Slam’s new round

Marc Smith

Marc Kelly Smith’s idea of hell is probably a poetry reading. His personal fiery pit might include an uptight junior poet (preferably a recent grad from a prestigious M.F.A. program) droning on in a monotonous murmur for half an hour, only pausing to allow polite applause from the waning audience (a crowd comprised solely of other poets sipping tea). So why has the 59-year-old Smith spent every Sunday night since 1987 at a poetry reading?

Well, for starters, the Green Mill, home of Smith’s Uptown Poetry Slam, runs on booze, not tea. And anyone who’s been to the homegrown reading series knows that it pretty much upends the genre’s upper-crust reputation. And as it turns out, Smith wasn’t the only writer disenchanted with poetry’s stiff traditions. Throughout the following two decades, the slam—a poetry style that relies heavily on theatrical performance, competition and audience participation—grew into an international phenomenon. It’s now complete with an annual competition that this year will draw thousands of poets from 80 cities.

Smith, however, is not on the guest list. “I’ve retired from leading the beast,” he says with only a trace of acrimony. For the decidedly low-key Slam Papi (as he’s been dubbed by Chicago fans), the national slam movement has morphed into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. After the form broke loose from its Chicago roots, it took off across the U.S., Europe and beyond—leaving some of its creator’s core principles in the dust.

But what can a founder really do once a movement takes on a life of its own? The answer: He can write a book—or two—on his invention’s fundamentals. So Smith recently published Take the Mic: Performing Slam Poetry and the Spoken Word and Stage a Slam: Create Your Own Poetry Slam, both through the Naperville-based Sourcebooks. Though one is a performance guide and the other an organizer’s handbook, both serve the collective purpose of cementing once and for all what slam really is and what it definitively is not.

“I was at a slam once where the poet was licking mayo off a knife during his poem,” Smith says with a befuddled shrug, slapping an open palm on his forehead. “Slam needs a how-to book.” That knife licker might be an extreme example, but it’s indicative of a kind of egocentric poetry Smith isn’t interested in. Basically, that mayo might have touched the poet—but it certainly didn’t move his audience. (This situation is what Smith refers to as a poetry “hijacking” in Stage a Slam).

As for the value of creative license, Smith is honest about his own old-school intolerance. “The problem is,” he says, “that I don’t really believe in democracy. I prefer benevolent dictatorship.”

But Smith insists that Take the Mic and Stage a Slam are not the groundwork for an international slam-poetry coup. “The books are really for those poets and hosts who I see and think, If they just change this one little thing, their performance, or their slam, would be so much better.”

Despite his altruistic intentions, Smith obviously hopes the books will help young slammers distinguish between unrecognizable permutations of his vision (see knife and mayo) and the real thing. And according to Smith, the one, overriding commandment that any true slam must obey is: Thou shalt always have more audience members than poets, “When that balance is off,” Smith says, “you know something’s gone awry.”

The next Uptown Poetry Slam happens Sunday 3.

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