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By Jymi Bolden
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Sylvester Little Jr.
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Parting is such sweet sorrow. It happens this time every year. Members of the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival (CSF) acting company move on in search of new pursuits. The reasons vary but, regardless, the family is torn apart. So it is that Sylvester Little Jr., a two-year CSF veteran, heads off to parts unknown.
Little, you see, isn't attending grad school or pounding the pavement in New York City as other actors from CSF's company have done. At least, not yet. Instead, he'll be taking it to the streets. Or rather, the schools.
For nine months, beginning in August, Little will, for all intents and purposes, be living out of a rental car with one other person as they bring poetry to schools across the country. The program is called Poetry Alive!
The concept is simple. Two-person teams travel the country performing the poetry of reknowned poets for students from kindergarten through college. Poetry Alive! began in 1984 with a show at McDibb's, a music hall in Black Mountain, N.C. A teacher in the audience that night arranged for the group to visit her class. From there, Poetry Alive! simply grew, adding more two-person teams and performing across the United States.
Little hooked up with Poetry Alive! earlier this year at the Unified Professional Theater Association auditions in St. Louis. And he's looking forward to living a transient life while performing poetry. "It's right up my alley," he says. "It'll be an opportunity to see the country. It'll just be a life experience."
Life experience for Little so far has included growing up in Birmingham, Ala., attending Berea College in Kentucky and joining CSF, his first professional gig after graduating in 1999.
Performing in one way or another all his life, Little originally went to college for a business degree. "My heart was in performing. My heart wasn't in business. Everyone was saying 'Do something in the arts,' " Little says, explaining his decision to become a theater major. "I got tons of support from everybody. That's faith. They made me a believer actually."
It's hard to believe Little would do anything other than get up in front of audiences and perform. He has a dynamic personality. He appreciates audience response. He hugs CSF fans. He gets excited talking about subjects beyond theater, especially about anyone's creative passion. He's just a generally amiable guy who knows no strangers.
And if you listen to Little, he knows little about theater. "I know poetry more than I know theater," he admits.
Poetry, after all, has been a part of Little's life a lot longer than theater. He began writing poetry in seventh grade, citing Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou among other African-American poets as his inspirations. "They have a lot of experiences, different situations that I haven't experienced. They talk about the beauty of life and the beauty of being black. You have some that let loose on how hard it is to be an African-American, the trials and tribulations," he says.
But he's enamored of poetry on the whole. "It's just a beautiful form of expression that I love," he explains.
Little also expresses himself through his raps. In fact, he helped craft the Othello Rap as part of CSF's December 2000 production of The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (abridged).
He refers separately to his raps and his poetry, begging the question as to whether raps are a form of poetry. "For me, they're both poetry. I just have a different train of thought for them," he says. "I don't speak about love in my raps."
His raps are called Poetry in Action. "I put a beat to them. They deal with pain, a lot of anger. I try to keep it on some sort of philosophical aspect," Little explains, saying that both rap and poetry are self-empowering for him.
It ultimately provides him with some peace of mind, usually after long nights spent working on his writing. "I go through a lot of pain before I reach that peace, literally. I stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning. I probably start at 10 in the evening. I'm on some sort of lyrical high," he says. "I don't feel fatigue until after I write the poem."
His poetry is but one side to Little. He talks about having two personalities, though he doesn't mean in the literal sense. "When I get onstage, people say I'm a different person," he says.
"The balance comes in just knowing that I'm sane. Whatever emotion that I express, it's all a part of me. I set the emotions loose," he says. "The only time it's difficult to come out of those emotions is when I'm doing other people's work."
And that's exactly what he's been doing the last couple of years, though he's not complaining. Though as appreciative as Little is of performing the Bard's works, it has hindered his own ability to write. It's been a year since Little has written a poem. "I'm full of Shakespeare. It's very difficult (to write poetry) when you have another poet in your head."
He's hoping his excursions with Poetry Alive! will give him the needed spark to write more poetry. But he'll also be contending with more than just one poet in his head. ©
Sylvester Little Jr.'s
A LUSCIOUS POEM
Your lips taste like poetry,
moving at their own pace;
fast to slow,
smooth to rough,
high to low.
Expressing feelings, not titled.
Passion unwritten, not spoken.
Unexplainable emotions
shared by few, desired by many.
Your lips taste like poetry,
where the words in the lines of the stanzas
make an angry man passive and a passive man angry ...
a happy man sad and a sad man, oh, so happy.
Your lips taste like poetry.
With no consistent rhyme scheme,
But, yes, there is rhythm
... and substance with ... essence and soul on the ...
tip of your tongue,
soul and essence on the tip of your tongue
bringing that poetry to life,
making it that much more enjoyable.
Yes, your lips do taste like poetry,
and I've never tasted a poem so good.
