Barbara Hoffman
New York Post

He's Poetri in motion, especially when he's late. "I'm so sorry, 100 percent sorry, 400 percent sorry," says Poetri, running into the Krispy Kreme store in Chelsea. "Please, give me a hug," he insists, as he throws his arms, bear-like, around the writer and photographer he's kept waiting. Round and sweet, Poetri - one of the nine poet-stars of "Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam on Broadway" - is a bit like a Krispy Kreme himself. It may be just a doughnut to the rest of us, but it's a passion and a poem to him. One of his best lines - about a Krispy Kreme conspiracy "to keep the black man down and round" - has been cited by every critic in town.

In "Def Poetry Jam," the poets (all colors, sizes and sexual persuasions) strut their stuff - separately and together - talking the tough language of the streets, and bound together by the hip- hop rhythms of a DJ. Leave it to the other poets to take on justice, bias and President Bush. But it's Poetri ("If I told you my real name," he says sweetly, "I'd have to kill you.") who steals the show, waxing fast and funny about food, women, money and the man he idolizes: Michael Jackson. "I agree he's weird, but I love his talent," says Poetri, 28. "They teased me backstage the other day, asked what I thought of his nose . . . it actually inspires me to spread the word." And it's his word that makes the crowd laugh. "I have some angry poems, too, and they have their funny poems," he says of his co-stars. "That's why the show works - it just makes my funny stuff funnier, and their angry stuff more serious."

Growing up middle-class in Michigan, he started writing poems at 11 and rapping a few years later. There's a thin line between the two, he says: "Rap has a beat underneath it, so you're rapping to the beat. Do the same rap without music and it's basically a poem." He rapped until he was 21 when, newly arrived in Los Angeles, he saw what was grandly billed as a "spoken-word performance." "I said, 'Omigod! They're just doing a poem!' " he recalls. "I can do that!" So he wrote his own performance piece. Fittingly, it was about food: "Must Be the Chicken," a riff on how fowl hormones can make a 14-year-old girl look like 18. "I mean this girl would make a gay man go straight I wanted to yell, 'Wait!' " It's based, Poetri admits ruefully, on a girl he'd dated he'd mistakenly thought was 18. "When she had homework to do, I thought, 'Whoa!' Was she in college? No - junior high school. "R. Kelly will call me now [and] see the play."

These days, Poetri says, he's no longer "Dating Myself" - the title of one of his poems - but seeing "a lovely princess who loves me," and accepting himself for what he is: a big man (6-foot-2 and 250 pounds) who is absolutely thrilled to be making his Broadway debut. "I'm not a star-struck guy," he says, "but if Michael Jackson comes, we'll go to a Krispy Kreme, have a doughnut and talk."