Poetry Slam Champ Letta Neely

SPEAKING DANGEROUSLY

By: Alison Smith

On a small, makeshift platform in a packed, windowless conference room at Boston's Park Plaza Hotel Letta Neely steps up to the mike and a hush falls over the crowd. it is the final round of the OutWrite Poetry Slam and the tension crackles in the airless, overheated room.

Neely, a leading voice in this burgeoning genre of spoken word poetry, is the two-time champion of the OutWrite Poetry Slam, a featured event at this annual gay and lesbian writers conference.

"I love poetry slams," says Neely. "It's like dining on words for an entire weekend, and I've gorged myself a lot."

A recent phenomenon, the poetry slam got its start in a Chicago bar and has spread like brushfire across the country. It's the literary world's answer to the Olympics, where performance counts as much as the poem itself and each poet's work is graded on a scale of one to 10. Judges for the competition are chosen randomly from the crowd and audience feedback is highly encouraged, filling the roomalternately with ear-splitting cheers and dismissive boos. It is not for the faint of heart.

"I was totally surprised and scared," says Neely of her first "slamming" experience in 1994. "Suddenly, I was a conduit for all of this energy. It was like a fever in me."

Neely's fever appears to be contagious. Wherever she reads, things catch fire, despite her easy, understated manner. In this world of wild cheering and shaking fists, she stands out for the simplicity, and the eloquence, of her delivery.

At 27, Neely, a Boston-based writer and teacher, is the author of one full-length book of poetry, Juba, and two chapbooks, gawd and alluh huh sistahs and when we were mud.

Writing on a range of topics from poverty to sex to the 1963 bombing of a black Baptist church in Birmingham Ala., Neely combines the rhythms of the Negro spiritual with a keen ear the spoken word. Bearing witness is an important part of her aesthetic.

"When I was little my family used to ask, 'Why do you always write unhappy things?' I love life. I love life so much that I'm probably always on the cusp of death somewhere," explains Neely, the word tumbling out of her.

"I've got to write that darkness out every day. I don't know if other people feel the world's mess going through their veins like I do, like toxic shock. It's hard for me to see the pretty things unless I get the dark things out of the way."

In writing that darkness out of the way, Neely has created some of the most emotionally charged, eloquent resistance poetry of her generation.

She can trace the roots of her inspiration to early childhood. Growing up in an all-black, working-class neighborhood in Indianapolis, Ind. (a place Neely calls "the world's biggest small town"), her parents had a strong influence on her early intellectual life.

"They were black nationalists," explains Neely. "their attitude was, 'let's speak Swahili, let's celebrate Kwanzaa and acknowledge that we're black.' It meant more than what we saw on TV."

"Both of them were really into black literature and the house was just stacked with books, all kinds, from novels to almanacs to thesauruses," Neely says.

Neely and her four brothers and sisters played in the streets with neighborhood kids every day after school. As the neighborhood formed a close, insular world, Neely developed close bonds with other children on her block.

"We played stick ball in the alleys and made basketball hoops from bicycle tire rims," says Neely, smiling.

But childhood was definitely not all fun and games.

"I've been working since I can't even remember," says Neely. "My first job was selling Captain Avenger greeting cards that I ordered out of the back of my Spiderman comic book."

Neely also began teaching at a young age. With her mother's help, she organized a reading program for the kids in her neighborhood to increase literacy. "It seems like I've been teaching as long as I've been alive," she says.

As the school busing policies of the 1970s came into effect, Neely's tight-knit neighborhood was disbanded. "We were all sent to different schools, really far away. I never saw some of those kids again," she says.

Commuting 45 minutes out of the city to the suburbs, Neely attended a predominantly white school. "Before that, I thought all white people were teachers because those were the only whites I saw," explains Neely, who had little time to devote to her budding lesbian identity.

"I'd been getting busy with girls since I was 9," Neely says, "but I didn't have time to worry about being a lesbian. I was worried about being an overachiever in a school where blacks were tracked for failure."

After high school, Neely had a brief and disappointing stint at Indiana University. "I went to college expecting that there was going to be an exchange, you know?" Neely explains, interlacing her fingers to emphasize her meaning. Neely headed instead for her dream city: Harlem.

"You see, I thought that the Harlem Renaissance was still happening,"

Neely says and laughs. "I lived with some kids from Columbia and Barnard. It was hot as hell and the #1 and the #9 [busses] went right in front of my window every five minutes. It's not quite what I had in mind."

Despite these disappointments, Neely started attending open mikes in Brooklyn and Harlem and the Bronx. It wasn't long before she was offered the headliner spot at a spoken word evening.

"That's when I learned that the featured reader got a little cut from the door. It wasn't much, but I was making money from my writing." From there her career took off. Soon, Neely was getting top billing at events all over New York and Boston.

In 1995, after moving to Boston to live with her girlfriend, poet Renita Martin, Neely stopped in at a copy center on her way to a reading. She planned to make a few copies of her poems, but once she started, she could not stop.

"I just made more and more copies," says Neely. "I started cutting and pasting a bunch of poems together. I'll never forget the feeling when I made the books. It was amazing. They were all raggedy, but I made them."

She sold all 50 chapbooks at a reading that night.

Neely, who has never been represented by a publishing house, never had a distributor for her books, chooses to carve out her own space in the literary world. In 1998, after she won for a second time at the OutWrite Poetry Slam and her chapbooks were selling very well, she founded her own publishing company: Wildheart Press.

"I didn't like the idea of anybody else telling me what I could and could not put in my books," says Neely of her dedication to self-publishing. Neely paid for all of the production costs for the printing of her first full-length book, Juba.

"I took on five jobs, taught night and day, to make the money to cover our first book."

"Juba is sort of an autobiography," she says. "When I read it through, I told myself a story I had never heard before."

Although Juba allowed Neely to take new risks with her work, she's still loyal to the chapbook. "There's a particular value in chap books, maybe in their lack of monetary value," she says. "They cost $1.62 to make--you can give them away, share them."

With still more chapbooks in store, Neely is currently working on an anthology of contemporary American resistance poetry.

On Wednesday nights in Cambridge, Neely teaches a writing class to gay and lesbian teens. She tells her students: "We are all worthy of being published. We all deserve to have our voices heard. We have our voices, we have the streets, we have copy machines," says Neely as she urges all of the kids to write for the local queer newspaper.

"Writing is a dangerous thing," says Neely. "And it should not cease to be dangerous."

Neely's doing her best to keep it that way.

This article was published in Curve magazine's July 1999 issue.