ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 31, 1996 TAG: 9609040006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER
When Patricia Johnson learned she was not a finalist in the National Poetry Slam, she walked out of her hotel room in Portland, Ore., and headed for the roof.
After the semifinals the night before, she was sure she'd made it to the last round; after all, she had the top score of the evening.
"I was walking around like I was in them and accepting congratulations," said the Roanoke team member.
But when she rose early on Aug. 24, the day of the finals, and called slam organizer Jeff Meyers to check her score, he broke the bad news.
"I went up on the roof and said a little prayer and thanked God and decided there must have been an error," Johnson said.
Then she went back downstairs and told her teammates she hadn't made it.
They were shocked. Slam-mate Simon Adkins and Maria Kusznir, who organized Roanoke's first poetry slam in 1992, pulled out the official rule book and read its contents over and over, trying to figure out what went wrong. Still puzzled, they went to the coffee shop where the scores were posted and copied down the results from the first two days of the competition. The scores from the semifinals were still missing, and they returned to the hotel and began knocking on doors hoping someone had made notes.
No one had. Then Kusznir remembered that a poet from Asheville, N.C., always took notes. She called the woman's hotel. "I made the hotel clerk go out to the pool and ask any poet he could find which room she was in," Kusznir said.
By the time they found her, it was 6:30 p.m. All finalists had to be at the theater by 7 p.m. or they would be disqualified.
Johnson was crying and running from teammate to teammate begging them, "Please do something."
"I have no memory of throwing things, but it's been said that I was throwing things," Johnson admitted.
With all the scores in hand, Kusznir and Adkins began scribbling and tabulating furiously. Finally, they found the error they were looking for: One of Johnson's scores had been switched with the score of another competitor.
Adkins called Meyers. With the finals of a national competition bearing down on him, the event organizer wasn't exactly in a chatty mood. "You have three seconds," he said.
Although doubtful at first, Meyers was finally convinced that an error had occurred - Johnson was in, he said. It was 10 minutes until 7 p.m.
Johnson clawed on her dress, squeezed into a car with five members of Connecticut's poetry slam team, and arrived at the theater just in time.
Somehow, Johnson was calm as she walked on stage at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts Intermediate Theater.
"For me, the competitive edge was gone, and it became a performance," she said.
She began with "Crow Master," a poem about a woman married to an abusive husband. The clincher was "Somebody's Child," about the burning of black churches in the South.
Johnson had performed that poem the previous Sunday at Crossroads United Methodist Church in Elk Creek, the church where she grew up and from where she drew the images for her poem. She remembered the minister's words to her after that performance.
"He said that God was going to work a miracle in my life," she said. "All I could think of was this must be the miracle."
The 1,200 people in the audience sat awestruck. The judges, randomly selected from the audience in true poetry-slam tradition, gave her first place - out of 120 competitors - and a $500 cash award.
"She went in there and she slayed them," Kusznir said. "The Portland newspaper described her in terms of Langston Hughes."
Johnson edged out Winston-Salem's Evert Eden by just a tenth of a point.
The South African native's performance earlier this year in Knoxville, Tenn., had inspired her to rewrite "Somebody's Child." Now it was Eden's turn to be inspired when he learned after the competition of her near miss.
"For her to have done that was completely unbelievable," he said. "It was a feat of nerves and grace under pressure."
Roanoke's poetry slam team - which consists of Johnson, Adkins, Nick Glennon and Heather Blue - reached the semifinals in the team competition. Final rankings haven't yet been posted, but Glennon said the Roanoke group will come out somewhere between seventh and 18th out of 27 teams. They were 12th in the nation going into the finals.
This is the team's third year in the National Poetry Slam. The team has made the semifinals once before and Johnson had ranked as high as seventh as an individual. But team members say they'll remember the 1996 slam for reasons other than just their high scores.
"It turned out to be one of those great group experiences," Glennon said.
As for Johnson, she's gained a new appreciation for some of her teammates nonpoetic skills.
"Thank God for math geeks," she said.
nRoanoke's poetry slam team will perform 9 p.m. Tuesday at the Full Moon Cafe in downtown Roanoke and 3 p.m. Sept. 8 at the Rex Theater in Galax.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Patricia Johnson. color.by CNB