Hawkins came up in Chicago’s youth-friendly poetry scene in the 90s. Teh’Ray “Phenom” Hale, who cofounded a south-side mentoring organization called L.Y.R.I.C., remembers meeting Hawkins during a poetry event at a club called the Clique. “I was floored by the way he wrote, and he had a commanding voice,” Hale says. Hale had been working his way up in the hip-hop scene at the time and joined forces with Hawkins to create a genre-bending performance outfit called POETREE Chicago. “They were super powerful and I used to love to perform with them,” says poet Kevin Coval, a local youth mentor who is the artistic director for Young Chicago Authors and founder of the Louder Than a Bomb festival.
POETREE, which is an acronym for People’s Organized Entertainment Teaching Righteous Education Everywhere, had upwards of 11 members, though Hale says he and Hawkins were two of the four people at its core. The group went on to release an album in 2004 called Positive Pollution. “We dedicated ourselves to making a project that was not just likable but actually inspired and impacted the youth to make the music,” Hale says of the album.
Around that time Hawkins would help cohost weekly open mikes at a west-side space he lived in called Lyricist Loft. Hale recalls they’d screen revolutionary B movies and cook people food in addition to hosting performances. “It was a real hippie-type spot,” he says. “We had parties and it was free art just exploding everywhere.” In a 2005 Columbia Chronicle story on POETREE J. Diamond Weathersby described the layout of the space in detail:
The “Lyricist Loft” space is just as nonconformist as POETREE’s mission, content and performances. Nontraditional forms of artwork are sprawled all over the loft, including a mattress suspended from a wall containing an abstract, multi-hued representation of a human face. Handcrafted, designer T-shirts are spread all atop couches and posted on some of the loft’s support beams. There is even a massive film projection screen in the middle of the loft’s seating area, as well as a host of signs and hand-written messages, two of which read: “Beware of artists—they mix with all classes of society,” and “Excuse the f**k outta my language.”