Wali Crowder gets in character for Harlem Renaissance Remix

One of the first times Wali Crowder read a poem for an audience, his hands were shaking so intensely he could barely make out the words on the page.

“It was so bad you could hear the paper rattling,” said a laughing Crowder, who at the time was reading for a packed house ahead of an appearance by the comedian TK Kirkland. “And the next day, I was in a beauty salon promoting another party. And this lady was there, and she said, ‘We saw you up there. That was a great poem, but we were like, “Aw, poor thing.”’ … And I was so embarrassed. And it was like, ‘Damn. That will not ever happen again.’”

Crowder often struggled with nerves in his earlier onstage pursuits, imbued with a desire to have his voice heard but born with what he described as “a naturally shy disposition” that could make the act of standing in the spotlight almost physically impossible. During one early workshop, the late Columbus poet Is Said noticed Crowder’s nervous tremors and instructed him to hold his arm to his side, which helped some. But the first real breakthrough occurred when Crowder thought to try his hand writing bawdier, more humorous verses, believing that doing something completely out of line with his character might also drive a physical transformation, pressing a thereto unseen confidence to the fore.

“Up to that point, my [poetry] was all spiritual, educational, social activism, so I said I need to do something to just blow my comfort zone out of the water,” said Crowder, who will read works by the Harlem Renaissance-era poet Countee Cullen as part of Harlem Renaissance Remix, which takes place at Streetlight Guild on Saturday, Feb. 21, and features musical performances (Starlit Ways and the Mark Lomax Trio) alongside a mix of poets appearing in character. “And so, I went up there and did a raunchy poem, and it just went over. And I used that as a way to break the wall and go all the way in.”

In more recent years, however, Crowder said he has started to shed aspects of this racier persona, returning to the more heartfelt poems he penned early on. It’s a shift the writer traced in part to the passing of his mother, whose death a year ago stoked within him a refusal to hold anything back. “I want to go 100 percent in and embrace everything I do,” said Crowder, whose mother illustrated a pair of children’s books but never released them in her lifetime – an oversight he intends to correct by having both published in the coming years. “It’s a thing where you want to get all that out, where you want to die empty.”

A number of these newer poems have in turn confronted his mom’s final months, including one rooted in an experience he witnessed during one of her post-stroke rehabilitation sessions, and Crowder described the writing process involved as both therapeutic and deeply layered. The majority of these poems have taken shape more intentionally on the page, designed in many ways to live there rather than to be read aloud in spoken word performances. “There’s the physicality of it. They’re here. It’s something I can touch,” said Crowder, who also shared how the process has allowed him to give the stories, recollections, and experiences he has absorbed throughout his life a growing, more defined physical presence. “I’m building these things, these pages, taking what’s been poured into me and kind of pouring it back. … There is a piece of it where it’s something I’m creating in her memory that I can hold and keep, and it grows and becomes larger as I add to it.”

Harlem Renaissance Remix has helped Crowder to expand his creativity in similar ways, with the poet crediting Streetlight Founder Scott Woods for seeing something different in him when he first asked Crowder to take part in the event some years back. “And I’m forever in debt, because he saw that other side,” said Crowder, who threw himself headlong into the experience, researching not just Cullen but the personal, social, and political conditions that helped to shape his writing. 

The first time Crowder performed as Cullen, he said people didn’t know what to expect, unsure if he might have unearthed raunchier poems more in line with the originals for which he had become best known. “And then I got up there, and I gave his story, and I became him,” said Crowder, who allowed that he is no stranger to this kind of reverential artistic mimicry, having adapted his earliest spoken word cadence from fellow Columbus poet Vernell Bristow. “And part of what I really wanted to do that night was talk about, in character, his hopes for the future, to where I could really begin to contextualize his words. … And the audience has the advantage of being from the future, so they know, ‘Damn. That’s not going to happen.’ Yeah, but Countee still hopes.”