Almost famous: an original Broadway Def Poetry Jam cast member learns that the trick is to survive after the stage lights go down.

I still catch myself wondering how it all came to pass: One moment I was laud died in the Nuyorican Poets Care reading clumsy rhymes about homophobia, and the next, I was dwarfed by the breadth of the stage at the Longacre Theater on Broadway.

Nobody knows if poetry is going to be the next hip-hop. But in the American entertainment industry, if the media says something enough it becomes gospel. And so, after Def Poetry Jam was televised on HBO and staged on Broadway, and went on the college tour, there were more DJs and poets and teenagers and biker babes and NYU creative writing students and construction workers in Idaho and inner-city preteens in Chicago talking about "being a poet."

To be fair, poetry hit its stride before Russell Simmons wrapped his name and his money around it, but the media hadn't got ten a hold of it yet. Popular spoken word was still primarily the slam created by Marc Smith and a bunch of bohemian types parading front city to city, carrying three minute poems about "the revolution" and "the man;' and the merits of dying; traces of the Last Poets turned Punani Poets with the sporadic sprinkling of Assata Shakur's, Sonia Sanchez's, Amiri Baraka's standing on the other side of the literary poets who nobody went to see.

Then came the cameras, and unseasoned poems were quickly seasoned or laid to rest. Funny ones were fished out, and "the revolution" was made more palatable with comedy and recognizable diversity, and a cast was chosen, and then there were nine.

We spent the summer of 2002 in San Francisco developing what was to become the show most people saw in New York City. The stint provided the critical acclaim needed to launch it on Broadway. And so, our faces, all nine of us, were in subway stations and supermarkets and The New York Times. It was very exciting those first few" months. People recognized us. They smiled and called me a poet. I was pleased. Poetry was finally being consumed by the Everyman.

I slipped easily into the lifestyle. I barely noticed that I was not writing. My online journal lapsed for weeks without attention. 1 stopped reading at local venues. No time. 1 was too tired. Eight shows a week is no joke. And plus, I had other places to go, other responsibilities concerning the show.

The show became everything. I began a quiet that spread from my fingers to my tongue. I worried about what my cannonball of a mouth might do to the show. I stopped saying that Bush was the spawn of the Devil. I toned down my lesbian self for the larger, more conservative media audiences. I felt guilty that when I was on the radio or TV, that I opted to say the more palatable things about lira show: It was fun. It was risque. It was socially and culturally significant.

I became more comfortable with the privilege of being a paid performer of my own poetry, but less comfortable with the way I had mastered the art of playing the safe version of myself.

My new apartment became a salve for the parts of me I had silenced. My new clothes covered the space in my journals.

The Broadway experience was intense; fans waiting outside, people shouting your name across the subway platform--everything yon did was up for public consumption--and why not? That is what we had hoped for, no? We poets who want to be rock stars!

The first time I saw my face on the back of a bus I almost lost my footing on a grate. Intense. Yes. It's easy to lose yourself in intense. It's easy to meet the celebrities who came to see the show: Joan Allen, Harry Be lafonte, Goodie Mob, Jewel, Method Man, Steven Tyler, Stevie Wonder ... and they came backstage to meet us, and pose for photos.

Heady. You start expecting fans. I remember someone screaming my name in Union Square and being impatient with him trying to figure out how he knew me. In my arrogance, I almost told the poor guy I was one of the poets from Def Poetry Jam. Turns out, he knew me from Jamaica. We went to the same Bible school one summer.

You start feeling entitled to the free clothes, the watches. Soon, you exist in the space where poverty does not, and for the most part, people treat you nicely, so racism and homophobia disappear (not entirely, just the blatantly offensive comments).

All this acclaim is for only three of your poems? What if you wrote another 10 "hit poems?" What if poetry did become the next hip-hop? You would be like Run DMC or Tupac! What if you got signed, if you pressed and sold millions of CDs?

And the reason you began writing fades into the background. You're making history as the first out, black Jamaican lesbian in the mainstream, the first of a hip-hop generation of poets on Broadway, an original cast member of the Tony Award-winning show.

The book you are writing is forgotten. The new one-woman show is shelved, and the articles you started are never finished. No time for anything but press interviews and getting to the theater on time and resting your voice and making appearances, and all this time the pen is paralyzed.

Then the show closed.

We closed on May 4, 2003. I suddenly found myself with whole days with nothing to do. I pretty much walked around in a kind of exhausted stupor.

Then, when the show was going to Europe, I was forced to actually make the decision to go or not go abroad with the cast. I knew I could not do those same poems for another three months, not in London nor in Edinburgh. It was hard, but I decided to stay while they went to conquer new horizons.

I am back in the poetry cafes and the bars with no wireless headsets. I sit next to the blue-haired white girl who does not use deodorant and listen to a bad poem about Art Fleischer being the product of a sexual intercourse between the Devil and Monica Lewinsky. I read at the New York City LGBT Pride Rally in the full throttle of summer rain.

I am relearning the walk of the bohemian. I had no idea it would be this hard.

I had forgotten what it is like to do a reading without a sound technician or a ready audience of at least 500 eager and silent faces hanging on my every word. I worry about money. I cannot spend in the way I had become accustomed. But neither can most of the laces I choose to speak for.

I still wonder if I made the right decision. The difference between the two worlds can be measured very clearly in financial terms. I had more than enough in the commercial world. In the underground, I never have enough.

I have to remind myself that I was not writing while I was in the middle of that glossy experience. I am not sorry I was a part of Def Poetry Jam. If I had not done Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, I would be watching someone rise doing the do and second-guessing myself in that choice, too.

On the upside, I now have the time for places like Bar 13 and the Bowery Poetry Club. I am doing more of the readings that were so different from the polished world of Broadway. It still surprises me that I'm able to hear different poems in the same spot every night. I had become accustomed to hearing the same words at the same time, said in the same way--that is the way of a Broadway show. In that world, it is more apparent that they are selling a product. They have to spend time marketing that product. You cannot change that product on the consumer. So there was not much room for the spontaneous, for the crazy, no room for "I don't fed like doing that poem tonight"

I like being on my own again. I still miss the way everything was sort of done for us, but it removes much of the artistic responsibility from the process. Without the show, I am enjoying creative freedom.

The months away from the Def Poetry Jam experience gave me room to ruminate. I had time to take new poems on the road, to think about the novel that will tell my mother's story, which is my grandmother's story. Which is only one of the stories I want to tell about people who are not me, who are not as privileged.

I have met and/or reconnected with women like Doria Roberts, like Ingrid Rivera, like Lynne Procope. I have gone home to Jamaica to read and been booed by the audience for my "nasty, illegal, homosexual performance." I am getting another chance to see the not so glamorous side of the revolution. Here, there are no Lincoln Town cars, no "bling-bling." It is just my poem--whatever I want to read that night--a mic and a bunch of people who may or may not look like me. Sometimes they are listening and sometimes I have to make them listen.

The underground is not the paradise that the commercial world is not, but it is a place where my decisions are entirely my own. I never have to consult anyone about what I will say. The dance of survival in this new world of art and money is the dance of the middle ground---one has to straddle the commercial/mainstream and the not-for-profit/underground. I have to rind the way to use the power of the experience of Def Poetry Jam to bring attention to the issues that have no place but the underground. This is what I have learned.

If the right opportunity arises for me to work with Def Poetry Jam again, I would, it was a hard road, but it was a road filled with particular truths and lies I had not experienced anywhere else. I was a part of a phenomenon that rerouted history. I am proud of the way my poems carried themsselves.

For weeks now, I have been preparing for trips overseas to showcase my own work, reestablishing relationships with the world I was so completely removed from during the eight-show-a-week period. It feels good, but I am noting the dwindling balance in my checkbook, gearing up to make phone calls to that other world to beg for rent if I should need it. Steady constructing poems on dirty napkins and running my hands over my own body at night. I am grateful that the words that come from the fold of it are my own. I am walking a tightrope between poetic prostitution and art--and that, my dear, is the only way to not die as an artist.

Staceyann Chin is a working artist. A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, she has been a practicing poet since 1998. She's stirred rousing cheers at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and one woman shows off-Broadway. The Joseph Papp Public Theater has featured Chin on more than one occasion, and she has enjoyed international success with her performances ha Denmark, Germany and London. Her work was also featured on 60 Minutes. Chin's poems can be found in her first chapbook, Wildcat Woman, as well as in the one she now carries on her back, Stories Surrounding My Coming. For BIBR's POETIC LICENSE, on page 22, Chin reflects on her experiences of being an original cast member of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway.