The Poetry of Pain

Then she attended an outdoor festival in Atlanta and saw a poetry slam staged by members of New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Though poetry slams had been around since the mid-1980s, Danley had never heard of the raucous spoken-word competitions. She was, she says, "totally blown and totally captivated."

Later in the week, the festival was featuring an open-mike poetry slam. On the day of the contest, Danley and a friend cobbled together a rollicking ode to feminism she still sometimes does for adult-only audiences, "If I Were a Man." And then, she remembers, "I got onstage with my little poem in my hand, and I read my poem, and I was on fire, and the audience went crazy. I was on fire. And I won."

Looking out at the crowd from that outdoor stage, she says, felt "electric," and "just crazy good." A few weeks later, she drove to Asheville, N.C., to compete in the Individual National Poetry Slam Championship. Danley brought "If I Were a Man" and two other poems she'd written earlier. Both touched on racism: One was titled "Sold!" about slavery, and the other was titled "Funeral Like Nixon's."

"Brown and shiny casket/expensive/Poised in the front yard of my girlhood days/Gleaming brilliantly in the honeysuckle April sun/When I die/I want a casket like Richard Nixon's . . ." The poem ends with: "I just want to die like a White man/sinless/blameless/timeless/and softly."

One of her competitors, Joel Dias-Porter, a slam poet in Atlantic City, remembers watching her onstage. "Gayle came out first with her poem, 'Funeral Like Nixon's,' and killed it, absolutely killed it, and it was clear to the rest of us backstage that we were playing for second place. None of us even came close."

Dias-Porter, now a good friend of Danley's, sees her as a natural, with a rare kind of emotional transparency. "Gayle has the ability to be herself when she's onstage," he says. "She's almost exactly the same person as when she's offstage. There's not a lot of people like that."

When Danley recalls that August day in Asheville, she says, "I felt like I had finally made it to some city I had been traveling toward all my life." She left with $500 in prize money and a new sense of purpose.

Danley has been living in a somewhat disheveled three-bedroom house in Northeast Baltimore with her 42-year-old husband, Twain Dooley, who is also a slam poet. He's a member of the Baltimore Slam Team, performs Sunday nights at Den Lounge in Baltimore and waits tables at P.F. Chang's. She has a 13-year-old daughter, Noni, and a 3-year-old son, Noah, who on a recent Saturday morning careens around the house in pull-up diapers and a T-shirt.

"Tiny man!" Danley calls out to him. Noni, an eighth-grader, is sitting on the floor braiding a friendship bracelet for her mom. A piano in the next room is covered with papers and books; a folded stroller lies beneath the bench.

Danley, wearing a pink T-shirt and maternity khakis, goes up to her bedroom, plops on the unmade bed and pulls out a pale-green diary she's been keeping to give to Noni someday. The entry for Oct. 26, 2007: "Ms. Lorenda has died and you and I are hurting."

She and Noni have pulled through some tough times together. The first few years after winning the big slam contest were turbulent for Danley. She met Noni's father, a rapper, at a convenience store, the start of a rocky relationship that she isn't eager to discuss.

Her poem "Noni's Eyes," which is not one she typically reads in schools, describes the time Noni's father threw a glass of water at her head while she nursed their 2-week-old baby: "He had a good excuse. He said he had had a bad life, a bad joint, a bad Mama. I said 'That's too bad Baby,' grabbed my pocketbook, the diaper bag, the baby girl, headed for the front door and never looked back."