The Humble Poet with a Purpose

the ARTS & DESIGN : Snapshot

It all started with a blue ribbon. In elementary school, Josephus Thompson III wrote an essay about his father and won the aforementioned ribbon. Throughout middle and high school in the early 1990s, Thompson studied the classics of poetry Shakespeare, Poe, and the like. The type of poetry he’d come to perform was not considered poetry in the schools at this time, just some strange form of hip-hop. However, he continued to write essays that gained him accolades and began keeping journals.  After going off to college in 1995, he continued to write and read more of his poetry under the tutelage of supportive professors and like-minded fellow students. Yet, the idea that he could be a professional poet, performing and profiting from his work didn’t even strike his mind until 1999, when he was at a crossroads of sorts about his own life purpose and path.

“It chose me, I didn’t choose it,” he notes about his humble beginnings and his slow but sure recognition of his gift. However, it took graduating from North Carolina A&T University in 2001 with an engineering degree and no job to show for it that propelled him into the full time pursuit of becoming a professional poet. After drawing inspiration from Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, he composed a poem called Purpose and launched out, becoming Josephus III and gracing the humble stages of coffee shops, bookstores and all other places where one typically thinks of poets congregating. Although he had some idea he’d be a successful poet, he had no idea that there was a greater purpose to his poetry.

One Friday night in 2004, he and a group of other poets were able to gain free performance space at the Broach Theater in downtown Greensboro. Unlike previous efforts where it was just him and the mike, he and this group, The Collective decided to use the extra space to experiment with props and other elements of staging. In addition, the location and timing, on a first Friday of the month, allowed the Collective to gain an audience much larger and more diverse than they’d ever seen. As a result, they created more shows and went on tour. On first Sunday nights, they began hosting an open mic of their own, drawing crowds to an otherwise quiet downtown area.

A classroom teacher friend asked Thompson once to come visit her language arts class and talk about his work. “They were studying similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, I enjoyed going into the classroom and being an example for what they were learning, especially since this wasn’t in the schools when I was growing up,“ he remarked. That one experience in the classroom has lead to a growing side business helping students recognize the poetry in hip-hop and their potential in poetry. He’s also parlayed the same lessons into lectures and workshops for people of all ages, growing the first seeds of what would become Mentality Enterprises, the umbrella organization for many of Thompson’s endeavors.

2005 was a banner year for Thompson. He was asked to perform as part of a group for Oprah at her visit to the Bennett College for Women. He also put out his first CD, Miracles and contributed to a quilt for former President Bill Clinton. He has since released another CD, One Thing, along with DVDs One Thing, Heritage and Passage. He’s also a visual artist, his images gracing billboards and his own line of greeting cards.

Also around this time Thompson’s following garnered him a special request to write a monthly column from Jeri Rowe, editor of Go Triad, the weekly lifestyle magazine of the Greensboro News & Record. Rowe’s idea was to draw on Thompson’s popularity among young African-Americans to bring them the magazine. “You know who my biggest readers are though,”he says, “Older white women. They write me the most letters and leave their names, that’s how I know.” He was also asked to do a radio show on 97.1 FM, the Triad area’s urban adult contemporary radio station, spotlighting spoken word poetry. Nevertheless, he gradually became the go-to person on matters of poetry and urban arts in the Greensboro area.

This year, after almost eight successful years performing, mentoring writing and lecturing, Thompson has no plans to stop. “It’s my job, I kinda can’t stop,” he says, but watching him in performance it’s obvious he still enjoys what he is doing. When listening to Thompson perform solo, one could easily be listening to a conversation. However, that conversation flows like cloth blowing in the wind, skillfully mixing hard themes and uplifting insights. Not one to be the only person in room talking, he often includes his audience in his poetry, through call and response. He may also be playing his African drum.

He’s probably also wearing one of his trademark blazers, emblazoned with words such as faith, freedom and heritage on the back and bearing the roman numeral III on one sleeve. While he has built a small clothing line of t-shirts with those same words and other statements,  the blazers are most sought after. While he’s considering auctioning off the over ten blazers he’s created, he hesitates selling them. “That’s my special thing., he says “What you wear on stage is important and hence that’s why I started the line, but the blazers are my thing. I try to price them up so high so that not many people will want to get one [chuckles].”

His latest venture is a partnership with the [Greensboro] City Arts, Greensboro Arts Council and the Greensboro Public Library called Reasons 2 Rhyme, a series of nine events throughout Greensboro . Beginning with Passage, his latest stage production, the series has featured a poetry slam, open-mic poetry cafes, and outdoor poetry festivals. It will culminate with Thompson’s one man show Boundless,, where it will just be him and the bare stage, a first for him. Although he is inspired by the growing urban arts scene in North Carolina, he would love to see Reasons 2 Rhyme go national. “I’d like to see this happen on a quarterly basis all across the country,“ he says, “ We could have a Midwest Reasons 2 Rhyme in the spring, then a West Coast Reasons 2 Rhyme in the summer.” Also forthcoming is is first book.

In the meantime, one might find this man dubed the Downtown Poet, sitting on the side of the fountain at Greensboro’s Center City Park with a notebook in hand, scribbling away. At the end of the day, he’s just an humble poet with a purpose gradually spreading it across the state, the nation, and the world. And he needs some chill time.

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