If you haven’t heard our Chattanooga poets speak, it’s time
If there was a Chattanooga poetic voice, it would rap while playing the mandolin or take a soothing sip of nettle tea before hollering into a mic in a bardic baritone. Clearly, there’s no such beast. But there is a distinct Chattanooga poetic community, a set of fragmented but companionable groups with their own trends and schools and heritage.
There are younger and older voices, poets who compose for speech and poets who compose for reading, poets with rural or urban accents, poets who take up mystic and realistic and political themes, all hollering and crooning and declaiming like bards in call-and-response to each other.
Best: they’re doing it in coffee shops and small theaters and bookstores and on Facebook and Instagram. You don’t have to wait for the SoundCloud drop or chapbook. The poets are right here, close enough to touch (okay, maybe don’t touch), the warm sonic whisper of their art near enough to tickle your eardrum.
“Our community is vibrant and nourishing and multifaceted,” says poet Mia Hansford, who is also a fine artist trained at the Parsons School of Design. “We have [poetry from] Lookout Mountain, Signal Mountain, Mentone, Ooltewah, Wildwood—whether high or low, with money or not, there are people writing and creating and reaching out to each other.”
Feel This Voice
I’m in Barking Legs and poet Erika Dionne Roberts is making my hair stand up with her velvet consonants. I’m in a coffee shop and poet Ray Zimmerman reads a few of his own words and I imagine for a minute someone’s put on a crackling record of Tolkien reading Beowulf, but Southern.
Denise Adeniyi, who performs as the Divine Poetess, has degrees in vocal education and music composition and describes her voice as sometimes tranquil, sometimes sensuous.
“I write from my heart and my soul,” she says. “I know everything is connected. I understand vibrations and frequencies.”
Some tuning forks, she continues, vibrates at 432 Hz, the same frequency as the earth’s vibration. She uses the sound of her voice to invoke intellectual as well as sonic vibrations.
“If I can touch people from the heart, that’s resonance,” she says. “It’s making a connection with the audience.”
When we talk about a poet’s “voice,” of course, we’re often talking about a style, not the way they sound speaking. But when you live with your poets, those can be the same thing. Each enriches the other. Mia Hansford’s dry, gentle style illustrates the dichotomy. Both her voice and her verse are plain, husky, resonant and still as a deep well.
“I’m not stark, I’m not Spartan,” she says. “There’s a rich grain of love and influences. I have very different threads in my life, family, and artistic upbringing and experience—there’s a rustic element to my background and what I love.”
Other poets pull the other way. KB Ballentine, author of five collections of poetry and a champion of poets in Chattanooga, describes her speaking and writing voice as nothing alike. The shape on the page, more than the spoken sound, partners the words’ meaning for many poets. Some poets marry sight and meaning by choosing fonts and even soft, thick paper, so that the chapbook becomes a tactile artifact.
Still, in Chattanooga, we know what our poets sound like. Before we hit up Amazon CreateSpace or buy a volume, we’ve probably heard them read in person, close as breath. The tactile—or “sonic,” as poet and artist Christian J. Collier says—quality is hard to miss.
Onstage: The Private Self
A performing poet in a small city runs into challenge: when she tells her story on stage, the supporting parts may be sitting about 12 feet from her, sipping gin and tonic and giving her the side eye if she tattles on them. The relationship between private poet and performing personality is complex.
Erika Dionne Roberts has made transparency both mode and subject of her poetry—and poetic persona—for the past few years. She’s active in teaching others how to express themselves through poetry, working with Chattanooga Girls Rock and hosting a series of poetry workshops at LIT gallery.
“It’s dangerous to tell yourself to be transparent,” she says. “If I’m going to be honest about who I am, some things must remain private. But if there’s anything that could help someone else, I should [use that to] help someone else speak.”She changes her poems in dialogue with her audience, she says, the meanings deepening for some who know the backstory.
“My book [now available on Amazon] is about transparency,” she says. “You have to be honest with yourself to be transparent with others, or you won’t see the truth.”
Segregated Community
Transparency involves trust between people, but moving out of your comfort zone and reading or workshopping with strangers is vital, too. Christian J. Collier has also been thinking about the poetry community in Chattanooga. In fact, he’s doing prep work for a documentary about the Chattanooga poetry scene.
“I realized the poetry scene here is segregated,” he says. “People who come to Barnes & Noble don’t go to Genesis’s [Greykid, nom de plume of poet Russell McGee] workshops. Inherent in that is that people think that’s all poetry in the city has to offer. I want to do something to document, to bridge.”
“Niches are inherent in Chattanooga, period,” he adds. “People are comfortable with places they know, with key personalities. It gets interesting because we are in the information age, but it’s a scary thing for someone who might like something but might not be willing to go to an event.”
That might have to do with demographics or simple lack of information, but I wonder whether it has also to do with very different forms of social courage. Several poets mention to me that workshops attract very different people compared with slam or hip hop venues.
Those who feel comfortable in front of a crowd may shrink from a minute dissection of their language, while a poet who loves to delve into word-by-word scrutiny of their verse might be overwhelmed with embarrassment in a more theatrical setting. And many poets, such as Erika Dionne Roberts and Ray Zimmerman, move easily from the cerebral workshop setting to the shamanic performance mode.
One place people may happen into poetry is Friday’s open mic nights at Barnes & Noble. Subject to time requirements, people can bring finished poems or works in progress to share. Passersby stop and read poems off their phones from time to time, explains KB Ballentine, who hosts the gatherings. The relative blandness of the mall makes it a good place to find unexpected poets from all walks of life. Some get hooked.
“You have poets who are in the workplace and poets who stay home,” KB Ballentine says. “You have urban and rural poets, different religions…what’s good at Barnes & Noble is people are wandering by. Lots have come through over the years and said, ‘I didn’t know this was here, can I read this poem on my phone?’ They get to share, even if for five minutes. Reading your poems out loud is a good, really self-satisfying thing, for a lot of people.”
That delight can erase fear, she says. “It’s scary; some people would rather die than speak in public, but you come to this group, and it’s okay! The older people hear it and bring poems back with them. But the kids jump right in if they have something with them. It helps them feel like, ‘I’m not just writing to myself.’”
Building a Tradition
Ray Zimmerman has been organizing, publishing and performing poetry in Chattanooga for many years now. His own voice, he says, has been influenced, consciously or subconsciously, by voices such as Christian Collier and Jody Harris.
“The community influences my work because I both listen and speak,” he says. “Reading is inhaling; speaking is exhaling.”
He cites Chattanooga’s workshop tradition as another way poets here grow and influence each other. “I may not like what people have to say about my poem, and may not make the specific change they suggest, but I know—the process tells me—I need to make edits. When somebody does not understand, the poem is not finished.”
Many poets came up through the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild or Rhyme N Chatt or first presented their work at Barking Legs Wide Open Floor/The Floor Is Yours nights. People move from one place to the other until they find the community whose mirror of listening best reflects what they’re trying to do.
“It’s hard to get us all in one court,” Erika says. “I came into poetry through Rhyme N Chatt, but how they felt about eroticism kept me from going some nights. I see Marsha Mills and Jody Harris as our pioneers.”
Poets grow through listening to one another, Christian Collier adds. “Hearing different voices, younger voices, different nationalities, different vectors of oppression, opens you up to what’s possible in the craft. So much of what we like is curated—we lose so much in the way of being challenged and the self-analysis [that goes with that]. It benefits everyone to be versatile. Go to something that challenges you, something you don’t understand.”
Come Out, Come Out
Why should young or retired or solitary poets share their works? For the existing community, it’s pure hunger for more poetry. The more voices, the richer the conversation. “We need to hear your work,” Ray Zimmerman says.
But sharing poetry can also be empowering. Therapeutic. Poet and professional writer Rachel Stewart—perhaps along with hundreds of others—has a powerful voice but hasn’t performed or published for some time.
“Getting back into poetry is a goal I’ve been moving toward slowly in the past couple of years,” she says. “I’ve missed the process of sitting down and creating something just for myself and then finding the right place to share it.”
In Chattanooga, there are so many right places. Poets! Come out, share your work and find your community!
Share the Word
Whether you want to speak out or just listen, Chattanooga has a poetry venue near you.
- Open mic at The Well—Mondays at 7 p.m.
- Open mic at Barnes & Noble—Last Fridays at 7:30 p.m.
- Favorite poem day at Starline Books (read any poem but your own)—5th Tuesdays
- Poetry Is LIT—Thursdays biweekly at LIT Art Gallery
- Chattanooga Writers’ Guild—Numerous events; see facebook.com/groups/chattanoogawritersguild
- Rhyme N Chatt—Numerous events; see facebook.com/groups/107372845949285/