Hey, Let's Do A Few Lines!

By JANICE C. SIMPSON

To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.

-- Walt Whitman

No stranger to the bar scene of his own era, the Bard of Brooklyn would love the crowd at Chicago's Green Mill Lounge. Every Sunday night it's standing room only in this gritty neighborhood tavern. The audience is there for the weekly "slam," a literary version of The Gong Show at which amateur poets compete for small cash prizes and the much richer reward of having their work heard by an enthusiastic public. The poetic abilities of many contestants may be open to debate, but the audience is always in top form. On a typical evening a rambling poem about using nuclear weapons to blow up political banquets brings raucous cheers. A watery ode to existentialism ("Nothing that is worth having actually is . . .") draws equally good-natured jeers.

Suddenly, poetry is popular again with the hip crowd in the U.S., for the first time since the Beat Generation of the '50s and early '60s. During the past five years, a new generation of defiantly populist poets has moved verse out of the hothouse environment of college and university writing programs and into bars, coffeehouses and even Laundromats and subway trains. "The only way ; for poetry to survive is to get out and get poetry into people's lives," declares Bob Holman, who organizes readings at the hip Nuyorican Poets Cafe on New York City's Lower East Side.

The poetic populists claim that their efforts are providing fresh blood for an increasingly anemic area of American culture. The transfusion is substantial: the New York City Poetry Calendar currently lists an average of 15 gatherings each night. In Los Angeles the Poetry Hotline gives updates on readings; meanwhile, celebrities like Joe Spano, who played sensitive Sergeant Henry Goldblume on TV's Hill Street Blues, render their favorite poems in trendy spots like the Chateau Marmont. "Poetry deserves to be heard," he says.

Readings have caught on with a young and racially diverse set that sees poetry clubs as an attractive way to meet people now that the disco scene is passe. "Before, the scene was centered around doing coke or pot in your house with your friends or going out to a bar and drinking," says Lycia Naff, a Los Angeles actress. "All those same people are now in the coffeehouses." Poetry gatherings are also a relatively cheap night out. Says Loyola University student Anne Grason, at the Green Mill: "Where else can you have this much fun for $4?"

Some observers credit rap music for the renewed interest in the spoken word. "Ears are being tuned up to listen to words again," says Manhattan's Holman. Events like slams are aimed to appeal to a generation accustomed to the frenetic action of MTV. Contestants at Chicago's Green Mill are encouraged to perform their poems to live music, creating a new blend of poetry and song that has been nicknamed -- what else -- pong. In New York City the deejay at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe plays James Brown records and other dance music during breaks between slam competition rounds. "It's great to see writing so alive, and the dancing is great too," says Danine Richards, 25, a writer from Brooklyn.

At the Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, California, the emphasis is on a mix of video and poetry called Telepoetics. At one recent event a poet in Santa Fe read a work about childbirth over telephone wires that fed into the cafe public address system. While her disembodied voice filled the room, images of her performance in New Mexico were projected onto three TV screens.

Open-mike readings, at which anyone can get up and perform, are another popular audience booster in the clubs. Social issues, sexual and racial politics, and the general crassness of American culture are popular topics. "In the Persian Gulf bodies rained,/ Arab jets all worked in vain,/ The modern world is at the flood," declaims Joe Roarty at Chicago's Cafe Voltaire. Earnestness and energy also count for a lot. Donna Wozinsky, 36, a spunky special-education teacher from Queens, whose verse tends toward the excruciatingly personal ("I, the sperm bank of your soul . . .") attends at least three open-mike readings or slams a week. Says she: "I don't mind being judged because I know the audiences like me."

There is, of course, the risk that the outburst of versifying will merely inundate the country with bad poetry that plays better onstage than on the page. But optimists argue that any interest will inevitably translate into greater respect for the truly gifted. "People prize the spoken word," says S.X. Rosenstock, vice president of Poetry Society of America, West. "Whether it's Beat poetry or Dante, they want to hear it. Speaking any poem is a statement of your freedom."

With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles and Nina Burleigh/Chicago