Poet's mission is fueled by passion

CHAPEL HILL -- C.J. Suitt, in a black sweatshirt and a fangs-bared-tiger T-shirt, stands against the yellow cinderblock wall.

His body sways to the deejay scratching on a laptop off stage. His head bounces like a bobblehead.

"Poetry is powerful," he tells the mostly high school crowd, "and it's not what you always thought."

"Poetry has become a tool for people to use the way they talk ... to change the way they live."

Suitt, 23, uses his poetry to change the way people see each other.

Last year at a forum in St. Joseph CME church on Rosemary Street he read a poem directed at the developers of the Greenbridge high-rise condominiums, which some fear will speed the demise of the historically black, working-class Northside community.

"We cannot save the earth without saving its people / we cannot save the people without saving the environment.

Partners of Greenbridge / there has always been a seat at the table for you, / as we hope there will be for us."

At a town forum on race relations in November, he criticized the pairing of two monuments on the UNC quad: Silent Sam, the Confederate soldier, and the low-to-the-ground Unsung Founders Memorial to slaves and free blacks who built the university.

"A table that has these two-foot slaves holding it up / The last time I walked past there was a lovely white family enjoying lunch

What reverence we show, still making them be the foundation for the nourishment of this nation."

Suitt has been writing since sixth grade and performing since 10th grade, when he read a poem during Black History Month, his first time in front of a crowd outside his church choir. Now before each poem, he sometimes bows his head as if he's praying. But any insecurity quickly fades.

"Poetry really helped me in school," he said. "I wasn't super popular. I didn't make the best grades in the world. But people would listen to me."

Retired professor of medicine Arthur Finn had never considered the Unsung Founders Memorial in relation to the larger Confederate monument until he heard Suitt's poem at the November forum.

"I don't think it's racist that the statue is small compared to Silent Sam," Finn said. "What I think everyone ought to put into their brain [is] why is this one this size and that one that size?

"And I think by doing that one becomes a more sensitive person."

Poetry in motion

Chapel Hill High teacher Michael Irwin sits in a back row at Flyleaf Books off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

For two hours, guys in hoodies and girls in bright tights and Ingrid Michaelson glasses perform monologues about breast cancer, a friend's losing her virginity at 15, the war on terrorism and John Edwards. After each poem, judges in the audience have scored the poems from 1 to 10, the winners advancing to the next round and a chance to attend a national poetry competition.

"People think youth don't know anything about these issues - but they're wrong," Suitt says, smiling broadly and taking the microphone between performers.

Irwin was Suitt's English teacher in 10th grade, but he says he stopped thinking of Suitt as a student a long time ago.

"We were always just capable of seeing each other," Irwin says.

Irwin was advising the school's poetry slam team the year Suitt, then a senior, traveled with the group to San Francisco for the Brave New Voices competition. "C.J. came back with a drive to invest in his art form," the teacher says. "I think on a very simple level he's motivated by trying to create the world in which he desires to live."

"I live in a wonderful little college town / Where true feelings are glossed over with "PC" wax like the floors in hospitals and the impossibles are made to seem possible

"Between the "Hellos" and "How Ya" Doings" / I feel the hatred brewing as she clutches her purse a little tighter / telling herself "I'm no racist / I have black guy friends, it's just the ones I don't know I'm afraid of."

Suitt wrote those lines waiting tables at the Rizzo Conference Center, part of UNC's Kenan-Flager Business School.

"It's when I hear about a black man being stopped by police I think these things are still going on," he said.

After high school Suitt enrolled at UNC-Pembroke, a college of more than 12,000 students with a significant Native American population. He planned to study environmental science, Suitt found "diversity doesn't really mean anything if people are still going to stay separate."

So he came home and now supports himself with a part-time job in an afterschool program and as executive director of Sacrificial Poets, a program through which he and fellow poet Kane Smego give workshops and performances.

Charli Randolph, 17, didn't think she could perform until she met Suitt. "I was really, really interested in doing what he did, reading poetry out loud," she recalled. "I asked him if he would help me."

Randolph, now a member of the Sacrificial Poets team, says her poetry can ramble. Suitt drew a horizontal line on the board and said she could swing over and under but had to come back to the center line, or theme of the poem.

"The over and under is all the details," Randolph said. "He would read my poems to me so I could understand how my poems would sound out loud."

Still, memorizing and performing didn't come easily. One day she told Suitt she was thinking about giving up.

"He gave me a hug, and I started crying," Randolph said. "He basically convinced me to stay with it."

"My team is my family."

The thrill of competition

Randolph didn't expect to make it past the first round at the Flyleaf slam and has forgotten the words to a poem she is reading in one of the final rounds.

Suddenly, finger snaps fill the room.

In slams, audience members snap to show support; unlike applause, snaps don't drown out the poet's words.

"You got it, you got it," they encourage her.

She pauses, repeats her opening lines, and this time the rest flow behind them. She will end up winning the night and a chance to compete in this year's Brave New Voices contest.

"It's not easy to get up here and do poems, especially in front of your peers," Suitt tells the crowd as his student steps off the stage to cheers. "I remember getting up here, shaking, hoping I wouldn't make it to the next round."

Suitt is applying for a grant to help fund Sacrificial Poets. He's convinced more young people can benefit from poetry, as he has.

"Everybody needs to belong, connect, to something," he says.

"It's a beautiful thing to come out in front of your peers and say, 'I know who you thought I was, but this is who I really am. You may be right. Or you could be very wrong.' "