Aspiring poet Sassy Ross is drawing some attention at a window seat in Panera Bread, 148 S. Allen St.

When she strides over, the guy at the next table looks up from his newspaper and resists looking down again for an extra second or two. When she begins speaking, he will pretend not to listen.

Outside, the chilly September wind makes it harder to decide between the seasons in the morning. Sassy chose summer: Her white peasant blouse tops off a long pale orange skirt. A scarf swathes the dreadlocks in her hair, and a handmade necklace dangles below.

She leans over a bowl of soup, and describes what she gathered from English professor Keith Gilyard and his African-American poetry class.

"I participate in a discourse," Ross says. "Whether or not I'm criticizing it, whether or not I'm agreeing with it, whether or not I'm challenging it, the question is . . . how am I going to participate in the discourse."

When she speaks, her words often come out like preformed lines of her own verse. She lingers on certain ones, repeating them and playing with them, as if testing out the sound they make in her distinctive subtle Caribbean accent. Her poetry reverberates with the same kind of voice, whether or not she is the narrator:

maaan

da last time you laid dem

thickblacklips on my thighs

wanted to sing your name in praises

but couldn't

for loss of breath

Ross does not use complex words in her speech or her verse. She relies frequently on repetition and incantation, lines that cry out to be spoken and spoken well. Most of all, her dead-on transcription of the vernaculars she knows distinguish her lines and diction.

During the past year, her poetry has appeared in Kalliope — for which she won a second place award in the Katey Lehman Creative Writing Contest — and in various online literary journals such as Mélange and Timbooktu.

It's almost unfair to pass up the inevitable link. She is Sassy. She is spirited. She is outspoken. She is bold, self-assured and even a little bit saucy, if only on the written page or when caught in the right mood. But she is also humble.

"It's poetic but it sounds like me"

Peering back over her college years, Ross points to her past friend Deana Lawson and the second semester of her freshman year as witnesses to her start in poetry.

"Deana wrote a poem for this guy, whatever — the content was not important. What impressed me about the poem was it was in the language that we spoke and I understood it.

"It wasn't like the stuff they had me read in high school like Shakespeare, in the language we absolutely did not use. I'm reading this and I'm like 'It's poetic but it sounds like me and it sounds like her.' "

Ross wrote her first poem — "of course . . . about this guy" — now freed from what she saw as the restraints of rhyme schemes and iambic pentameter.

Her first creative phase, Ross admits, was love poetry or "wannabe" love poems. But she pauses to think about what she's just said, gazing around the bakery café and corrects herself a bit: "You say love poems but then they end up having nothing to do with love."

St. Lucia to Boston

Ross was born in Castries, the capital of St. Lucia, a small island nation in the southeastern Caribbean Sea. Growing up, she spoke a mixture of English and a French patois comparable to Haitian Creole.

The 21-year-old says she has now spent about half her life in the United States, since leaving her birthplace after 10 years.

Her poem, "me likkle island st. lucia," evokes some of her remembered images from the island with touches of the dialect:

long time me no taste sweet sugar cane

an drink some coconut water

long time me no climb mango tree

or pick tamarin, golden apple, an guava

is a long time me no visit

me likkle island st. lucia . . .

She has not been back yet, but she looks forward to the day she returns.

"I need to have something to give when I go back, and I don't think I'm ready," Ross says.

Her arrival in Boston, Massachusetts in 1989 provided fodder for a poem Ross edited last spring in English 413 (Advanced Poetry Writing) with C. S. Giscombe, associate professor of English. Ross says Giscombe taught her the importance of specific detail in her work.

"I wrote this poem about arriving in the United States . . . and he demanded more of me: 'Where in Boston? What was the name of the airport? What were you wearing? What color were your shoes? What were you feeling when you arrived?' . . . He told me, 'Put that in the poem.' "

Ross was glad to oblige:

i arrived . . . ragged and awkward

and shy, a little girl sheltered in secrets

i arrived in this mansfield of massachusetts

a middleclass suburb as wealth as st. lucia was poor

as pallid as st. lucia was colored

as numb as st. lucia was alive.

Dancing at Penn State

Eventually, it was from a Richmond, Virginia area high school that Ross came to Penn State on the recommendation of a counselor and the encouragement of a scholarship.

She enrolled as a business major, and helped to found the Women In Business organization on campus as a freshman. But her interests soon turned to African/African-American studies, her current major.

In the meantime, Ross indulged in a longtime fantasy of hers.

"As a kid, I always wanted to be a ballerina. I was always interested in dance, but never took any dance classes."

After seeing the members of NOMMO Performing Arts Company dance together once, she decided to join. No previous experience or African dance skills were necessary, but she says it did require a great deal of dedication and determination.

By junior year, she had risen to the rank of the group's president. This semester, Ross continues to dance but has stepped down from her leadership role to relieve her schedule and allow time for work on her honors thesis.

She is, however, teaching about 40 other students what she loves as the instructor of Dance 281 (Introduction to African Dance).

Living with another poet

Ross shares her apartment this year with Matthew Kremer (senior-English), another student poet. They met in Giscombe's class, and Kremer sent Ross e-mail inviting her to lunch in March.

"We are very different personalities. We come from vastly different angles . . . in terms of criticism and social philosophy," Kremer says.

"However, there is obviously a commonality that makes us friends, which is embedded in our mutual appreciation for poetry and more importantly, self-expression."

The two do their best to make their home life conducive to writing, but Kremer admits Ross has a funny quirk:

"We have no kind of TV reception, but a VCR. I think Sassy is Mike's Movies' No. 1 customer. She'll rent one or two movies a night, sometimes just to have background noise."

'Barefoot & funky'

Last winter, Ross started a small nonprofit press called Feeling Publications. She produces mostly chapbooks of her own design and construction as a method of "making the poet's poems accessible to the public."

The idea grew out of an assignment in English 413.

Besides her own work, she put together a book of Kremer's verse.

"I am very grateful to her for how kind she has been to me," he says.

Her latest volume of poetry, Barefoot & funky: with questions and other somethings, will soon be on a shelf in the Penn State library, thanks to a friendly recommendation from the author.

Howard Rambsy (graduate-English) composed the introduction for Ross's book, after meeting her and reading some of her work.

"Like a lot of poets of my generation, Sassy is a sound poet, heavily influenced by spoken word poetry and hip-hop culture in general," Rambsy says.

"Listening to her and looking at her poetry on paper, there's no doubt that she is also influenced by the poet Sonia Sanchez. This sister Sassy is connected to black expressive traditions in many ways."

To Ghana

While Ross admits she probably should have just been an English major, she has found inspiration in her current discipline, focusing specifically on African studies.

She hopes to delve into the Asanté culture when she studies abroad at the University of Ghana next school year.

"Ghana is almost a time off, not a time off from writing, but I do want to see how Ghana is going to influence my writing," Ross explains.

She also wants to check out the poetry scene there, but expects to print a few more manuscripts before leaving.

Upon her return in 2002, she will graduate from Penn State and see what she can do to further her career as a poet.

"I've demanded of myself at least a book a year," Ross says.

Along the way, she will have supporters, who have a lot of faith in what she can do.

"She's brilliant, she has a lot of potential, and she's already achieved some of it," Gilyard says.

Rambsy adds his praise: "With Sassy, it really seems that writing and poetry are like breathing for her. That is, her mind seems to tell her that she must write poetry to live."

As Sassy finishes her soup in Panera and gets ready to head off to teach her dance class, the guy at the next table isn't even trying to hide the fact that he's listening. Perhaps she just attracted another fan.