Published in the Quad-City Times on Apr. 22, 2024

On a Friday night outside Rozz-Tox, the sun is setting.

The remaining light has crept inside the Rock Island café’s barred windows, illuminating a sparse scene in the main room. Roaring Rhetoric, the recurring open mic poetry events at Rozz-Tox and Rock Island’s Skylight Luxury Lounge, is about to start. 

Tables are filling up. Poets are shuffling to and from the bar. Some are changing their seats to be closer to the stage. Others are moving further back. A microphone is at the stage’s center and window light has turned it into a silhouette.

At the back of the stage, local musician DJ K1NG SUPR3M3 sets up his equipment. He’s as gentle with his turntables as he is with his coat, a camouflage fatigue covered in patches. 

By 7:20 p.m., the sun has almost completely fallen behind a nearby building. Its last gasp illuminates a series of poems taped to the walls, written by guest artist Marcos Herrera. 

“You would not say it if you knew that in a few lit years, you would come back in crafts,” the one closest to the stage reads. 

Finally, Rozz-Tox employees close the window curtains, bringing an abrupt end to the dusk. There are roughly a dozen poets in attendance. Just before the event starts, one asks a question: “Isn’t Aubrey hosting this?”

‘Home is literally what made you’

Typically, that would be the case.

Aubrey Barnes is a Rock Island-raised poet and spoken word artist who goes by Mister Aubs. He has been working professionally since 2014, the same year he founded Roaring Rhetoric. 

Since then, he’s published three books of poetry, and has plans for three more in the near future. He’s also a founder and teacher at local education nonprofit Young Lion’s Roar. The calendar stays packed, but still, Barnes hosts most Roaring Rhetoric events. On that particular night, in the thick of National Poetry Month, he was in Joliet, Illinois, performing at an open mic. 

Being on the road is nothing new for the 32-year-old. In recent weeks, poetry has taken him to Albuquerque, Kansas City and Nashville.

But he says nothing feels quite like home. 

Barnes wants to prove that you don’t need to be from a big city to make it as a professional poet. He also wants to make his hometown proud. 

“(Rock Island) made me who I am,” Barnes said. “It’s a big part of my narrative.” 

Sitting outside Theo’s Java Cafe, he gestured up the street, pointing to where his bus stop was as a kid. He pointed to where he first got his lip busted in a grade school fight. Where he recorded albums with a sock over the microphone at his friend’s rat-infested apartment. To the riverfront, where he ran to meditate after learning that his younger brother died. 

“I think as an artist or creative or a human in general, I definitely understand wanting to leave home,” Barnes said. “But I don’t think that you should ever discount the fact that home is literally what made you.” 

When he started Roaring Rhetoric, he was hoping to locally tear down some of the walls around poetry. 

“It’s less of a thing now, but people were kind of hesitant of the poetry community,” Barnes said. “In this part of the Midwest, some people don’t even know what poetry is, or even consider (it) an art form, or an art that you can get paid for.”

Because of all the travel, Barnes has worked to make sure Roaring Rhetoric runs smoothly when he’s gone. At the most recent event, longtime poets Ambrea Samuels and Tommy Quinn co-hosted in his place. The next event is on Friday at Skylight Luxury Lounge. 

‘We all want to be heard’

Both Quinn and Samuels say open mic events have helped intensify the sense of community. There’s a familial feeling at Roaring Rhetoric, if even just for the diversity of experience the event attracts.

Quinn said that’s what makes the local poetry scene unique. 

“You have people of all different classes and races,” he said. “A lot of times you really don’t know your neighbors, you really don’t know other people who don’t look like you.

“We’re able to become more of a community with each other by being around each other and being able to share our different experiences.” 

Barnes thinks that this sense of community comes from a natural urge to be seen and understood. 

“We all want to be heard — one of the most human-est desires is to be heard,” he said. “I’m convinced that this space is needed for people to share their stories.” 

Local artists say getting into poetry has changed their lives on a more personal level, too. Quinn says it’s taught him patience. He writes two to three times a week, and it doesn’t always come easily. With time, he’s learned to let it happen naturally. 

Quinn also said he enjoys the feeling of moving a crowd. As a kid, he was inspired by the magnetism of performances by Michael Jackson. 

“To be able to grab the attention of everyone in the room, have them pay attention to everything you say or do,” he said. “Things like that have always excited me.”

Samuels, who has been writing poetry since she was 10 and performs under the name Golden Goddess, agrees that being on stage is empowering. Recently, her experience working with Roaring Rhetoric opened the doors to participate in an all-female poetry slam. 

When she took the stage earlier this month, Samuels’ poems, which interwove sexual imagery and personal narrative, commanded the audience’s attention. It hasn’t always been that easy.

“I used to be scared to say how I was feeling,” she said. “I would just write for myself, and then I just saw that people were really vibing with it.”

Barnes said he’s used poetry as a way to keep his late brother’s memory alive. He argues the best way to honor someone is by speaking their name. 

“I try to do that as often as I can, just to keep their presence known, to let people know that this human being was here,” he said. “I know that, because I lived these years with them. I went to have tacos with them. They slept on my floor when they didn’t have a place to sleep.” 

His brother’s name was Benjamin. He was five years younger than Aubrey. 

The bridge between poetry and hip-hop

Poetry first entered Barnes’ life when he was 12 years old, after hearing songs by Nas and becoming infatuated with battle rap culture. He says a poetry slam and a rap battle are mostly one and the same. 

A university study published in Germany in 2017, cited by the National Library of Medicine, concluded that seeing poetry performance is a powerful emotional stimulus that consistently causes chills and goosebumps at a rate similar to live music. 

Over the last decade, the Venn diagram of Quad-Cities slam poets and rappers has moved closer to a circle.

Quinn, for example, started performing because of Tupac Shakur, whose poem “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” is his favorite ever. Samuels was once a singer, and said listening to music provides her with inspiration before writing.

And then there’s John “Rewind” Gunter, Jr., a rapper and spoken word poet raised in Rock Island, who has since relocated to Atlanta. There, he’s pursuing a career in both art forms.

The 35-year-old Illinois State alum has been performing since 2008. In 2013, he started EpideMic at Rozz-Tox, which he says was the Quad-Cities’ first recurring space for spoken word and rap performance. 

“Black artists didn’t have a lot of venues that we could even perform at,” he said. 

Some people associated rap with violence, and poetry with peace. He would hear things like, “Oh, you guys aren’t rappers, you’re poets.” 

“We’re doing the same thing — we’re the same exact people,” he’d answer. 

But still, it opened doors. Over the years, Gunter saw the ratio of rappers to poets at EpideMic shift. It created a nurturing space for artists from both disciplines to thrive, something he’s proud of. 

He’s especially proud to say that many local rappers played their first headline show on the Rozz-Tox stage. Echoes of that impact can still be felt in Roaring Rhetoric, which Gunter said he comes back to the Quad-Cities to attend and perform at as often as he can. 

“(EpideMic) kind of walked so a lot of things can run now,” he said. 

The sun rises

The trajectory of local poetry still points upward, especially as interest in it at the youth level has grown exponentially in the last decade. Between 2012 and 2017, the National Endowment for the Arts found that the rate of adults 18-24 reading poetry more than doubled.

Social media has also made poetry more accessible — poets like Rupi Kaur, Hanif Abdurraqib, Amanda Gorman and Ocean Vuong have Instagram follower counts with six or seven digits.

Chris Britton is a local poet and creative writing teacher at Thurgood Marshall Learning Center, an alternative school in Rock Island. Britton said he was into break dancing and freestyle rapping at an early age, and through that experience, he found spoken word performance. 

As a teacher, Britton said he uses the lyricism in rap and spoken word to connect with students. The rawness of each genre helps to strip away some of the “academic jargon” that tends to come with poetry’s reputation in the classroom, he said. 

Britton likens someone’s poetry to their fingerprint in uniqueness. And if there’s one thing he doesn’t ever have to worry about with students, it’s their passion for leaving a mark. 

Everett Hamner, professor of English at Western Illinois University, said writing poetry can enhance a critical skill for students: the ability to “concretize and focalize what matters to them.”

Hamner has taught at WIU for 16 years, and in that time, he’s seen young poets get braver.

“There’s more readiness among our students to take risks — and put their sense of what’s right and wrong with our world … on a page or behind a mic — than there was a couple of decades ago,” he said.

Hamner is also the faculty adviser for IDEAS, a WIU student organization that organizes a yearly event called GET LIT at WIU’s Quad-Cities campus.

GET LIT, which started in 2018, allows area high school students to share and perform poetry, spoken word and visual art. This year, the event was held on April 4, and it attracted 131 students from nine different high schools.

During its open mic segment, where students are encouraged to share their work, there was hardly enough time to get to everyone. Lunch was postponed. Kids waited more than an hour for their three minutes at the podium. 

And the poems were strikingly candid. Students delved into topics like depression, anxiety, body image, abuse, grief and politics. As hundreds of peers watched, many approached the podium nervously. The words raced from their lips. Final stanzas were punctuated with sighs of relief. 

Izzy Dudek, a junior at Moline High School, shared a reworking of a vulnerable poem that won a gold prize the year before. At the podium, their hands shook vigorously. But Dudek’s voice boomed, ricocheting every word off the university’s translucent walls.

Dudek, who uses they/them pronouns, has participated in GET LIT since their freshman year, and said they’re writing poetry as a way of honoring their late grandfather, a poet himself. Dudek also said it’s affirming just to be heard by students from other schools.

“I just like sharing my work with people,” they said.

GET LIT wrapped up in the early afternoon.

As students were given awards for their poems, the Mississippi River crawled along outside one window of the almost entirely glass atrium. Through another, the sun beamed high in the 1 p.m. sky. 

There was not an empty seat. The entire room was bathed in light. 

Upstream at Rozz-Tox, a poem taped to the walls ended its first stanza: “Floating through air, floating through time, as pure presence. As the lightest proof of light.”