Settled within a literati-packed café in the heart of Chicago’s Andersonville hippiedom, Marc Smith--the city’s most celebrated bard and the grandfather of slam poetry—nibbles on a croissant sandwich before gruffly and rather unexpectedly declaring a fiery political affiliation.
“I’m a socialist,” he says loudly, without pausing to glance the room over for potential McCarthy holdovers. “What I’ve seen through the slam is that when you try to create a pure democracy [that] allows everybody’s voice to come up…the most aggressive, ambitious, vindictive and manipulative people gain the platform.”
As Smith, 58, begins depicting the creative allure of Bobigny, a communist suburb tucked into the northeastern part of Paris, France, and the site of the 2nd Annual World Cup of Poetry, it becomes apparent that he has abandoned his first “platform” and initiated a quasi-exodus to a new one. A better one, he says.
Chicago slam poetry insiders agree with Smith’s diagnosis. Pillaged by commercial enterprise and usurped by egocentric individuals, the original and once thriving kingdom of slam has begun to collapse. And its sovereign has fled.
The Backdrop and Current Scene
In response to the egotism and monotony he experienced in the Chicago open mic circuit, Smith invented competitive performance poetry at the Get Me High Lounge in 1984.
Guided by principles like audience interaction and judgment, an open door policy, and community activism, the reactionary movement developed an anti-snob following and was awarded the Sunday night spot at Wicker Park’s The Green Mill in 1986.
During slam’s peak in the mid-90s, a horde of Green Mill spin-offs hosted packed houses, where drunks and intellectuals alike flocked to see up-and-coming wordsmiths compete.
Thirty-nine-year-old “Buddha” Dave Hargarten, host of a biweekly open mic at West Loop’s Jaks Tap and a quarter-finalist in the 2003 National Poetry Slam, characterizes the golden age of the art as all-enveloping.
“You could walk down the street and three different bars on that street had open mic nights at different times,” Hargarten, a Pilsen resident, says. “You could bounce from one to the other.”
According to Smith, only three clubs—the Green Mill, The Funky Buddha Lounge, and Weeds—boast an atmosphere that harkens back to the old slams, a sign that Chicago’s audience may die out completely in the next few years.
Even the immensely popular Mental Graffiti collective, featured at the Funky Buddha, was forced to reduce its weekly show to once a month. While collective member and 2002 National Poetry Slam finalist Joel Chmara, 33, maintains that it had to do with “growing up,” he admits that it was difficult to hold a consistent weekly audience. He estimates that Chicago boasted over twenty, thriving weekly venues when he first joined the scene.
Charlie Newman, a sixty-five-year-old open mic host at Lincoln Park’s The Café, says a typical Tuesday night brings in an audience of close to 100 percent poets.
“We’ve had a couple of nights where poets were outnumbered by audience but it’s really weird,” Newman, the Printer’s Row resident, says. “I would hate to be the poet reading here on a Tuesday night if the Cubs were in the playoffs.”
The Shift
Two defining tenets of slam, the value of both performance and audience, have faded from the minds of many Chicago minstrels. Intensive media coverage and HBO’s popular Def Poetry program, which both emphasize celebrity rather than artistic value, have helped subvert creativity by spawning a “rock star poet” complex.
According to Newman, inept individuals pursuing unrealistic ambitions have tainted the quality and reputation of slam poetry in Chicago.
“You have a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing,” Newman says. “[Def Poetry makes slam look] a lot easier than writing a sestina or a villanelle, but it isn’t.”
Hargarten stopped attending the open mics swept by this negative phenomenon. The trite imitation of popularized content and rhythm was far too much to bear.
“[There’s] a lot of people who aren’t writing because they enjoy writing,” Hargarten says. “They are writing in order to win. They always [use] same rhythm because that’s what judges [in the audience] are looking for.”
Smith decries the whole trend as a microcosm of a larger American narrative.
“There’s thousands of people that have put their souls into [slam],” Smith says.
“[Def Jam] is an exploitive entertainment [program that] diminished the value and aesthetic of performance poetry. Whether you’re in Appalachia or whether you’re a Native American, it’s the same American story repeated.”
Like any art, slam has also bred a series of self-involved performers—individuals who exploited the stage and moved on.
Newman knew them well and dismissed them quickly.
“We had one period of turnover when I got pissy about people reading for too long and not caring about anyone else,” Newman says. “I really don’t care because I don’t need them. One of the things that distinguishes this place is a common concern for each other.”
That common concern is something that epitomizes slam’s grassroots mien. Perhaps that is why those who turn their backs on it seem so venomous to Smith, who has helped so many nobodies become somebodies.
“There are people who have made astounding careers in slam, and they haven’t done one goddamn thing for [it],” Smith says, rubbing his wrinkled hand over his right temple, as if the whole subject were beginning to give him a headache.
Exodus and Revival
Disenchanted with the state of his brainchild in Chicago, he concentrates most of his efforts overseas.
“In America the big literature festivals and institutions still scoff at the slam,” Smith says. “In Europe they welcome it. The audiences are growing over there. And the aesthetic is growing and evolving.”
Esteban Colon, an up-and-coming poet from Staiger, has a more optimistic outlook for the future in Chicago.
“Its not like there is some kind of death or something,” Colon, 28, says. “It’s thriving in its own little bubble, but people outside the bubble have no idea what’s going on.”
Colon and Hargarten say they can extend their reach outside the poetic-sphere through innovation like the “Poetry Bomb,” which involved poets performing in random locations all over the city at 3:30 PM last April.
“The recent trend in poetry is a group of people who just want to grab it by the balls and change it and make it more accessible,” Hargarten says.
Also optimistic, Chmara believes that infighting has died down since his debut in 1999 and that the scene has condensed in a period of transition and reinvention.
“Once you realize that there is a formula to winning a slam, true artists really push themselves to try to recreate the form,” Chmara says.
More glumly, Smith defines the ongoing conflict in slam as a “self centered element battling against [a] service-minded person.”
While Smith, and other elders, tire from the struggle and retreat to other locales, confident youngsters like Colon, Hargarten, and Chmara push through to the front lines of the literary battle. And for now, they will continue to defend the art.
Ryanj899 