in about a dozen cities, including at New York at the NuYorican Poet's Cafe.
She also has a chapbook of her poems available, called "The Loneliest Road."
Delbridge is about as well-connected as they come in slam circles. She started going to Asheville to compete and began meeting people who asked her to come to other cities to perform.
"People will just come up to you and hand you a phone number," she said.
Is there much money in it? Nope. This is poetry we're talking about here.
Mostly, poets get a cut of the door with a guarantee of not much more than gas money.
"Boston has this whole mathematical formula they go through," Delbride said. But then, the $110 coughed up there was more than anyone else has paid her.
"It pretty much has to be a vacation, rather than a vocation," she said.
In Roanoke, local poet Nick Glennon passed his bright orange baseball cap around to cover Danley's bus fare back to Washington, D.C., where she lives now.
Danley said she'd be glad to come back here.
"They've got good, talented people, and the promotional machine was in place," she said. Danley appreciates promotion more than the average poet. She showed up with posters, tapes and books for sale.
The poetry slam idea has been slow to catch on in Virginia outside of Roanoke. Delbridge organized a slam at Blacksburg's now-defunct South Main Cafe, but she said the owners put a stop to it because patrons didn't buy enough beer.
Delbridge said there's a regular competition in Charlottesville now, but the group is small and keeps to itself.
She expects the Roanoke scene to keep growing and evolving, especially as more touring poets are featured.
"It just gets kind of incestuous if you have a closed circle," she said.
by CNB