Conflict has long played a large part in Quincy Troupe’s life. He was born a few months before the outbreak of World War II — on July 22, 1939 — in a working-class suburb of St. Louis. His father — "the second-greatest catcher of all time in the old Negro League" — left home when Troupe was eight or nine. That’s when life started to get rough. "We were thrown into a very poverty-stricken situation," he says. "We moved downtown into what I call a cutthroat, bucket-of-blood area. All of a sudden, I had to worry about whether someone was going to kill me, which made me tough, because you have to be. You have to survive."

When he was 14, Troupe’s mother moved the family to a safer neighborhood in a northern suburb of the city. The only problem, for young Quincy, at least, was that the neighborhood was anything but safe. "It was nothing but white people," he says, "and of course they didn’t want us there. I went to this school, you know, this high school with 3000 white kids and seven black kids, which was a trauma. We were always fighting. They’d call me you black this, that, or the other, the N-word. It was ridiculous."

Things only got worse when Troupe’s mother introduced him to literature: the novels of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes. "I would hate to see her coming on Saturdays, because that meant it was poetry time," he says. "I lived in a community where if your mother was in there reading poetry to you on a Saturday morning, you were a sissy. So when I went outside these guys would say, ‘Oh, there’s sissy Quincy.’ But I could fight. I’d just beat them up."

At around the same time, Troupe experienced something of an epiphany, one that was to change his life. "I walked into this fish joint," he recalls, "and there were these four black guys sitting in a booth. They were so hip-looking, and Lord knows I wanted to be hip then, so I sat down behind them. I wanted to hear what they were talking about. They were listening to Miles Davis. I had never heard a trumpet played like that — it went straight to my heart. All those kids in high school, who hated me, were listening to Pat Boone. Shit, that was boring. I was looking for something else — well, that day I was just looking for a fish sandwich — but I found Miles. He became my first cultural hero."

Before long, Troupe was dressing, acting, and speaking like Miles Davis. He was also becoming a very handy basketball player, a talent that landed him a scholarship at Grambling State University, an all-black college in rural Louisiana. "I had such a bad experience in high school," Troupe says, "I really didn’t want to go to another white school. I thought maybe they’re all going to be like that — maybe there would be people running down the halls with two-by-fours, and I’d have to think about bringing a straight razor to school. I didn’t want to go through that anymore."

Still, Troupe had difficulty fitting in. "The school was out in the middle of nowhere," he says, "and these black people were so provincial. They had no understanding of music or culture. They didn’t like the way I dressed. They called me City Slick. I got along really well with the girls, and the guys were furious about that." And so, once again, fistfights became a part of Troupe’s daily routine.

After graduating college in 1963, Troupe was drafted into the Army and stationed in Paris. He continued playing basketball for Army teams, and it looked as though he might eventually go pro — the St. Louis Hawks, he says, were interested. But a knee injury put an end to all that. While the injury felt catastrophic at the time, Troupe says that he is "happy" about it now. After all, if he hadn’t hurt his knee, he may never have started writing. "I was in the hospital, and I had nothing to do," he explains, "so I started to write this awesomely bad novel. I knew it was bad — I wasn’t fooling myself. I said to the Frenchwoman I was going with at the time, ‘This is a bad novel.’ And she said, ‘There’s a friend of my family who’s a writer; maybe I can arrange a meeting.’"

That family friend turned out to be Jean Paul Sartre.

"I didn’t know who he was," Troupe says. "I met this little owlish-looking guy with glasses, and the first thing I thought was, ‘Damn, this guy is weird-looking,’ you know, ‘Shit, he’s short, goddamn, I’ll bet he can’t shoot jump shots,’ that sort of thing. Some of the reports that have been written about Jean Paul Sartre and myself make us real good friends. We met two or three times, but I was too young and stupid to be his friend. He was a cosmopolitan man; he didn’t have time for a silly little man like me." Even so, it was Sartre who first suggested to Troupe that he might want to try his hand at poetry, a suggestion that led to Troupe’s discovering what he calls "the passion of my life."

When Troupe returned from Paris, he was a changed man. "I began to hang out with artsy types," he says. "Before, all I was interested in was shooting jump shots. Now I was frequenting these jazz clubs and coffee shops and hanging out with these painters and musicians who were getting high." Troupe’s years as a bohemian were cut short, however, when the 1965 Watts riots broke out. Within the year, he had moved to Los Angeles, where he rubbed shoulders with poets like Ojenke, a star in the Watts Writers Workshop, and members of the Black Panthers. He had numerous run-ins with the police. His poems took on what he calls a "cold-blooded, political" edge.

In the late ’60s, Troupe’s circle of friends widened to include a more ecologically aware, hippy-ish crowd, and his work began to reflect these new influences. "I began to write about issues other than race," he says. "From that point on my writing became more diverse." In 1971, he moved to New York, where he met Miles Davis, the man who was to have the biggest influence of all on his life and work — although he wouldn’t have known it at the time (see "Friendly Fire," at left).

The final, and most important, step in Troupe’s artistic development came about when he began to approach middle age. "I started to think," he says, "how can I change so as I get older I can find a wise voice, a human voice, one that can carry me into my 70s and 80s?" The answer to this question, Troupe quickly discovered, lay in what he didn’t want his poetry to be: "I was tired of iambic pentameter, that metronomic, robotic line — de-da de-da de-da de-da de-da — because that bullshit ain’t the way people talk. The poetic line should be about cadence and breath. I listened to the music of Miles Davis. I memorized every solo. I threw out all of my iambic pentameter and replaced it with the way Miles played his solos." The resulting poetry was probably his best — and certainly his most distinctive — work yet. His 1995 poem "Avalanche," in particular, was a huge success (in 1998, the poem was posted on LA buses as part of that city’s Poetry in Motion series).

... this is a poem in praise of continuity

is a poem about blood coursing through tongues

is a praise song for drowned voices lost in middle passage

is a praise song for slashed drums

is a construct of orikis linking antiphonal bridges

is a praise song tonguing deep mojo secrets

in praise of the great God’s blessings

in praise of healing songs sewn into tongues

inflating sweet lungs into a cacophony of singing ...

Whether one likes this sort of thing or not, there’s clearly nothing de-da de-da de-da about it. "Quincy has the ability to capture the rhythms of speech of the average person," says writer Ishmael Reed. "He has a powerful voice, and he does capture the blues aesthetic. I think he’s as successful as Langston Hughes, who’s still the granddaddy of blues poetry, but Quincy rises to that, easily. He’s done a lot for poetry."

Endorsements don’t get much better than that, and Quincy Troupe knows it. Indeed, these days the prickly, scrappy, take-no-prisoners poet seems to be the picture of contentment. And why not? "I have a great wife, great children, great friends," Troupe says. "I’ve had great experiences. I’ve had some hard times, but I’ve had a really interesting life. If I die tomorrow — I don’t want to, but if I did — I’d feel fulfilled. It’s been a remarkable journey."

Quincy Troupe will appear at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, 42 Brattle Street, in Cambridge, on Saturday, March 9, at 2 p.m., to give a talk about Miles Davis, followed by a discussion and Q&A session. At 8 p.m., he’ll perform his poetry with the Jeff Robinson Trio at the Marran Theatre, 47 Oxford Street, in Cambridge. The talk is $10. The performance is $12 in advance, $14 at the door. For details, call (617) 547-6789 ext. 1, or visit www.ccae.org. Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com