Universe of verse: Unvarnished prose, passion unleashed at Poets’ Corner

Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2002 | 8:28 a.m.

Steven Crowley needs a cigarette. He's asked everybody for a smoke but nobody is handing one over.

Frustrated, he grumbles to himself and returns to the pages of his tattered yellow notebook.

"This is like bumming a cigarette in Salt Lake City," he said.

Momentarily forgetting the cigarette, Crowley leans across the table and declares with a grin, "You're getting ready to hear the most famous poet that ever lived. I'm the best that ever lived."

Rose incense burns near the front podium as Crowley speaks. The self-professed "best poet that ever lived" might have some competition on this night.

Poets seated around the tables look through their collections, practice readings and make last-minute changes. Others have come to simply open their minds and listen.

There will be sweet words of love and desire, lyrical men-bashing and women-bashing, reflections of hate, gender roles, stories of street life, and rantings on government, greed and racism.

"There are a lot of horny people here so you're going to hear a lot about sex," playwright China Hudson said before the Friday night reading. "Everyone has their own flavor. As long as you respect yourself, that's it.

"Helen (Murphy), she does not consider herself a poet. She writes letters and reads them."

The Poets' Corner at West Las Vegas Arts Center on West Lake Mead Boulevard is a place where the poetry is as diverse as the faces in the audience.

It's a place where a prim, proper, elderly white woman listens to stark poems about crack, sex, sexism and being black. Then moments later she reads to intellectuals and brawny young men wearing thick silver chains a news article she wrote for a community college newspaper about a percussionist at a jazz dance class.

"What we have is a true open mike," Keith Brantley, host of the Poets' Corner, said to the audience before Friday's reading. "We don't censor anyone. You may hear some things you don't like, or you disagree with. The only rule here is you respect yourself first and foremost.

"If you're long-winded save it for one (poem)."

Then it begins. Crowley, who said he gave up crime for writing, reads about life on the west side of Las Vegas in 2000 -- the year his "friend Harvey died."

Reading from a laptop propped on the podium, a man named Christopher tells of his ideal girlfriend, "My favorite color is her. Her favorite animal is me." Holding a copy of his recently published book "From Wind to Mind To Rhyme," Ghaib Najm tells the audience, "I have thoughts of a drug-filled lady trying to get rid of a man we'll call shady. I have thoughts of the look in her eyes, the pain in her thighs when they said we're not leaving baby."

A man named Jade chronicles black history in the United States from the Underground Railroad to Rodney King to blacks fighting wars for the United States "in an all-black platoon, returning home to be just another coon ... I remember being treated as if my color was a curse."

Wearing a baseball cap and large eyeglasses, Martin Johnson reads about inner and outer beauty, following it with "Cucumbers, Hot Dogs and Dildos" to groans and laughter from the audience.

"We encourage crowd participation," Brantley said. "We don't sit in a quiet librarylike setting and wait for people to finish so we can snap our fingers."

What the Poets' Corner encourages most of all is that people be themselves and say what they want, said Brantley, a 41-year-old Las Vegas resident who has been reading poetry since the 1980s.

"Everybody gets a fair shot," Brantley said. "For some people, it's the only time they get to be heard. We've got such a wide variety of people. We will touch on any subject. But love is the favorite."

Bringing it together

Brantley started the Poets' Corner five years ago with others in the community as a onetime event to promote literacy through the arts.

"We had 10 readers," Brantley said. "We thought that was really something, so we put together a six-month schedule, then did it every other month."

It has since grown exponentially and draws an eclectic mix from throughout the Las Vegas Valley. There are beginning poets, established poets, moms, dads, working professionals, blue-collar workers, seniors, teens, rappers and students who come to share, learn, listen and absorb.

"This is the best place in town because of all the spirits in one place," said Ghaib Najm, poet and author of "From Wind To Mind To Ryhme" (2002, Morris Publishing). "Everyone sits down and they get motivated."

Because of the program's growth, each reader at the Poets' Corner is limited to two poems. The evening can easily stretch into nearly three hours of reading.

"We have to put time limits on it," Brantley said. "It's actually gotten bigger than our comfort level allows.

As the number of readers grow, Brantley said he'll continue to encourage people to open their own readings.

"I may have to look at that bridge sooner than later," he said.

Already there have been two spinoffs from Poets' Corner -- Ebony Poetry at the Elks Lounge on Owens Avenue and H Street, and Urban Artists at West Las Vegas Library every third Wednesday of the month.

"But it's not as easy as it looks," Brantley said. "The West Las Vegas Arts Center makes it really easy for me. Marcia (Robinson, the director of the center) has governed and loved and taken care of us for so long."

Culture and history

Unlike readings in other areas of the Las Vegas Valley, the crowds and poets at Poets' Corner are predominately black, Brantley said.

"That is more geographical than anything else," Brantley said. "A lot of (white) folks don't want to come to historic west side."

Also, he added, "I found that when you get a large concentration of black people, white people tend to shy away."

And black people, he said, sometimes feel more comfortable speaking to a crowd that understands what they are discussing culturally.

"Black issues," he said. "If your poetry is talking about that kind of stuff and it's a room full of white people, you're flying solo. It's a cultural difference.

"What you have to find is a common ground."

And at Poets' Corner, baring of the soul is all the common ground needed to be heard and understood.

Hudson, known to the poetry audience as "Miss China," moved her body slowly to her heated words and soulful delivery about the downfalls of the white powder known as "Jack Frost."

Ron Neven, a retired white man in a blue cardigan and a first-timer at the reading, tells of noisy neighbors and the "click- etyclack, clicketyclack" of their kids' roller skates on the sidewalk in his poem, titled "Thanksgiving Paradox."

"There are some people they had no intentions on reading when they came in," Brantley said. "But they were up there reading. I call it the spirit of the poetry corner.

"And people say 'Hey, you know what? I've finally found my poetic home.' "

Or as Carlos Enrique, who charmed Friday's audience with his romantic poems said, "I allow myself to go different places, see different people. From them I learn. From them I grow."