Danny Hester watches his granddaughter play with sand on the beach at Gunpowder State Park and sees a poem.

Daniel James Hester Jr., 48, is a formidable talker, a prodigious reader, a poet of the heart -- and a floorman who runs a buffer for the housekeeping department at Towson University, "stripping and waxing."

He is the literary equivalent of the outsider artists at the American Visionary Art Museum. He's a bit raw, mostly untaught, but not unsophisticated. He's sharp, observant, perhaps even wise.

Next Friday, he'll make his public debut, talking and reciting his poetry at the opening night of "Chain Reaction," the new performance-art series the Fells Point Creative Alliance is launching at The Lodge, 244 S. Highland Ave.

Hester talks about writing poetry the way Ernest Hemingway talked about writing short stories.

"I just started writing down words," Hester says. "Just walking around seeing people in action and then I'd put the people in their surroundings the way they are. Like lovers, walking and holding hands, I can almost imagine what they're thinking or saying.

"Plus I would add on what I would think or say according to being right there at that particular moment. You know: how the sky is, the location and everything. It's a physical thing. I would put in what I'd see. And I would put a bit of me in it."

Hester wrote the poem he calls "A Grain of Sand" on a very, very hot day in the summer of '95. He took his 3-year-old granddaughter, Sabrina, to Gunpowder State Park and he sat on a picnic table and watched her play.

"Let me set it up for you," he says.

"She was sitting on the edge of the beach. The sun was just beginning to set. The tide was getting ready to come in.

"She had the dry sand and she would pick it up and let it drop like in an hourglass, and it would just shine and glisten. The trees were swaying real, real softly and it was so quiet and serene and she was so at peace and she just kept picking it up and said, 'Granddaddy, look!' "

So he looked at his granddaughter.

"That pretty, smiling thing. And the sun was setting. And the little waves were coming in just so nice and calm. And I just wrote:

"I wish I were a grain of sand,

"Lying in a baby's hand,

"Falling like a diamond chain

"Into the ocean.

"A willow tree is strong enough to bend.

"Not like the oak which lives in fear of the wind.

"A grain of sand is all I ever wanted to be.

"Lay me down and let the water rush right over me.

"Right on over me."

"It was just flowing," he says. "I didn't have to stop and think or anything. She only called me once. 'Granddaddy, look.' She was just playing, humming and singing. And every now and then she would [sift the sand] and watch it fall. She was fascinated with it.

"So she wasn't really paying me any attention after she first called me and I like it like that. I just wanted to catch it naturally. Seemed like I got this adrenalin rush. Almost like you get a sudden burst of happiness from a surprise, or a sudden burst of fear. You know how it just grabs you and makes you just go phwooo. Like a chill factor.

"She and the surroundings were my inspiration. But I want to tell you: I did not know what I was doing. It just came."

Poems have been coming to Danny Hester since he was about 14 and first heard the Beatles.

"I picked up the pencil and began writing my own songs, but they turned out to be more poetic than songs."

He grew up in East Baltimore, on Spring Street and near Bond and Madison streets. He's got a complicated African-American, Italian and Jewish background. He never saw much of his father, maybe a half-dozen times before he died. But he still idolizes his mother, Lettie Hester: "She was a perfect mother figure."

He went to school at the old Fairmount Hill School and Dunbar High. But at 16, he joined the Job Corps and traveled though Indiana, Michigan and Connecticut.

"My first real job was at Sparrows Point," Hester says. He was an analyst in a metallurgical lab at Bethlehem Steel. "Why'd I leave? Young and dumb."

Over the years, he has worked as an electrician's helper, a pressman's helper and a cook, his favorite job and the one he considers his profession.

He got married when he was 19 and he has four children: Devin, Melissa, Makeba and Daniel James III. The marriage ended three years ago in an amicable, but painful divorce.

For the last two years, he's been at Towson University, doing the floors in the arts and humanities building. That's where he became friends with Jason Sloan, a graduate student in art who is performing Friday at "Chain Reaction." (He'll do an abstract-expressionist piece inspired by action painter Jackson Pollock.)

And that's how Hester got his poetry debut opportunity.

Sloan hooked Hester up with Cindy Rehm, an adjunct professor of art who is curator and impresario of "Chain Reaction." Rehm listened to Hester, read his poems and put him on the bill.

"Cindy told me I have a good soul," Hester says. "I don't know, but that's a possibility. I've been told I'm a spiritual person. I don't even know that."

Cindy Rehm thinks he is.

"He cuts to the core of things," she says. "I think he has the soul of an artist. Artists are like sponges. They absorb bits and pieces of everything, then translate it and put it back out. The real value of artists to society is that they can be translators, vortexes of information."

Hester is certainly like that.

"I always used to carry my little notebook, the one that opens from the left and flips open easy," he says. "I used to walk down the harbor and I'd be watching people, places and things. And I'd just start writing.

"People would come up to me; they'd be thinking I was sketching. I'd start a conversation. I got phone numbers from people who own galleries and gave me addresses to poets' clubs, little coffeehouses and everything. And I'd say I'm not ready for all of that. They'd say, 'This [work] is good. It's raw, but it's good.' "

He likes the encouragement but he has a solid sense of his own individuality.

"It's so hard trying to be an individual," he says. "It seems like it's not allowed. Being an individual doesn't mean you have to be dressing all weird or acting all weird. It's just your own thoughts.

"We are all going straight for what I call 'Desolation Destination,' " he says.

"I look toward the future for this whole system and I just can't see nothing," he explains. "I just keep seeing things getting humanly worse and environmentally worse. Just worse. And if any aliens are among us or are out there looking at us, they don't want to have a damn thing to do with us. And I can't blame 'em!"

That's the kind of free-flowing talking that inspired Jason Sloan to call him an "impressive conversationalist."

And that's an extravagant understatement.

Hester's a lavish, awe-inspiring, inexhaustible talker. He used to be in great demand among his long-haul truck-driving friends, who liked to have him aboard, talking through the night to keep them awake. He'd talk nonstop from Baltimore to Georgia. "And all the way back," he says. "They didn't need one cup of coffee."

People used to invite him to parties just to hear him talk.

"I used to be home asleep," he says. "People would call me up. 'Danny, come on down.' They used to pick me up.

"You know, like the music is jumping and everybody is having a little fun. They would have a chair in the middle of the floor. They would have a little cooler with my favorite beverage.

"I would be chit-chatting and as soon as I'd say, 'I can remember one time ...,' that's when they'd turn down the music and it's like somebody in a library telling a story. They'd be wiping their eyes and everything. It would just be rolling out. They'd be like jokes with a helluva story line."

He was recorded twice when boom boxes first became popular. A guy once sold a couple of hundred tapes for $3 a piece. Hester didn't mind. His material was, and is, endless.

"I had a sense of humor to fit everybody's personality. If you used four-letter words, I had that. I even could tell good jokes to Christians and they would laugh."

All this in spite of the fact that he has a stutter. He traces it to a traumatic accident when he was about 7 that left him in a body cast for months.

"I used to get bad grades in school for lack of class participation," he says. "Children's scorn is more deadly than adult scorn. When they say something it cuts deep. And I didn't say anything much."

He vividly remembers his mother carrying him all the way from Spring Street to Johns Hopkins Hospital when he was in his cast. "That's uphill. Raining or snowing," he says. The cast had a kind of handle. "Man, they carried me around like a cello or a string bass."

But when he recites his poetry, he doesn't stutter. And he doesn't stutter either when he reads aloud, or sings.

He's been putting down words for a long time, but he's produced only a relatively small body of formal poetry. So what has he written most?

"Love letters," he says. He's been composing love letters for other people since he was a teen-ager. "I was like the neighborhood Cyrano de Bergerac. I used to get paid for them, $10."

He's good at sizing up personality, and he tailors his love letters to the senders and for their loved ones.

"I even had a couple of marriages come out of it," he says. "I was best man at two weddings."

'Chain Reaction'

What: Poet Daniel James Hester Jr. and a half-dozen other artists launch a new performance-art series called "Chain Reaction," arranged by the Fells Point Creative Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes the arts and humanities. In addition to programming, the alliance holds monthly discussion forums and annual shows.

When: 9 p.m. Friday

Where: The Lodge, the alliance's hall at 244 S. Highland Ave., Baltimore.

Admission: $4 or $2 for alliance members.

) Information: 410-276-1651

'A Cold Wintry Death,' by Danny Hester

Six humans trapped by happenstance in a bleak and bitter cold.

L Each one possessed a stick of wood, for so the story's told.

Their dying fire had need of logs but the first man held his back.

From the faces round the fire he noticed one was black.

The next man looking across the way saw one not of his church

And could not himself to give the fire his stick of birch.

L The third sat in tattered clothes, he gave his coat a hitch.

Why should his log be put to use to warm the rich.

The rich man just sat back and thought of the wealth he had in store

And how to keep what he earned from the lazy, shiftless poor.

The black man's face bespoke revenge as the fire passed from his sight.

For all he saw in his stick of wood was a chance to spite the white.

The last man from the forlorn group, not accepting for gains,

But looking at those who played the game,

Their logs held tight in death's still hand was proof of human sin.

They didn't die from the cold without.

They died from the cold within.

An excerpt from Jason Blue, a poem by Danny Hester, "inspired by a wayward preacher."

One Gloomy day in 1942,

There was a man by the name of Jason Blue,

Who grew sick and tired

Of poverty and strife,

And cried, "Satan bring some

pleasure into my life."

Satan rose from a ball of fire

And said, "Jason I'll grant

all that you desire.

I'm most glad to welcome you into

the fold.

It's not every day I get

a preacher's soul."

Mr. Preacher fell from grace.

Because he had to have a taste

Of wealth and fame.

He's not poor. He's got gold.

But he doesn't have a soul.

Pub Date: 7/04/98