Franklin Brown, emcee, host and poet, was the first at the mic. The doubled red Solo cup in his hand slowly dropped to his side as he turned his attention to the crowd.
He opened with “Falling in Love,” a piece that offers his version of what falling in love feels like — he’s performed it since he was a teenager. “To the Moon and Back,” followed, its words telling the Tuesday night audience about his deep affection for women.
“Maybe you are my universe. If it was up to me, I would rearrange the letters of the alphabet just to put you first.”
“Seven for Seven” took listeners into the bedroom of his relationships.
The crowd, full of mostly women and a few couples, responded with claps and whoops. One fan in the audience yelled: “We love you Simply!”
Brown, whose pen name is Simplythepoet, and other poets and spoken word performers find a welcoming space to express themselves every Tuesday in Akron. Versified Expressions Poetry Night happens every week at Royal Palace, located in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood. The event starts around 9 p.m., although many performers arrive closer to 10 p.m. After paying a $5 entry fee, performers and listeners can grab $1 wings or drinks from the bar.
On this night, karaoke was sung before poetry, and pieces ranged from romance to chattel slavery; sex to community; and personal experiences with incarcerated family members.
“I love it,” said Victoria Baldwin, a crowd member from Canton. “Natural, raw. Mistakes, they’re going to come and that’s the beauty of it, true rawness.”
Anthony “Amptified” Evans created this poetry night more than 20 years ago.
“So, we get intimate,” Evans said. “This ain’t your regular poetry spot where they talk about rainbows and bunnies skipping through the forest – we talking about it all.”
“So, it gets a little explicit on this mic here.”
Finding poetry as a teenager and appealing to female audiences
Back in the 2010s, Brown needed one more credit to graduate from Northern High School in Durham, North Carolina. So he enrolled in a poetry writing class.
His green mechanical pencil met his red college-ruled notebook. It’s here that he wrote and performed, “Falling in Love.”
“In the class, they made us perform,” said Brown, now 32. “And that’s what made me like, ‘Oh, I bet I can do poetry.’”
“Then I couldn’t stop, that’s all I could think about from there.”
He has kept love at the center of his poetry. Much of his writing is crafted to intrigue women in audiences, with lines that praise their “lullaby” soft voices. Other lines compare them to art.
In “A Perfect Piece of Art” he writes:
You are the rarest and most beautiful work of art i ever did see
I mean picasso couldn’t even paint you
and van gogh would have to cut his other ear off if he tried to
Mozart Bach and Beethoven couldn’t compose a symphony to compete with you like
The sound of yo voice is the most beautiful sound a sweet lullaby i could always fall asleep to
baby you keep me at peace
You are art in the most beautiful way
Performing for claps, snaps and shoutouts
Brown performs in a straightforward, conversational style that allows listeners to connect with his words. There isn’t much fluctuation in his voice, or in his hand gestures and facial expressions.
When he connects with crowds, they let him know by clapping, snapping or shouting, “Rewind,” signaling the poet to repeat the last line.
He has been attending poetry night for the last four years and hosting for one.
His prose is more than flirting. He also writes poetry about his health issues, including weekly dialysis for low-functioning kidneys and brain surgery in 2015. And race issues.
In “What’s Black,” Brown writes:
Black is waking up in the morning and the first thing you smell is pine sol followed by the sound of music playing and you know exactly what time it is no clock needed
What’s black
Black is living everyday caged in because you’ll always be considered as a wild animal
What’s Black
Black is the way I feel when I see flashing lights and I know I ain’t do nothing wrong
What’s Black
Poetry Night bounced around town before finding its home in North Hill
Evans created this poetry night 22 years ago at 330, a now-closed venue in Kenmore.
After 330, Evans moved the event to Paolo’s in downtown Akron, then Tallmadge’s Gold Room, both of which are now closed. Poetry Night was even held at Evans’ Versifies Expressions Poetry Cafe near Kenmore for about a decade before it shuttered as Evans shifted his focus to family.
In recent years, Poetry Night has been held at the Royal Palace.
Before Evans established this recurring event in 2002, he learned about Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes and other poets at Buchtel Community Learning Center. This motivated him to pen his first poem to a high school crush.
Who knew that the poem he wrote, folded up and slid to her in a classroom would lead to decades of intimate poetry in Akron?
(Evans and his crush dated for some time before deciding to be friends.)
“Everybody becomes family,” Evans said. “Once you do poetry, you’re part of the family.”
As a serial entrepreneur, he combines his side hustles, including a 360 photobooth rental and photography while curating “Sip N Paint” events and hosting annual events such as an erotic poetry night.
Art presented as raw, uncut personal truths
On this Tuesday night, Nisha Hill, poet and painter, performed a spicy poem that discussed toxic love.
“…He’s exploring my body like Dora, I’m swiping him like Swiper, because I’m snatching his soul…”
“…he reminds me of Pinocchio without the attire because he got a big a** nose and he’s a liar…”
Other poets like Juliet Taylor, or Ju, a bartender during the event, and YNot The Priceless One use poetry as an opportunity to tell a story and express themselves through rap-like flows.
Brown watched from nearby. He’s all in with poetry and continues to write, perform and repeat.
“When I write, I write to just get it out,” Brown said. “Just to get it off my chest.”