Metro Pulse/Backstage/Sunsphere Shots

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What:
Sunsphere Shots by Daniel Roop, produced by Actors Co-op Beehive and Knox Word

When:
Friday, Feb. 28 and Saturday, March 1 at 8 p.m.; April 25 and 26 at 8 p.m.

Where:
Black Box Theatre

Cost:
$6. Call 523-0900 for more info.

Poet Daniel Roop examines what it means to live in the shadow of the Sunsphere

by Adrienne Martini

As any art student will tell you, perspective is a bitch, what with all of those angled lines and vanishing points. Sometimes, you have to retreat quite a distance in order to see something properly.

This holds true for cities, as well. The Sunsphere makes more sense when considered from, say, Kansas, than it might when you stand right next to it, craning your neck to take in the whole blooming thing. For slam poet Daniel Roop, it was from the Midwest that Knoxville finally found context.

"I felt more southern in Wisconsin than I ever had in my life," he says, over coffee and beers at Cup-a-Joe's in the Old City. "I learned to appreciate a lot of things that I really hated before, and I wanted to come back here."

Roop is preparing to perform Sunsphere Shots, an hour-long piece that contains 10 of his poems that struggle to come to terms with what this place means. Initially from Powell, Roop moved all over the country for a few years before coming back. Knoxville, he says, hasn't changed.

"It's the same, only my perspective has changed. When I was in high school, I hated things about Knoxville. I hated that it was so small. I hated that it had an inferiority complex. I hated that it wasn't New York. And I still hate those things about it. But I love things about it, too. I love that old women in gas stations call me honey when I walk in. I love that my parents are here. I love that it's warm and that I can walk outside late at night in the summer in just boxer shorts."

While Roop won't be presenting his poems in his underwear, his approach to poetry is just as irreverent as such a statement would be. There is an urgency in his delivery of his work, a passion that makes his verse crackle and pop with barely restrained energy. This distinctive style was born from Roop's training in the Slam scene, where poetry is treated like hip-hop, given lush swagger and catchy rhythm.

Slam, however, did not come naturally to Roop.

"I initially hated Slams," Roop admits. "The first thing I ever saw that really made me appreciate Slam was in the old Sam and Andy's on Cumberland. A lot of students, but also a lot of blue collar people who had just gotten off of work and just got their check and wanted to have fun and drink. And really didn't want to listen to poets.

"We would all get up there and just kind of sheepishly shake through our little poems. Pat Storm gets up and from the back of the room, not even on the microphone, just starts belting out this poem. And the entire room shuts up. That's what I want to do, to make poetry seem necessary."

Poetry, however, doesn't command high currency in our world anymore, and it's drowned out by MTV and the nightly news. How can something usually reserved for high school English class still command our attention?

"One of my favorite poets is Yeats, because of the idea of antithesis that runs through all of his work—you can't have good without bad," Roop explains with an engaging smile. "So you can't say poetry is necessary without also saying that you can make poetry way too important. Not everybody cares about poetry. And that's cool. That's completely valid. I would just like people to give poetry a fair chance, to hear good poetry before they decide and know that there's not just one kind of poetry. Just like you can't say music is bad, music is boring and outdated—you can't say that about poetry either."

Shots is a vivid amalgam of Knoxville, akin to driving around town on the surface streets, snapping pictures at random. While the total package lyrically captures all that this scruffy little city is, there is one memory of Knoxville that Roop will always hold most treasured.

"Playing basketball with my friend Stephen in the back court of Powell middle school," Roop says. "He's dead now. He was one of my best friends. I have friends that I'm closer to, but I've never felt that kind of non-verbal connection with anyone, other than when we were playing together. We weren't stellar players. But just the feeling of knowing exactly where someone would be—knowing that if I threw a blind pass, he'd be there. It's an amazing feeling."

"The poem [in Sunsphere Shots] about Stephen is about his mother asking me to write a poem for him after he died. At the time I was a little lyrical poet full of myself—I'm like, how can I write a poem she would understand and be true to my art at the same time? That was total garbage. She wanted a poem. I ended up writing her a poem that she loved. And I learned a lot doing that, that you owe your audience something. You have to know who you're writing to, and you have to meet them halfway."

The same can be said of Knoxville, it seems, once you get far enough away to get some perspective on it. Like Shots, it's a thing you can love if you're willing to meet it halfway.