Voices From Everywhere

What started as a low-key, living-room poetry reading has turned into a crammed-theater, spoken-word jamboree in the Fairfax district.

Every Tuesday night, more than 250 people fill 100 seats and spill into aisles and onto the floor of a Fairfax High School theater.

Da’ Poetry Lounge, as it’s called, started two years ago with a group of friends who wanted to share their thoughts and rhymes through the drama of “performance poetry.” It changed venues several times, once meeting in actor Dante Basco’s living room, ending up last year at Fairfax High’s Greenway Court Theatre.

It mushroomed into sensations rarely associated with poetry: Bodies squish together. Elbows press against shoulders. Legs are crossed or folded into chests. The air is muggy, like a Bally’s Total Fitness gym on a weekday night. Guys strip off leather jackets and sweaters, revealing white tank tops.

Host Shihan VanClief repeatedly tells people “it’s a fire hazard” and to find a seat on the stage, the floor, a beanbag, a pillow, a lap. He runs the show along with Basco, 25, disc jockey Gimel Hooper, 26, and comedian Poetri, 30.

Bridget Gray, 28, an actress and dancer, springs onto the circular stage, which sits in the middle of the audience like a boxing ring. She launches into a poem about hip-hop music’s degrading portrayals of women:

Dear Hip-Hop,

I’m writing to inform you,

I’m ending our relationship

I know in the beginning

I was down to work my hips

but I was tricked

seduced by your beat

you had me for three minutes and forty-six seconds

I was suspended in time

but when I snapped out of it I had to ask

did I hear what I thought I did in that last rhyme?

Tonight’s isn’t competitive “slam poetry,” in which the audience picks a winner. Poets are unofficially rated: a wave of applause for a good try, a slap on the knee and a laugh for being cute or funny, a spirited “Yeah!” for a hit, clusters of the audience springing out of their seats shouting, fists raised in the air, for the ultimate.

Gray got the fists and shouts.

Performance poetry grew out of poetry slams, which originated in Chicago in the mid-1980s. It is fused with spoken word, comedy, dance and song, draws from hip-hop and pop culture, and is known for impassioned dialogue, gesticulation, cursing and joking.

“It’s an act,” said VanClief, 25. “You’re playing for the audience as well as for your soul.”

Adds Basco: “In reality it’s like a club, too. “Guys are coming out and looking at girls. But the foundation is still there: the camaraderie and multiculturalism.”

Fashion here includes a maroon-and-blue knit beanie, a yellow head wrap such as R&B; artist Erykah Badu wears, a bright orange sweatshirt that says “Brooklyn,” blue jeans with a hole in the left knee, Rastafarian-style dreadlocks, a White Sox baseball cap, a yarmulke, black spiked-heel boots and a jeweled bellybutton necklace.

“The voices of the community are coming from everywhere,” said Hooper, who is the DJ. “It’s like Hollywood meets the ‘hood.”

In between poets, Hooper plays “Poison,” a 1990 hit by Bel Biv Devoe. Shoulders bounce and heads bob as audience members sing along.

Tiffany Scott, 26, positions her delicate, wiry frame in front of the mike, closes her eyes and releases:

Black to the bone

to the core

to the root

A strange fruit in America’s eyes

but I refuse to believe

those lies

that my problems lie

in the pigment of my skin

‘cause racism never came

from within me

“If my father were alive to see what was going on here he would stand proud,” said Gabriel Dell, who manages the Greenway Court Theatre. “The beat generation has matured.”

Da’ Poetry Lounge draws actors, singers, modern dancers, tap dancers, screenwriters, comedians, rappers and anyone else who wants to say something through poetry. Admission is free; donations help cover stage costs and are given to a Fairfax High School film program.

Eighteen-year-old Codi Chavez attended her first poetry reading two years ago. Now, she’s an up-and-coming artist.

“I fell in love with expression and the fact that people can leave their souls on stage and just be embraced,” she said. “It’s being able to get up and say what I’ve suppressed for 12 to 15 years.

Wearing a black skirt, black velour jacket, black open-toe sandals and black polish on her toenails and fingernails, the baby-faced Chavez performed a long, stark poem about being abused and dating a man twice her age. It began:

A 4-year-old girl with curly hair

comes down the stairs

obviously in shock,

eyes locked on the floor

sure that someone would believe

finally she became intrepid

and told the boy’s father that

she’d been molested

ghost white and horrified

he replied,

“Don’t ever say that again.”

He told her she lied . . .

Strangers hugged her. Minutes later she was standing outside, puffing a cigarette and crying.