The Poetry of Pain

Actually, though, she did look back. She was with him, she says, on and off for about four volatile years. In those days, she was essentially a single mom, living in the Washington area, where she'd moved to try to start a poetry career and be closer to Noni's dad, who lived in Maryland. She took a transcription job at the TV show "America's Most Wanted" for a year or so, and, for a while, tried to pay the bills by baking cakes. She'd walk the streets with her homemade frosted lemon pound cake, trying to sell slices for a dollar.

"It was just awful," she says. "It made me realize I didn't want to go around begging anybody to buy something from me."

Her slam career continued in fits and starts. She'd taken a shot at the 1995 slam in Ann Arbor, Mich., but, she says, "I was preggers with Noni and got knocked out of competition the first night." But the following year, she won a competition in Heidelberg, Germany. And poetry was opening other doors for Danley.

In 1994, right after the win in Asheville, Danley had done a reading at a coffee shop. After the performance, Danley recalls, a young woman called her up to say, "You need to be in schools." The woman had connections with schools in Upstate New York, so that's where Danley started doing poetry residencies. Slowly, "one gig led to the next." Eventually, she became such a big draw that Young Audiences, which works with 5,000 artists in 24 states, named Danley its 2006 National Artist of the Year.

Danley met her husband in the mid-'90s, when both were performing at a cafe called It's Your Mug near Georgetown. They were friends for years before romance took root. In 1999, when Danley's relationship with Noni's father was finally over, she ran into Dooley at a restaurant. "There was a lightness to him that felt good to me after a heaviness with [Noni's] dad," she says.

They've performed together. The last time Danley slammed was in 2006 at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, when she was on the D.C./Baltimore slam team with Dooley and three others. Battling some 70 other teams, they made it to the finals and placed fourth.

Because Dooley has such a different performance style -- low-key and comedic -- Danley says there's no professional rivalry between the two. He's far less expansive than his wife onstage, and more whimsical. There's a brief clip on YouTube of one bit titled "Kitchen Poem," where he begins, in a mock-angry tone, "Spoons are always stirring up something. They are always in knife and fork's business, talkin' 'bout how knife just ain't cuttin' it no more ... " The couple apparently saves their competitiveness for the game board. When they married in 2001 in a small ceremony on Georgia's Jekyll Island, vows included a promise to always play Scrabble together. Danley says she has loved the game since high school, though about five years ago an old friend taught her how to play like a pro, showing her the Scrabble tricks he'd learned while doing time in jail. Now she says she's into it "real deep."

"You come to my house," she warns, "you're probably going to have play me some Scrabble."

At the Mocha Hut coffeehouse on U Street, Danley shouts out to the audience, "I'm not gonna be here for long, y'all, 'cause I need to go home and have sex with my husband!"

The crowd, mostly 20s-somethings and college students crushed together in the small space, cheers with delight.

Danley is a different person at venues like this, among adults; not necessarily more effective but definitely louder and a lot raunchier. She's wearing a plunging bright-green blouse over a white shirt, and hot-pink sandals. Along with some newer pieces, she performs her classic "If I Were a Man," whose first line declares, "I'd be a ... mixture of Shaft, Clifton Davis, Bob Marley, Jesus Christ, Bill Gates (for the funds)," and offers a few other choice observations, including, "If I were a man, I'd have one woman -- Okay, no more than two!"

The young people watching add whoops of laughter throughout. In this room, on this summer night, she is a slam-poetry rock star.

Two college-age wo-men sit on high stools together, and one writes "Gayle Danley" on the back page of her newspaper. The two are rapt when Danley weeps through the Lorenda poem, then ends with another about visiting a juvenile detention center in Richmond, where, she says, she was able to make a hardened young inmate cry with her poetry.

"That was the evening I decided I'm just gonna keep on being a crazy fearless poet," she tells the audience, emphatically. At the end of the 20-minute performance, the room roars with a standing ovation, and a group of young women gathers around for autographs. "She was amazing," the young woman with the newspaper whispers, wide-eyed, to her friend.

Danley doesn't do too many of these coffeehouse performances anymore. Though the hat gets passed, the gigs typically pay next to nothing. She also doesn't compete much in slams anymore, because preparing "can take a lot of time and focus, and these days I'm finding myself more interested in focusing on the next big, new challenge, whatever that may be."

She's taking real estate investment classes, just to try her hand at something completely different. In addition to her family's home, she owns two rental properties in Baltimore. In class, she's learning about foreclosures, tax liens, how to do home inspections -- all of which, she cheerfully says, "is so unartsy! It's so business and numbers and real life!" She says her new interest in real estate is not about making money, but about the fact that "I don't have to perform," so "it's a way to relax."

She's got a 3-year-old she's trying to potty train, a packed teaching schedule and a constant low-level nausea from the pregnancy. She's just found out she's having a boy. She's also been going through "a spurt," she says, "where I'm just writing and writing and writing." She's got several notebooks strewn about in her car, and tends to compose poems on anything available when inspiration strikes -- except on a computer, with which she's not a whiz (she considers forwarding e-mail messages to be "fancy stuff").

She's been searching for a new platform for her talents, something that would allow her to affect more people, more deeply. Last year, she had a one-woman show, "Naked," at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre, but that didn't generate as much attention or sense of satisfaction as she'd hoped.

Lately, she's been visiting alternative venues, harder places, such as prisons and homeless shelters, to perform her poetry. She changed her schedule at Deerfield Run to fit in a trip to a shelter for troubled teens in Buffalo. That meant an almost seven-hour drive each way (she's claustrophobic, so she avoids airplanes) for what turned out to be an evening performance in front of only three girls. (It wasn't entirely altruistic, however, since she made $850 for the effort through Young Audiences of Western New York.)

She hopes to spend a few weeks this spring with homeless women in Baltimore at the Women's Housing Coalition, helping them explore their feelings through poetry. She's thought about visiting intensive-care units in hospitals or working with hospice patients. When asked why she's drawn to performing and teaching in these settings, she responds by e-mail, in her typical poem-like writing and speaking style: "That's where the challenge and the fear are. There's no pretense in those places, just heart and laughter and pain. Everything is so immediate and yes, I feel very 'necessary' when I'm there."

Stacie Sanders, executive director at Young Audiences of Maryland, says that while the organization is trying to help Danley stretch and reach more people, "I hope she'll keep a place in her heart for kids because it's really clear that they need that outlet. These kids need her."

On Danley's fourth and last day with the sixth-grade class at Deerfield Run, she looks a little more tired than usual. Her belly's getting big, and she's wearing tight maternity jeans and a gray sweat shirt. After leading the children through some stretching exercises, she seeks volunteers to read their poems, first advising them to use eye contact with the audience, and to infuse the performance with personality, passion and authenticity -- or as she puts it, "Show your flava!"

She'd asked them to write a story about something that changed them, using "Ms. Gayle's Five Steps to Slam: 1. Write it all down, 2. Read out loud, 3. Cut the fat, 4. Read out loud, 5. Add the flava!!" One girl reads two lines about her father's girlfriend's baby. There's more on the page, but she doesn't want to read the rest.

It seems like the class hasn't quite gotten it yet, and, at times like this, it's easy to understand Danley's frustration with teaching. There's the boy named David, for instance, who eagerly gets up in front of the class in baggy black jeans to read his poem, which begins with "Roses are red, violets are blue," and ends with "boogers are green, this poem is through."

"Eww!" his classmates scream and laugh.

But many of the children sit silently throughout the lesson, including a small boy in glasses. He's holding a poem titled "The Big Loss" that starts with "December 29, the worst day of my life." After class he shows it to Danley, his eyes red. It's about his uncle's death, he says. When asked what he learned from the poetry workshop, he replies, almost inaudibly, "I learned how to express my feelings and sometimes you feel like crying. When I read my piece, it loosens up my heart."

It is moments like these, Danley says, that loosen her own heart and remind her "to keep the faces of the children in front me."

Christina Ianzito is a contributing writer for the Magazine. She can be reached at cianzito@gmail.com.