The mid-January night was frigid, but inside the Oak Park Public Library, hot chicken wings and a few hardy performers and listeners of all ages tended the verbal fire at the microphone in the middle of the dim room.
“How is everybody doin’?” asked open mic MC (and library staff member) Marcelis Wyatt, playfully chiding the audience for not displaying enough energy. Marcelis, of medium build, has a presence that isn’t bombastic, but warm and inviting. He often wears large black sunglasses, stripes (on everything from preppy collared shirts to sleek black suits), a chain, and hats and shirts sporting creative riffs on birds, crowns and skulls.
“Chillin’!” responded Kelly Ristau from a chair in a corner of the circle.
“That’s what’s up,” added Marcelis softly.
“You gotta be loud–there’s like literally eight of us!” Ristau shot back without missing a beat.
A minute later, Ristau was walking up to the mic, announcing herself with “What up! What up!” then launching into her poem, “True Story.”
“The more I listened to him speak, the more I wanted to listen,” she began, and could have been referring to Marcelis. She continued to play off the surrounding scene, as if the performance had been scripted: “The atmosphere was very chill.”
Later, after the ice began to break, Marcelis joked, “We gonna make family tonight ‘cuz we only got a few of us.”
Then, after rhythm and blues songs and spoken poetry about God, love, and language, Ristau performed another of her poems, “Notions of Fire.”
“I’m too in love to turn down the heat,” she said in an anguished voice.
Over the course of the freezing night, in a small corner of a large room in an empty building, the performers played off one another to create a welcoming atmosphere where everyone could express their rawest emotions.
The event had lived up to its name: “Fire on the Mic.”
Marcelis Wyatt, who’s 23 years old, is a 2002 Oak Park and River Forest High School grad, R&B singer, and published poet, who also happens to work at the circulation desk. Last March, he began leading the library’s After-Hours Teen Coffeehouse open mic nights, which have been ongoing for 15 years. The open mic nights take place every third Friday of the month from 7 to 9 p.m, funded by the Friends of the Oak Park Public Library.
Marcelis calls the open mic nights “Fire on the Mic” because “fire symbolizes the strength of words and the power that words have over people, whether writers or people in the audience. Putting a fire to the mic is to let it be known, no matter what, say what you mean.”
Last summer, Fire on the Mic attracted more than 60 teenagers to Scoville Park, aided by the warm weather. In the last year, he has hosted two fashion shows (with poetry and music complementing the modeling), a “Fright Night” just before Halloween, and a “Soulfully Spoken” night, accompanied by soul food, in November.
Marcelis tries to make the nights “like a construction site where people feel welcome, always can come back, and say whatever they want to.” He ensures that “there’s no critique. You’re not going to get shut down, and you’re not going to get desecrated for what you do.”
Ristau, like Marcelis a 2002 OPRF graduate and former member of the high school’s Spoken Word Club, agreed. “Everybody else should hear what everybody else has to say at some point without being judged,” she said. “That’s what spoken word is.”
Jalisia Robinson, an OPRF senior and shelver at the library, sang at the January open mic night. She likes the library’s open mic nights because the audiences are a good size, and are always supportive. She’s become more comfortable singing solos at Fire on the Mic, and also sings in the gospel choir at the high school.
Marcelis knows firsthand from his experience in the Spoken Word Club at OPRF and from his performing career the last few years that “if you don’t have a way to let yourself out, everything stays caged in, and you self-destruct.”
Alan Jacobson, the Oak Park librarian who oversees programs, says Marcelis is a good fit for the MC job. “He’s talented at making people feel at ease, and feel welcome,” he said. Jacobson also praised the teenagers who perform at Fire on the Mic: “The insight and depth of some of these kids is just unreal.”
He’s not just an MC. Since January 7, Marcelis has also led a weekly writing workshop for teenagers called “Building a Fire,” on Monday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. The program got started after Fire on the Mic performers came together and decided to meet more than once a month. Marcelis wants to “have students come in, or teachers if they want to, to talk about what it means to be a writer, talk about what they wrote, have constructive criticism, and work on a piece they can use for the open mic.”
As a mentor to the teenagers who come to the events, he tries to stay both upbeat and realistic. “Positivity is the best medicine. Even if you get hit by the deadbeat father, the strict parents, the teachers who give you bad grades, the friends who are two-faced, the boyfriend or girlfriend who’s cheating on you, anything like that, as long as you stay positive, you can make yourself a better person,” he said.
And he has no trouble relating to the problems the teenagers are facing. “I feel like a teenager myself,” he says. “From teenagers to 25 nothing really changes.”
Marcelis has been around the block when it comes to high school social life and Chicago’s open mic scene. He’s been interested in poetry since he was 11, and he joined the Spoken Word Club at OPRF, led by Peter Kahn, during his freshman year.
The Spoken Word Club exposed him to different rhyming schemes and helped him break out of the repetitive forms he’d been using. When he was at OPRF, he recalls, he “had a lot of material to work with.” He wrote about high school conflicts like interracial relationships, cliques, economic class differences, looks, and dress.
He wrote about the more human aspects of relationships, too. “High school is, of course, full of drama, day by day, and this was like the one major outlet, whether it was my drama or somebody else’s … this is how I got my feelings out,” he recalls. “Love was the main thing-and friendships. Most of it was about how people communicated or didn’t communicate with each other.”
He won the Chicago poetry slam, “Louder than a Bomb,” with his high school spoken word team, but didn’t go on to nationals in Michigan. “I didn’t like the competition or the politics of it,” he says. “You can’t critique poetry that’s coming from the heart. If you’re critiquing someone’s style, then you’re critiquing the person themselves, and you can’t really do that without striking a nerve, so I got tired of it real quick.”
He enjoys the Chicago open mic scene more and has performed at open mic nights downtown at Columbia College, and on the North and South sides. At these events he hears rap, poetry, singer-songwriters with guitars, vocalists, and hip-hop. “Most open mics I go to have live bands already there, and sometimes they’ll make music right off of what you’re saying,” he says.
These days he performs his poetry with the eight-member group So Ill Poets, who mostly hail from Chicago. They travel to schools to perform and teach writing, and also perform at Fire on the Mic. It’s good to have Chicago and Oak Park people together, Marcelis says, so that Oak Parkers “know there’s a lot more to the poetry scene.” It has, in fact, enabled him to meet a lot of people, including renowned Chicago rapper Twista.
But he doesn’t limit himself to poetry these days. A few years ago he started singing his poetry, and positive feedback about his voice led him to take up rhythm and blues. His musical influences include Brian McKnight and Jamie Foxx, whom he calls “a genius, right up there with Stevie Wonder.” He has self-released a new R&B CD, titled, “Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me,” and is performing its songs around the city. In the long term, he’s hoping to pursue a career in the music world as an entertainer.
With several books of poetry already published, Marcelis writes “mainly about whatever I went through in my life that day,” and he often improvises. Over the last few years, he says, poetry has kept him sane.
“It was my biggest outlet. It helped me cope with a lot of things I was going through in life and kept me going,” he says.