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ROB RAND: "Drive Time." As the highway of suburban workers cuts through the park on the edge of the city, as the consuming, rational people commute.

SPEAKER: Writer Rob Rand is dressed in a pinstripe suit with a businessman's briefcase in his hand and stands awkwardly in front of a microphone at the Bad Habit Cafe in Saint Paul. All the tables are full and people are peering down from a banister on the second floor. Rand is reading from a work in progress called "Escalator, A Trip Through the Maul, M-A-U-L, of America."

Monday is poetry and storytelling night at the Bad Habit, an event started more than a year ago, which co-owner Bob Gale says has been an unqualified success.

BOB GALE: On the first count, we've had probably close to about 150 people read over the last year. I think that's significant. Secondly, we do it on a Monday night. Here in Saint Paul, it's quite a slow city yet we fill up to capacity every Monday. It's one of our busiest nights.

SPEAKER: Many in this crowd of coffee drinkers look like young social outcasts. They wear thick-soled boots and studs in their noses. They smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and read their books in between poetry performances.

Every writer who signs up at the Bad Habit must read their own work and gets 10 minutes at the microphone. 19-year-old Karla McLaughlin sits near the front of the stage, waiting for her turn. She says being a poet or writer is an acquired status. Not a title you bestow upon yourself, but something you earn.

KARLA MCLAUGHLIN: I want to be a writer. I want to reach that plateau. And I think this is as good of any way to achieve it. You have to go out and get feedback. You got to go out and you can't be afraid.

SPEAKER: 29-year-old Darren Smith is a poet who moved to the Twin Cities from Milwaukee, where he says live poetry is also enjoying a resurgence. Smith thinks it's because people are bored and feeling emptied by consumerism.

DARREN SMITH: Young people are-- they're just dissatisfied with the normal ways that you can get culture. It's always fed to them, spoon fed to them prepackaged. And this is instant and it's do it yourself. And sometimes it's better

"Father's Day." Would you rather have a soda or your father brought back from the dead? Would you rather have a soda or an egg salad sandwich? Some of us squint when we look up at the cornice and the road is full of cars in the sun, but I'd rather have a soda than an egg salad sandwich.

[CHEERING]

MICHAEL HALL: Hello, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the Minneapolis Poetry All Stars. I'll tell you a little bit about it.

SPEAKER: In the more rowdy atmosphere of the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis, poet Michael Hall is hosting the fifth meeting of the Poetry All Stars. Hall, an avowed poetry promoter, has recruited the best readers around the city to participate. He urges the audience to register its approval or disapproval, and he threatens to gong the readers off the stage if their work doesn't meet his standards. Hall says he's grooming the Poetry All Stars event as a poetry slam, where readers compete before judges and the audience. But he says Minnesotans aren't ready for that yet.

MICHAEL HALL: Minneapolis has a nice guy attitude and people aren't really used to it. I started out as a poetry gong show and it got quite a few people upset.

SPEAKER: Hall is a 38-year-old Austin native. He calls himself the spam poet. He says he feels like an old timer in a group of young upstart writers. He agrees that people are moving away from their TV and computer screens and getting into poetry. But he also thinks the local effort to put writers and poets in the public schools has given students a new perspective.

MICHAEL HALL: The foundation was laid in the '70s and the '80s for what's happening now, where people were being educated to what poetry was and/or re-educated. And that's a lot more exciting to them than to sit down and rhyme every poem. Next up, we have Paul Dickinson.

PAUL DICKINSON: Lucky, lucky me, I get to hang the globe with the world around my neck, around people that are really machines, around cattle posing as voters, around aristocrats posing as socialists. Lucky, lucky me, I get to owe my life to the landlord, to the tax man, to the time clock. Lucky, lucky me.

[CHEERING]

SPEAKER: Poet Paul Dickinson. Michael Hall says he thinks it's great that more young people are getting into poetry, but he's concerned about those who are involved for superficial reasons.

MICHAEL HALL: Poetry is serious business. It's serious to me. And some people just think it's cool to be a poet. And they'll learn sooner or later that it's torture.

SPEAKER: Paul says there is a chance that the poetry revival will be gobbled up and destroyed by our media-driven culture just like any other fad. But he's also confident the poetry people here will linger in their minds and stay with them.

MICHAEL HALL: I got a little poem from Spam Land to read here before I go on. It's called "Breakfast at 4:00 AM in Spam Land." In the burnt toast of night, a little sizzler of a lady came up beneath the milky moon with two sunny side eyes smiling out of a porcelain dish, left me smothered by orange juice desire. Imagine two pancake lovers dripping with hot butter.

[APPLAUSE]