'We are a city of stars': Fayetteville's poetry community shares the art of spoken word

As a teenager in Fayetteville, Neil Ray found his passion for writing poetry and noticed there wasn't a prominent community of poets in the city, so he started one. 

Since the late 1990s, Ray has worked to build up the poetry community in the Fayetteville area. As a member of the Writer's Guild, a Fayetteville writers group, he said he helped it create its first newsletter called The Ink Pad. He also started hosting Java Expressions at The Coffee Scene, which is still held today. 

"That's probably one of the longest events that we've ever had, especially since it started at a time where it may seem to some people we were doing things in Fayetteville at that time was real new in the arts kind of way," he said. 

Ray, a Terry Sanford High School alumni, said he found his niche in writing poetry while in high school and would even write poetry for people in exchange for lunch money. 

After high school, he served in the military for four years but he had a love for music and poetry that stayed strong. 

In 2012, Ray started the Poetry Festival because he said Fayetteville deserved one. 

"I'm a community guy," he said. "I grew up in Fayetteville and I love my city, I love what it does. It's not perfect but none of them will ever be so I had no problem with that, and I said 'we should have something like this.'"

Ray eventually passed the torch of the poetry festival to LeJuan "El'Ja" Bowens who he said has transformed the festival in a great way. 

"He had that fire," Ray said. "I just felt he had that hunger and he kept that hunger alive and was making a big difference in our community." 

Ray said he wanted people to be happy and excited to be a part of the festival. 

"I want them to go out, especially young people and create new stuff and create some community action on their own," he said. "With the addition of the projects we have in the festival; we have workshops, we have nerd slams, we have the ugly poem slam .... so we're trying new ideas and people get excited." 

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Bowens, who is from Michigan, was writing poetry as a hobby and it wasn't until his last deployment in the military in about 2007 that his chief warrant officer suggested he get a poetry book together. 

When he got out of the military that same year, he went to his first open mic and later learned about the Fayetteville poetry community at the Coffee Scene. 

"Just getting around, seeing a slam, seeing some poets at the time that I did not know were like doing poetry for years across the country ... it started getting me more intrigued with wanting to do more with my work." 

For the poetry festival, Bowens said the importance of performing poetry is seeing a different point of view. 

"You are hearing stories from people that you did not expect because their story may be the story that you're living and you just needed to have that perspective," he said. "That perspective of knowing that there's someone else out there and living that same story that you're living." 

Bowens encourages poets and spoken word artists trying to join the poetry community to just go to an open mic and give it a try. 

"You can go to an open mic and you sign up and if you enjoy what you hear, then you continuously come back and if you think it's not for you, then some people just stop coming," he said. "The biggest thing is just finding your niche and finding what event fits you. Fayetteville always have numerous scenes that's out." 

Through the poetry community, Bowens has connected with many other creative speakers who also motivate others to express themselves with their voice, like Yolanda "Yogii" Barnes. 

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When it comes to the Fayetteville poetry community, Barnes describes it as diverse. 

"It's vast, it's amazing, it is powerful; it is a lot of underground," she said. "It is definitely diverse through voices; the stories from the military, from the mothers to the students, even our youth poets are amazing." 

Performing poetry is something that Barnes said leaves her feeling refreshed and when it comes to the youth within the artistic community that is an aspect that's important for them. 

"Right now for the youth, especially with COVID, they felt so much bottled up in them and you would be so amazed at what they write," she said. "The complexity of what they write just really makes you really, really think. Like you don't think they understand much but they got a handle on some things and they know how to verbalize it. So the importance of letting them express themselves, that's the part where you have to, as the adults say, you can say what you need to say." 

Highlighting the art of poetry in the Fayetteville community is part of not just expressing the beauty in the art form but also in the city. 

"We don't have to be Seattle, we can be Fayetteville," Ray said. "We make a noise. People don't know it, but we make a lot of noise here; we're sneaking up on people. We don't have the tall buildings, we don't have all the elaborate but what we got is art and our artistic community. I challenge people, I say we are a city of stars." 

Staff writer Akira Kyles can be reached at akyles@gannett.com.