Marvin Scott Marvin’s yelling like he’s on a Stackers binge, gravelly voice dragging syllables like he’s a graduate from the Bill and Ted academy of speech. His refrain—“Drain the blood, motherf--kers!”—increases in volume and vitriol each time he says it. Long, ash-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, soul patch kept scruffy, dressed in a Generation X slacker’s gas station jacket, he looks like a regular unassuming dude. Until he steps up to the mic to read his poetry.

Exploring organic notions of rhythm instead of creating something solid, his clear voice turns gnarly at the end of each word. He dips low, stretching words slinky, and you can hear the raised eyebrow without having to see it. He messes up a little, yodels and takes a swig from his beer—nice save.

He’s the sound guy for Radical Thinkers Artistic Coven, a Wednesday night open mic at the Olive since October 2005. Though he’s not a host, he’s the unofficial boss. When something needs getting done—someone needs an audio cable, or wants a chair, or is too nervous to adjust the mic stand or just wants someone to discuss poetry with—Marvin is the Dude. Everyone respectfully nods hello to him on his or her way in and says goodbye on the way out. Even the young woman in short shorts carrying a fake Murakami-style Louis Vuitton bag who’s just there to eat gives Marvin a little salute.

As Marvin reads, shouts from the kitchen echo him in solidarity. He knows when to pause at crucial moments to let the audience chime in, though sometimes they beat him to his next line. A waitress with bleached hair scurries around with padded bill holders hugged to her ears. “Shut up, Marvin,” she mutters. He’s one of those people you either love or hate.

He came to Las Vegas in 1993 from Anaheim, California. He hadn’t had a real job in three years because he was selling drugs. “People were dying,” he says. “People wanted to kill me from deals gone bad. I was losing a place to live. It was a bad scene.” When he moved here he’d submit six to 18 job applications a day. The first one to called him back was McDonald’s. Fine, he thought. I’ll humble myself to eat.

He says he was so insubordinate he became the official custodian after a coprophiliac customer they tenderly called the “Shit Bandit” showed up every Friday morning to defile the men’s room. “It was art, I swear to God,” he says. “Who the hell would even think of that?” He memorialized the experience in “Toilet Humor,” a poem that he claims has inspired many decent folk to exit the room upon his reading.

I just spent half an hour in a small enclosed space with bleach fumes

***

When Marvin was growing up, his family didn’t own a TV, so he became a voracious reader. During reading time in sixth grade, he decided to write instead. His teacher picked up the paper he was scrawling on and said, “Oh, you wrote a poem.” That was 1982. He hasn’t stopped writing since.

Marvin’s actually his middle name; Scott’s his first. “I’ve been surrounded by Scotts my whole life, and I hated every one of ’em,” he says. Plus, he reasons, “It takes more balls to walk up to someone and say, ‘Hi, my name is Marvin.’” He says he doesn’t socialize much because he has a difficult time finding people to relate to.

Among the poets whose work he’s toting with him one evening at the Olive: Charles Bukowski, Julia Vinograd, Diane Wakoski. The pile of books teeter atop a ginormous plastic folder full of his own material, printed on the back of discarded paper a friend collected for him from a real-estate office. He says that’s only a couple of months’ worth of work.

Last year he released 72 copies of a 32-page, photocopied, stapled, self-published chapbook bearing a price tag of $29.95. He doesn’t submit to any publications, he says, “but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”

He decides what to perform ad hoc, sometimes playing off what’s going on in the room. The night two Navy recruits wearing their training gear sit in the audience, he reads an acerbic poem about “terrorist Bush” and the conflict in Iraq.

Though he’s confrontational, Marvin says he doesn’t believe in poetry as competitive sport. After his initial encounters with poetry slams in 1994, he says, he began to notice a change in his writing style: His voice was sounding too much like everyone else’s, and he was focusing too much attention on the performative aspect of reading. “I became disillusioned with the whole scene,” he says. “I was disgusted that I knew I could read a shitty poem but really perform it and get a great response.” So he quit doing readings for more than eight years.

***

Excerpts from “Poem By Committee” by Marvin Scott Marvin

This is a poem by committee

***

Now, once a month he goes to a poetry slam at Café Hookah—an event with judges and rounds and finals and local wordsmiths who perform onstage to shape a kick-ass Las Vegas team to compete against other cities in larger poetry slams. Why? “To support poetry in general and my friends more specifically,” he says.

At the slams, which have strict time limits of three minutes per reading, he’ll read a 14-minute-long poem, reap a score of -22.9, and the next round he’ll read for 20 seconds, just to be an ass. He’s also been known to put a chair onstage just to fall over it, break tables by leaping on them and tackle the microphone stand and chairs. Few there are amused.

A couple of years ago Marvin began to participate in a more traditional night of poetry reading, but the organization “had a terrible sound system that was completely inadequate for the task,” he says. This became a serious personal concern a couple of weeks after he got into it, he says, when he was the “convenient target for some asshole’s undirected anger” and was sucker-punched outside a bar. “With my jaw wired shut it was difficult enough for me to communicate, so I began to bring my PA to the reading.”

There he met Teisha Starr, who later became founder and co-host of the night at the Olive. (Arden Guy now acts as the other host.) An idea to start a new night “where there would be a more youthful and intense vibe,” says Marvin, was encouraged “by someone who shall remain nameless. He didn’t appreciate my poetry and suggested that we start our own ‘filthy poets’ coven,’ where we could read what he considered to be offensive writings.”

At Radical Thinkers Artistic Coven, Marvin is not the leader, but as the sound guy he is the keeper, and he is one cagey dude. Talking to him is often an exercise in excruciation; extrapolating information is extremely complicated and long-winded, or else willfully vague. In fact, during our interview I’m so exasperated I’m a few words short of flat-out verbal abuse.

Sample snippet:

Q: Why do you think people treat you like you’re the chief?

A: Because I’m me, man.

Q: Why’d you move here?

A: Oh, different opportunities.

(Noisy sigh ...) I wish we could simply converse in poetry-reading form; in a spotlight he’s expressive and charming, with a swagger he lacks otherwise. It’s like he comes alive when he has something to recite. It fills him with confidence. Poetry reading as therapy is rather vile. But if you have a single ounce of humanity, you can’t completely deny a soul laid bare. And the souls at the Olive on Wednesday are naked and flopping in the breeze.

One week, a girl sort of brags that she almost hit two children with her vehicle that day; the week prior she confessed she pissed the bed. Another girl, in striped socks, Fluevog boots and pigtails, rambles from her journal, going from Baby Voice to Empowered Woman in 0.5 seconds. Starr’s outside pacing the parking lot, looking up at the sky, reciting aloud, occasionally glancing in defeat at the slim stack of paper she’s holding.

An awkward novice plunks at a guitar; Marvin gets up and adjusts the mic so he will be better heard.

There’s awkwardly stoic androgynous choppy vocals offset by sweet acoustic strumming. There’s do-rag didgeridoo and poetry about steaming stars and intergalactic travel. There’s spoken word about life’s larger issues: war, family values, obsession with celebrity, how to hit on chicks.

There’s newcomer Homeless Mike, looking like Sleepless in Seattle chewed him up and spat him out at the Olive, dressed in flannel PJ pants under army cargo shorts. He’s hanging out with a dirty dude in Ray-Ban rip-offs and shredded black jeans, his right knee wrapped in an Ace bandage. He plays a nice little ditty on soulful slap bass about his friend’s rat being raped: “She wanted it/In the face/In the butt/Not my rat!”

Another newcomer, a shorn pixie dressed the part of renegade poet in a mini trench, leopard-print flats and smoky eyelids, reads a poem about violence and tortured love. I can read her mind backward and these are the words: “I need the perfect outfit.” She has some line about “the next generation of Jewish lamp shades,” which elicits some wounded “ooh”s from the audience, but that’s it.

No one bats an eye when a kid who’s legendary for his poems about bombing McDonald’s and flying planes into Wal-Mart whisper-yells like a crazy thug about finding Jesus’ secret diary, a reptilian race inside the Earth, pyramids on Mars, dark powers of Enochian magic, summoning demonic beams and “that nigga Judas.” If we’re interested at all in the Illuminati or the spirit world, he says, we are more than welcome to come talk to him later. Also, he tells us we can Google the topics he’s addressing, if we’d like. “It’s all true,” he says.

All the regulars influence one another. I hear same kinds of cadences and stage voices week after week. They tuck inside jokes into their poetry, and they hoot “famous lines” at one another. It’s a little dangerous—isn’t expressing yourself all about, um, expressing who you are as an individual?—but it’s sweet.

Relegation to cute cliques seems to be the fate of poetry these days. What used to be the ultimate in bombastic ego is fading fast, the backlight to prominent silhouettes of memoir (and false memoir).

Eyelids at half-mast, puffing on hookahs, performers and audience are just feeling it all go down, folding into the glory of totally letting go. Everyone’s nodding slightly, small laughs escaping lips. The ceiling’s strung with grape vines, and bundles dangle provocatively, taunting us with visions of paradise just above. Coin-trimmed veils and harem pants, spangled bra tops and ill-draped fabric the colors of pretty finches don the walls. A trompe l’oeil cracked plaster painting on the wall exposes a brick noir tableau, as if everything outside of right here, right now, is dull and gray.