Kimberly Simms has played a major role in making performance poetry a fixture in this region, creating venues where it can be seen and heard.

She talks about what is needed for such activities to flourish.

"Having a thriving arts scene is about having the kind of leaders that make an art scene happen - creating new venues for artists, places where it can be seen, and platforms for new voices to be heard," says Simms.

In fact, she herself is one of those kind of leaders, a trait that has not gone unnoticed.

"If it was not for Kimberly Simms, I would not be where I'm at today, " says Jus Caus.

"She was a direct catalyst of my growth as an artist; she introduced me to poetry slam."

Poet and slam veteran Kimberly Simms expands the definition a bit. Performance poetry, she explains, is merely "the oral recitation of a written work." At the next level is slam poetry, which Simms defines as "a little bit of performance art, a little bit of theater, a little bit of stand-up. It's written; and many times, it's choreographed; and people have a good ride."

For Simms, the good ride must seem like a lot of hard work. In addition to her duties as the founder and director of the Greenville-based Wits End Poetry, she is a writer, teacher and high muckety-muck in the national poetry slam establishment. But like Vera Gomez, you can just call her a poet.

If there were any real poets in the sanitized suburban grid where I grew up in the days of the New Frontier and the Great Society, we never realized it until Bob Dylan spoke up. "A poem is a naked person," he wrote, adding, "Some people say that I am a poet." While the Beats had howled their dissatisfaction unadorned, these new poets had guitars to shield their vulnerability. But as Dylan tells us in his autobiography published earlier this year, he disavowed the savior's role because too many people showed up at his house.

Not so the vital artists who unleashed poetry slam on the Upstate in the 1990s. Trying to identify the Founding Fathers of that movement is a difficult task, however, because the names that keep coming up over and over are women. Glenis Redmond is a formidable presence on the national poetry scene whose influences include Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, as well as Bob Marley and Marvin Gaye. Before relocating to Asheville, she made her bones in Greenville where she fostered the poetry slam movement here alongside Vera Gomez and Kimberly Simms.

Simms' poems have appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, and she has performed on many university and festival stages. When she draws herself up to her full height to perform her signature slam poem, "The Emasculator of Men," it is a memorable experience, indeed. The first verse ends with this warning: "I don't recommend trying to play me, cause I'll outline you so fast you'll be sending my mother flowers."

For all her work with Wits End Poetry and as the Greenville Slammaster, Simms is much more than some sort of artistic bureaucrat. Like Glenis Redmond, she lived for a time in London, and longs to return at some point - though it's not surprising these English language poets would feel an affinity for the land that produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake and Yeats.

Kimberly Simms not only commands the space and the room, but you get the idea that if she had a flaming hoop, many in the audience would line up to jump through it, lest they run afoul of the emasculator of... well, you get the idea.