Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 18, 1995 TAG: 9509180123
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STACY JONES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Her arms reach out to touch a shoulder, caress a hand or to add color to a reply. Her eyes smother her subject, confiscating the slightest emotion, the subtlest nuance. Her chair slides close, a smile occupies her face. There is a pause, then she starts to recite.
Poetry.
It could be in response to a question or to fill a quiet moment. Mostly, it's because she can't help it. Patricia Johnson is a poet.
At this moment, she is explaining the energy that is exchanged between a performer and and audience.
``It's like a dance,'' she said.
``In tennis, you hit the ball back and forth, back and forth,'' Johnson demonstrated. ``That's what I do with the energy, I absorb it, throw it back out and then watch the reaction. The show dies if the audience is not being fed.''
Johnson has been many things during her 43 years: a restaurant owner, an actress, a wife, a writer and a farm girl. For the last seven months she has been a performer and instructor for Poetry Alive!, a national organization based in Asheville, N.C. Members go all over the U.S., visiting schools and presenting poetry classics. Their mission is to revive student interested in poetry through stage performances.
Johnson has been a poet since childhood and part of the Roanoke arts community for more years than she cared to share. The difference is that now she takes to the stage and is gaining a bigger reputation for her performance art. She appears in a number of city venues - the Iroquois Club, Henry Street Music Center, Books-A-Million - and hosts a radio show on station WTOY.
Not bad for ``a country girl'' from Elk Creek, Va.
Back there, Johnson knew a thing or two about making soap, plucking a chicken and pumping well water. She also knew this rural Grayson County hamlet, where in 1965 she had been one of the first black students to integrate the local high school, was not the place for her.
She told a story to illustrate.
One summer, Johnson was unceremoniously fired from her job in an Elk Creek garment factory.
``They told me I was a distraction. They weren't used to people singing to themselves, talking to themselves and dancing,'' said Johnson, who did ballet exercises beside the machinery to keep her legs limber. ``Instead of doing their jobs, everyone would be looking at me.''
Johnson didn't worry about her job - she was planning to quit anyway - because she was headed for Ferrum College. It was there that she discovered theater - and herself.
``For the first time in my life I felt accepted,'' she said. ``The theater people didn't care what color I was. They didn't think I was strange or a distraction. They appreciated the things about me that were unique or different.''
Although she eventually came to love the theater, Johnson got her first stage role by accident.
It was 1970, the height of the Black Power movement, and Johnson was something of a militant. After a stroll through the campus theater, she noticed that there were no black actors. She confronted the director and demanded to know why.
Johnson slowly whispered the director's reply: ```The answer is very simple. None have ever auditioned.'''
``The next thing you know, I had gathered practically every black person on campus to go audition for the show,'' Johnson said, shaking her head at the memory.
It was a short-lived victory, because many of her recruits suffered from something Johnson could barely imagine: Stage fright.
``I got so annoyed, I took their scripts and showed them how to do it,'' she said.
Johnson got a part in the play.
Maria Kusznir tells a similar story about meeting her friend. It was last February, when Johnson made her debut as a performance poetry artist during a poetry slam at the Iroquois.
``She came in with her guns blazing,'' remembered Kusznir.
It's true, said Johnson. ``As soon as I started reading, everybody hushed, stopped doing what they were doing, and listened.''
``She won first place just like she said she would,'' Kusznir said, noting that one of the judges described Johnson's reading as ``wicked.''
``Patricia is one of the real performers - instead of just a reader,'' said Kusznir, an organizer for Roanoke's poetry slam team. ``She is one of the most positive things to happen to the city.''
Johnson has a bachelor's degree from Virginia Commonwealth University, a master's degree in art management from Virginia Tech and is slowly accumulating credits at Hollins College for a master's degree in the humanities. She has taught writing and acting workshops for years, and she says she turned down movie parts in ``The Color Purple'' and ``Sommersby'' because she wanted to complete her college education.
``I often wonder why she is in Roanoke,'' said her friend of 25 years, Karen Wade. ``I think it's her family that keeps her here.''
Johnson concedes as much. ``When I'm on the road, I call my parents more than I do than when I'm here.''
``I know I'll need to leave at some point, but right now I'm not ready to say goodbye,'' she said with a hint of melancholy.
Wade calls her friend's poetry ``wholesome. It's about family and living, experiences we can all relate to.''
Kusznir thinks ``emotional'' is a better description. ``The first poem I heard of hers did something to me, something that I don't have a name for.''
``They're realistic,'' offered musician William Penn, a friend for 15 years. ``She deals with issues that a lot of people avoid.''
Johnson is delighted by the the lack of consensus on her poetry.
``They heard the poem and got out of it what they needed,'' she said. ``That's good.
I will never tell anyone what [the poems] are about. I let [listeners] have their experience.''
For the record, Johnson refers to her writings as ``simple.''
Eschewing complex structures and abstractions, Johnson prefers to tell it straight.
``I used to write that way, in cluttered abstraction, but I wrote that way because I didn't want people to know what was going on inside of me,'' she explained. ``What's the point of writing something on a page if you have something to hide?''
"At this point in my life I have nothing to hide,'' Johnson said. ``I feel like I'm put here for a purpose and I want to make sure I get it all done. I don't ask why anymore. I just do it.''
As she is prone to do, Johnson pulls up the lines to an appropriate poem and shares her feelings in verse. The chair draws near. The arms take flight and the eyes, inches away, dance.
``When I take my last breath, before the colors are released to seep from this chimney, I want my work to be done.
``I want the poems written, the stories told, the histories recorded, the plays enacted, the lyrics sung.''
``Maybe then I could get some sleep,'' she laughed.
by CNB