It didn’t surprise me when Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement and host of the Uptown Poetry slam, told me that ministers sometimes “lurk in the shadows” of the Green Mill Lounge, a prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy, during the Sunday night poetry slam. When I first moved to Chicago, I, too, lurked in the flickering light cast by tabletop candles. I entered the Green Mill as hungrily as church and found fragments of meaning that sparked and floated down like ashes from a campfire.
There are few public spaces in which it is safe to be real, and this is a large reason the Uptown Poetry Slam draws crowds.
Perhaps this dearth of safe public spaces is a remnant of Victorian codes of etiquette that chided us not to “introduce politics, religion, or weighty topics for conversation when making calls.”1 While our age bristles at Victorian morals, this etiquette has made it tactless to be curious about others and difficult to broach “weighty topics.” It sanctions our resistance to vulnerability, and so, growing up and growing respectable become processes of boarding up the delicate aspects of one’s identity. Becoming accustomed to city life, too, is a process of letting less and less of one’s private self show on a face that pushes through crowds.
And so it’s rare to find a public space, much less an urban space, offering a sanctuary where people can reveal the selves that so many of us quarantine-brittle with unanswered questions, restless because of broken relationships. Revelation is what poetry slammers do in the Uptown Poetry Slam Sunday after Sunday.
Marc Smith yells, “Hey, turn that jukebox off!” or cues the band to a lull, and launches into an interactive shtick (beginning, more or less, with, “I’m Marc Smith,” met with a resounding, “So what?!!”). After that, performance poets step onto the stage with jazz musicians who will improvise along with the poems if poets want them to.
The slammers dive right into pieces about rejected marriage proposals, questioned destinies, lost childhood and contemplated abortions. One poet read about the night he murdered his wife.2
It’s baffling. How can people stand in front of strangers and say things they could hardly stammer to a close friend?
“We all need public validation of who we are,” says Smith. “To speak in front of your fellow human beings is very important.” Performance poet Molly Meacham adds, “If you air a wound, it will heal.” In presenting poems that are personal, wounds are out in the open, and poets can say things the audience may feel but can’t yet put into words. Competing in the national slam, Meacham has experienced this. There is an instant communication, and an instant gratification as the poet sees his or her words grabbing the audience.
Meacham cautions against being too raw, however. “I was lucky enough to have a thick skin,” she says. Poets who don’t have a thick skin, or who gush emotion without crafting it, aren’t likely to survive the demands of frequent performance, where they are susceptible to critique.
“The stage is not therapy!” said slammer Robbie Q. one night after a sentimental performer left the stage one night. You have to purchase credibility, he told me. You have to get the audience to relate to you, with humor, for instance, “or by making fun of Marc.”
• Finding a poetry slam near you may be as easy as visiting www.poetryslam.com.
• Read more about poetry slams at Wikipedia.
Poetry slams started in 1987 with honesty as a goal. Smith had found chemistry between poetry and acting. He decided poetry readings should no longer be what he calls “bogus affairs” controlled by the literary elite and leaving everyday people scratching their heads.
Early on, Chicago’s literati derided the slammers as “just a bunch of drunks in a tavern,” says Smith, but when he asked the audience their occupations around that time, he discovered a group of physicists sitting smack in the front row. At the time, turning poetry into a performance was taboo, but Smith wanted poetry to have the vibrancy that only acting could give it, and people from all walks of life came to crave it.
In the early days, he felt that slam was akin to folk art, where it’s not precision but honesty that defines art. “Slam is not about making stars,” Smith’s website affirms. “It’s about everybody all together in a room with their hair down and their feet up.”
It reminds me of sculptor Claes Oldenburg‘s credo that he is for an “art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top… an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.” Slam embroils itself with the everyday crap, and it uses whatever means necessary.
There is no telling what a night at the slam will be like. It is poetry meets Vaudeville meets Gong Show meets, well . . .
“Is this like the Rocky Horror Picture Show?” one newcomer asks Marc as he makes the rounds to talk with members of the audience.
“Yeah, it’s like that.”
The first portion of the show is open mic. Anyone-amateur or pro-can walk in, meet Marc, and add his or her name to the list of performers. If it’s their first time reading in public, they’re dubbed a “virgin virgin,” which is often the only razzing they get from Marc, who may encourage the neophyte to join the slam competition, the third and final portion of the show, where slammers compete for a whole ten dollars. The middle section features a performer or group of performers-anyone from a local singer/songwriter, to a man who performs It’s A Wonderful Life in ten minutes, to a professional slam poet.
On any night at the slam, the audience can catch at least a few fragments of meaning. Fragments like these:
From the poet Stella, whose name Smith yells like he’s Stanley Kowalksi: “There is a river flowing backwards from death to life.”
From poet Tennessee Mary: “Our best laid plans are there for God’s amusement.”
From Smith, performing George Cabot Lodge: “This is the song of the wave, that died in the fullness of life.”
From poet Derek Brown: “In death, I’ll resemble more a pilot light than a man.”
On a night when every aspect is “on” – which is in itself a strange alchemy, since so little is planned – the present seems more palpable and immediate than usual, crammed full of meaning. Moments brim full of other moments in life. Lines of poems spark with the audience’s unanswered and unanswerable questions, their satisfying and ecstatic moments of life, fears and fumbles, and frenetic quests for meaning. I’ve experienced a few such nights there.
The night, for instance, back in my days of faithful slam attendance, when Smith started off with Carl Sandburg’s “Skyscraper“: “By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.” When Marc performs, he may walk through the audience, pat them on the back, whisper, shout, sing, bang out a few chords on the grand piano, raise his hands to the ceiling and gesture twinkling stars. The traditional podium of poetry readings must be side-stepped, the audience captivated with drama and interaction.
The night continued with professional slammer Derek Brown, who used phrases structured like a Hebrew psalm: “It was the dawn of weird, the morning of strange.” He told us he couldn’t explain “why I’m feeling God more in a pool hall than in a church.” Then in a crescendoing passage, he listed ordinary occurrences – a clumsy first kiss, a drunken night with friends – and after listing each, he took the tone of a priest offering benediction, saying, “holy” in rising momentum after each ordinary occurrence.
And so, the everyday people, the ministers, poets, actors, ex-cons, newsstand owners, teachers, physicists and hot dog vendors, gather in the candlelight, tapping along to the jazz beat, eyes reflecting the glow of the neon Green Mill sign on the stage, all looking for meaning, and on some nights, finding more than we can hold.
1 Hill, Thomas E., The Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette. San Francisco: Bluewood Books, 1994.
2 He tells us he spent many years in prison, where he met Chicago’s legendary “Killer Poet,” also once a Green Mill regular.
