One thing you can say about Quincy Troupe: he knows how to fill a room. At six-foot-two, with a thicket of dreadlocks and a heavy-lidded, slightly menacing gaze, the 63-year-old poet cuts a somewhat daunting figure.

In this case, looks do not deceive. By his own account, Troupe — who’ll be appearing at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education on March 9 — is a lifelong scrapper. "I’ve been shot," he says. "Stabbed a couple of times and shot once. It wasn’t fun, but it happened. And I never shy away from things that happened."

Another thing that happened is this: in the mid ’80s, Spin magazine sent Troupe to interview Miles Davis. Upon their introduction, Davis reached out to touch Troupe’s hair. "Just ’cause you’re Miles Davis," the rookie journalist said, smacking the legendary trumpeter’s hand away, "don’t give you no damn right to invade my space." The two men faced off, glaring at one another. Davis — who himself had a notoriously wicked temper — backed down.

These days, Troupe more often finds himself on the other end of the interviewer’s mike, and, by his own admission, he can be a tough subject. You get the sense that more than one journalist has scurried away from a Troupe interview with the word "fool" ringing in his ears. A one-time Black Panther keynote poet, a two-time winner of the Heavyweight Championship of Poetry, Troupe is clearly not a man to be trifled with. Reached at his office at the University of California, San Diego — where he’s a professor of American and Caribbean literature — Troupe cuts into the initial pleasantries with an abrupt, "When do you want to do the interview?"

Well, want might be too strong a word for it.

Troupe’s professional accomplishments are as daunting as his conversational style. To scratch the surface: he’s a two-time American Book Award winner — for a collection of verse, Snake Back Solos (Reed Cannon & Johnson, 1979), and an as-told-to bio of Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1989). He has authored 14 volumes of poetry and prose. He has written for the New York Times, the LA Times, Spin, and Elle. His literary events have drawn the likes of Toni Morrison, W.S. Merwin, C.K. Williams, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, and Yusef Komunyakaa. He has rallied for free speech with Alan Ginsberg, talked poetry with Jean Paul Sartre, and launched a men’s style magazine with Larry Flynt. He’s taught in Ghana and played basketball in Paris. He has been featured in the TV documentaries of Bill Moyers and Ken Burns.

Most notably, perhaps, Troupe is widely considered one of the pioneers of performance poetry. His flamboyant, energetic style dates back to the late ’60s and early ’70s, when he read poems at the Black Panther rallies of Huey Newton, Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael. "I was the warm-up act," he says. "I’d go out there and read these inspiring poems to crowds of 25[,000] to 30,000 people. You had to reach the person waaay in the back. So you had to be up. You had to be really rhythmic and commanding."

Today, Troupe’s peculiar rallying cry has evolved into the wildly popular poetry slam — vigorous, competitive readings where, for better or worse, bookish, formal poetry is swept aside by a combination of intensity, rhythmic mastery, and sheer volume. As Troupe himself once put it, "If someone puts their spirit into it, they can make a phone book sound good." Troupe, meanwhile, has put a damper on his own fiery reading style. "I’ve learned to bring my energy down," he says. "I used to be over the top, but when there are only two people in the audience, you don’t need to do that."

Troupe isn’t being entirely truthful here. For one thing, he regularly appears before sold-out audiences. For another, his rhetorical prowess is still very much in evidence, and not only at his readings. "He fires up his students," says Lucinda Rubio, head of the literature department at UCSD. "They just gush about him, about his style being very entertaining and informative. He’s a very popular teacher."

Talking with him, you can understand why. Once Troupe gets going, he does not so much speak as orate. He routinely repeats a word three or four times for emphasis. He adopts different voices. He uses alliteration and assonance and launches into elaborate metaphors. Discussing "What Is a Black Man?", the first serious poem he ever wrote, Troupe says, "It wasn’t even on the ramp leading to the freeway that leads to the street that goes to the parking lot of the Coliseum." In other words, "It was terrible, a terrible poem."

For a hard man, Quincy Troupe is awfully nice — witty, charming, self-deprecating, even a bit gooey at times. Could it be that his reputation as a prickly character is undeserved? "My mother always told me I could do anything," Troupe says. "I was always smart, and my mother always told me I could do anything I wanted, and I believed that all my life, and it’s gotten me into a lot of trouble. Somebody once told me that I was arrogant. But I’m not arrogant, I’m confident. Sometimes, people in this country have problems with very confident black men."

Fair enough. But Troupe has expressed his confidence in some pretty unorthodox ways. He recalls another incident with Miles Davis, which occurred long after the two men had grown to be dear friends. "He said to me once, ‘Man, I’ll hit you in your mouth,’ and I said, ‘Miles, have you looked at yourself recently? You’re five-feet-eight; you weigh 150 pounds. If you hit me, I will beat your ass. I will beat you up. I will beat you to death. I don’t take ass-whippings from nobody.’"

A similarly pugnacious attitude marks Troupe’s approach to poetry. He has little patience, for instance, with people who object to the way he marries poetry and jazz, or his propensity to write poems with titles like "Flies on Doo-Doo" or to pen villanelles and sestinas about baseball and basketball stars.

"First of all, I think any subject matter is okay for a poem," he says gruffly. "I don’t like the term ‘postmodern,’ because I don’t know what that means. But if they talk about postmodernism, then I’m post-post-post. If a guy wants to be all pinched and sallow and sit in the corner of a library and read" — Troupe breaks into a theatrical whisper — "like that, and you have three people there along with the roaches and the flies, and even they are running away, that’s okay. But I can’t be held down by a bunch of bullshit about the way a poem is supposed to be."