Voices Of The Urban Experience
by Edward Reynolds
Who would have guessed that downtown Birmingham has a verbal pulse after sundown? It’s not an easy pulse to locate. But once it’s found, it’s a startling revelation.
The beat thrives at the Carver Theater the third Sunday night of each month when a poet named Moon hosts spoken word celebrations. Urban spoken word wrestles for life in a town often indifferent to the most fundamental of creative arts. Sundays at the Carver Theater in the Civil Rights District are a rhyming confrontation with brutal honesty between artists and audience, and between the artists and themselves. Sometimes at the Carver the audience remains in the observation seats, jostled and soothed by the spontaneous flow of syllables. But on this particular Sunday evening, the audience joins performers onstage. Why, it’s almost a hootenanny!
On the second Tuesday of each month, the pulse shifts a few blocks east to the Urban Echo, a dimly-lit club illuminated only by flickering candles and the flicking of cigarette lighters in bursts of approval for poets delivering their deepest emotions. The Urban Echo is located in the 1800 block of 3rd Avenue North in a building whose windows are emblazoned with “Jewel’s” in big pink letters. A block away, the Alabama Theater’s neon marquee advertises an upcoming B.B. King show.
The coffee shop vibe is mysterious indeed, an oasis of a trance tucked in the midst of deserted downtown streets and alleys. A DJ spins soft jazz led by meandering flutes. The whoops of the audience and the click of lighters provide percussive accompaniment. If you don’t smoke, don’t worry; cigarette lighters are distributed before performances by Kanika Wellington and Kibibi Jones, the women who host the Urban Echo spoken word evenings.
The crowd drifts in slowly. Urban Echo is competing with American Idol on this Tuesday evening. “What’s up, y’all?” Wellington asks the audience of a dozen or so, an overwhelmingly African-American crowd in their twenties and thirties. The jazz flutes give way to seductive percussion as poets preach menacing, hypnotic rhymes that detail everything from the daily grind of black economic and social frustration to stanzas proclaiming God as the perfect guide through life’s bitter roller coaster ride.
“Our vision of the Urban Echo is to be open mic and not limited. Your style, whatever you bring if you are a poet or an artist, we want to hear it,” says Wellington. “You’ll have one poet who is very aggressive, and is very much what we call ‘street’ or kinda ‘hood-like.’ And they’re talking about the everyday life of drugs in their community and how their mother was a drug addict. And then you may have somebody come right behind that and talk about what God has done for them and where they are now and how God has moved them and how they’re on this quest for motivation and elevation.”
Dee Smith introduces “a very, very, very, very old piece” in a soft, lush voice. Sheand her partner, a poet named Kkoall (pronounced“coal”), are billed as the Ike and Tina of Poetry. She recites the Pledge of Allegiance in a poem she wrote that repeats the refrain “I’ll be damned if I’ll die for the Taliban.” Smith recites her version of “God Bless America,” with references to slavery, the Confederate flag, and bomb threats on her elementary school as a child. Kkoall performs his “Burn D.C., Burn” and the moving “Father’s Kinetic Energy.”
Several miles west of Birmingham lies Fairfield, home to the Red Carpet Lounge. Inside the bar in an adjoining room is the Lyric Lounge. A couple dozen people sit at tiny tables on a Thursday night at eight o’clock. The walls are painted black. The carpet is blood red. On the night I attended, Smith and Kkoall were three months shy of shutting down the monthly poetry night. It’s a shame. The Lyric Lounge is more cocktail bar than the Urban Echo. Red vinyl couches are scattered about the room. A spotlight illuminates the lone microphone in one corner of the lounge. Above, a ceiling fan casts a Tennessee Williams-inspired shadow onto the stage. Smith walks from table to table lighting candles. She approaches the spotlight at center stage and demands, “Respect this mic.”
In a chat a couple of weeks later, Smith thanks her mother for her childhood love of creative writing. “My mom used to implement a lot of reading. We’d just read all the time,” remembers Smith.“Out of that I used to just write stuff down. Creative writing, little short stories, and things like that, but I never pursued it actually until I got older.”
Smith continues, “They tried to get me to change my name to Political Dee. I just like telling the truth. For the most part, I like telling the truth and that’s it. Everything else pretty much is always simply how I feel or I think somebody else’s emotions, and, you know, speak from the mind of other people in certain situations and things like that.”
Smith was never shy of a microphone. “No, never…Me? That’s funny…No, I don’t feel nervous…I was the kid that would always get up in front of the class and read or recite something. That was me.”
Smith has performed her spoken word at some unusual events. “I do perform at different churches. I’ve done retirement centers, elder care centers, weddings, funerals. I do poetry at funerals! Believe it or not…I’ve done poetry at two funerals, as a matter of fact.”
On the phone a couple of weeks later, Kkoall’s down-home friendliness and warmth remind one more of Andy Griffith than Ike Turner. “Well, it just depends on what mood I’m in, when I’m in the mood to write,” Kkoall says of his inspirations, drawing out the word “well” in a smooth southern drawl straight out of Mayberry. “Sometimes it just depends on what’s going on in my life…I think the things that I enjoy writing about the most are mostly, I guess what most people call ‘love jones.’” He explains that a“love jones” is “writing about a person that you’re in love with or someone that you’re infatuated with.”
Kanika Wellington will never forget her first time to perform spoken word. “I as so nervous. I remember when I did my first poem … oh my goodness. I was reading off a paper and stumbled through the whole piece. It was awful,” she recalls. “But I’m very comfortable. I’m so in love with this right now. I am addicted to the microphone. Poetry is my everything. I still get nervous. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of that. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t ever want to get too confident. “Birmingham is kind of limited,” explains Wellington of the prominence of African- American participation in urban spoken word events. “But nationwide, spoken word is very diverse. You have it from all kinds of cultures—Korean, Puerto Rican, Spanish…It’s just here in Birmingham that the scene right now is predominantly African-American.”
Yolonda Carter, an African-American woman in her thirties and known as Yogi EC (Eternal Communicator), is not surprised that the secular and the God-fearing co-exist on the same stage. “I think it’s just a respect for what people believe to be their own truth…I have heard some stuff that offended me and I walked out until that artist got done. If it’s just absolutely vulgar, I’ll walk out.” She wrote her first poem at age five. “I wrote my first poem in purple crayon. It was called ‘The Day.’ It was like ‘The day has passed me/the day loves me/I love you day…’ Something like that (laughs).”
Yogi EC elaborates that poetry has been an outlet. “It’s been an avenue for my own feelings; it’s been an avenue to explore the truth; it’s been an avenue to give me a voice to say things that I feel I couldn’t say in another arena; it’s been an avenue for anger.
Yogi EC grew up in New York and moved to Birmingham at age seventeen. “It was a big culture shock. I did go through a lot of racism —from black and white people. I was very isolated. So poetry really kind of gave me a voice to say stuff.” She started doing spoken word in 1996 at age twenty-four. Yogi EC offers her perspective of the black experience’s spoken word. “Its a kind of two-sided coin to me. With African-American poetry I feel a real passion. There’s an intensity because what most poets are talking about they’ve ‘lived’, she explains. “On the flip side, though, to me black poetry got kind of redundant. I have heard lots of black poets say ‘I am angry about the social situations and stuff.’ “But now they have identified the problem, what is the solution? Let’s start talking a about a solution in our poetry and living it…I’d say maybe twenty percent are talking about different things bedsides being an angry black person. And the other ones are talking about the ghetto and ‘the man’s got his foot on your neck’ and all that. OK, we get it! What’s next?”