Winning Poet Acted the Part : Contest: While many of the competitors in Fullerton were a little off-the-wall, first place went to a performer in more traditional guise.

Contestants included a truck driver who compared the Grim Reaper to Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman, a middle-aged woman who elegized upon the erotic side of casserole-making and a strangely androgynous character who bemoaned the collapse of East Germany.

But when it came time to choose the winner of Saturday’s second annual Performance Poetry Competition, both a panel of judges and an audience survey selected someone in more traditional guise: Willie A. Sims Jr., bedecked in beret, crew-neck sweater and small, circular spectacles.

Besides looking the part, Sims had held the audience spellbound at Fullerton Museum Center with his poem “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” which recounted the rise, fall and resurrection of Jesus Corinthians Moses Jones, “a barefoot black boy” from Mississippi who finds his fortune as a slick and unsavory television preacher. With a dramatic, sly delivery that made full use of his poem’s frequent alliterations, repetitions and juxtapositions, Sims bested about 30 competitors to win the competition’s $100 first prize, and a gift certificate for a portrait setting.

“But then Armageddon struck,” Sims’ poem reads in part. “The National Enquirer accused the reverend of having an affair with a pair of martian porno movie starlets who were the illegitimate daughters of Hitler and Elvis. . . .”

Sims, 47, explained his victory concisely: “The younger audiences are more action-oriented. They don’t want stuff about walking on the beach.”

Indeed, the evening’s other winners were all vigorous performers whose work stressed satirical, or at least impassioned, wordplay rather than gentle, impressionistic imagery.

“I write for the rich man, I write for the poor man. I write for the white man, I write for the black man,” explained second-place winner Mellow Martin, 36, after delivering his poems “Civilized Jungle” and “Whatever Happened.” “My stuff is to-the-point. Everybody knows what I’m talking about.”

The Watts native said he honed his poetic skills while serving time for assault and battery. In prison, he said, fellow inmates turned to him when they had feelings they couldn’t quite put into appropriate words themselves.

“When a guy couldn’t get a lady to come visit him, I’d write a little something for the guy, and it would get that lady down there,” Martin, now of Santa Ana, said. “Straight call, no lie, nonfiction.”

Martin, who took home a prize of $40, was one of the few contestants to write his poems in rhyming couplets. In “Civilized Jungle,” he offered angry images of a society he feels is coming apart:

Babies having babies--now isn’t that a shame?

Who do we look at, and who do we blame?

Just last week a lady went out and bought a gun

And because she was depressed, she went and shot her only son.

A man rapes and beats a five-year-old girl

And you tell me that is a civilized world?

The third-place winner also found his muse in a state-run institution, but 13-year-old Manuel Schwab said his junior high school classmates placed slim value in poetry.

“I know of two other kids out of a school of 800 who are writing poetry. It’s too subtle a form of expression for the rest of them,” Schwab said, displaying a budding poet’s requisite alienation. “Their form of release is playing video games.”

Schwab, who won a bookstore gift certificate, read two well-crafted, highly stylized works, “The Velocity of My Paradoxic Ping Pong Ball” and “Acid Free Suicide Business.” The latter work concludes with the line, “And finally it was all theirs, and the melting pot of the world shattered to pieces, leaving all people to live in a sagging chair beside turpentine walls, sniffing the great wooden flower.”

The crowd of about 200 that came to contemplate such observations was largely composed of the contestants’ friends and relatives, along with a smaller group of Orange County poetry aficionados.

For their $5 admission, attendees got five hours of entertainment starting at 7 p.m., and could amble from the museum’s small auditorium to its outdoor patio, where free cookies and 75-cent bottles of imported beer--as well as a big-screen monitor capturing the performances inside--awaited them.

But despite the civilized setting and amiable tone of the affair, some felt a need to justify their interest in metrical speech against Orange County’s perceived social opprobrium.

“So many people out there don’t realize how OK poetry is,” said Janine Duff, 24. “They get this stereotype of weird people and homosexuals. But it’s real people expressing real feelings,” the Tustin loan officer said.

But is “performance poetry,” in which contestants are judged on delivery and stage presence as well as content, really poetry?

“No,” said one of the contest’s judges, Prof. John Brugaletta of Cal State Fullerton. “This is really a kind of fluff, as far as I’m concerned. I love the beauty of the English language, and that seems to be missing from performance poetry,” the literature scholar said.

Indeed, many participants explained that expressing their feelings was a greater motivation than displaying proficiency in composition or complexity in symbolism or meaning.

“When I’m depressed, poetry gives me a chance to get my feelings out,” said Kim Svoboda, 26, a reporter for a suburban weekly who normally writes about school board meetings.

Svoboda offered works that reflected her experiences as a single young woman. “I know you want me,” began a poem entitled “Re(a)gression.” “You’d like to take me/here, now--/On the floor or/Even on that table. . . .”

Rowland Heights advertising man Jeffrey Maslan, who came in second in the audience survey, offered the perspective of one immersed in the world of marketing: “Put some non-dairy creamer in my non-coffee coffee in my plastic glass. No, I would not like fries with that,” he began his work. Maslan, 30, described his brand of poesy as “Definitely L.A. Angst, single and horny Angst, recession a la Bush Angst. “

But according to the event’s organizer, Poets Reading Inc., the well-attended declamations of Angst, eroticism and annoyance may be coming to an end in Fullerton. Although the nonprofit group has sponsored poetry readings in Orange County for more than three years, government and corporate support has failed to materialize. As a result, according to group founder Michael Logue, Poets Reading will probably “close permanently” unless it can obtain grants to sustain its operations.

“On the one hand, the public doesn’t give a damn about this,” complained Tom Rush, 39, an Anaheim truck driver and Poets Reading member. “They’re too busy watching their situation comedies and cop shows and listening to bad pop records to care.

“On the other hand, the people in the arts community don’t take us seriously. They give their money to symphonies and theaters, but they aren’t willing to support poetry.”

As he cleaned up the museum patio after the event’s midnight conclusion, Logue, the group’s principal organizer, reflected on the passing of Poets Reading. He ascribed the organization’s likely demise in part to the “introspective and self-centered” nature of the form’s practitioners.

“We made poetry a public event,” said Logue, 35. “Featured readers could pick up the newspaper and see their names in it. It was quite a thrill for them. They could come down here, find an audience, maybe even sell a few books.

“But after they were a featured reader, they packed up and went home and we never heard from them again. Take a look around. How many of the poets stuck around to help clean up?”