Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the through the Mill podcast. My name is Mark Elleveld. I'm the editor of the spoken word revolution series. This is a podcast dedicated to poetry slam, slam poetry. And really our subject is Mark Kelly Smith, the Chicago icon, the longest running show in Chicago. Mark Smith, the poetry slam creator. Mark Smith, the curator of the poetry slam. Mark Smith, the international known Mark Smith, lots of Mark Smith. Hi, Mark.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Too many marks met.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Here. Yeah, we started last podcast by saying the reason we're doing this, in part, is because you're spending about six months of the year overseas. I got an email from the University of Vienna asking questions about the poetry slam. It dawned on us, or you, you kept getting questions about in the World Wide web, there isn't one spot to go to find out about Mark Smith. So this is in part about your story and the creation of poetry slams and slam poetry and what that even is. And then all of the artists and the performers and the musicians and all the stories over the 40 years of your career that come along with this.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Yeah, because there was so much adrenaline going through my body that my arms waved around and performance poetry was born out of that.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: What's remarkable about that story, and it's your story, but it took one person clapping to give you the inspiration to climb out of some of the things that we talked about last time, how a writer's life, how a poet's life used to be, how it was created, the business end of it, the inspiration part of it, and you had a different vision.
We went through a lot of that. So you get that response. One person clapping.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Yeah, one person. And I think that's common to a lot of writers that start out, you know, it could be one person that just gets you out of feeling that you can't do it, to make you feel like you can do it. And that's certainly, certainly what happened to me. So I went from going to these poetry open mics and watching, and now I'm going to do it, you know, I am going to do it. And immediately I started writing more. I started writing thinking about the stage. And I would seek out now, and there wasn't a lot of them, but they were around. I would seek out every poetry group, every open mic there was, and I would go there and do my thing. Some of it was kind of funny because I had a very angry style at the beginning. I was Sandy, my wife, identified what was happening was like I was purging all this stuff from my lifetime, purging it, getting out all those things inside of me that were stuck inside me. I was pouring it out on the world. And I remember going to this one open mic. It was mostly kind of a folk music scene. In fact, I think it was a folk music open mic. A couple poets there. I did this poem that was so angry, they thought Charlie Manson had walked into the room, that's for sure. But I just, I couldn't get enough. I mean, I had to. I had to find the next poetry reading to go to. I did that for three or four times a week. I would be out wherever there was a poetry reading, I would go there.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: And because I know you, I also know that you made a lot of lists and you wrote everything down constantly, and you would critique yourself and you would talk about the spots and who was at the spots and what the tone of the spots were. You know, one of the misnomers, I think. I guess it depends what artist you talk to. But I remember, like, reading Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, and when they were touring together, they would flip who opened and who closed, and it was a point of animosity, and they would try to blow up the stage so hard that whoever had to follow, and I think, you know, we're talking about the slam. You gave the three definitions last time, but you want to get on stage and be better than. I mean, Patricia Smith wants to get on stage and be the best poet on stage.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: I can imagine you at these open mics.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Oh, I was terrible. I was the insecure ego that drives a lot of, you know, you're insecure, but you're not going to show the world that. You're going to show the world this other very egotistical thing. And you're right. I didn't want to just go to poetry reading and participated. I wanted to blow the roof off, off of it. And sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't. And I would. I would leave humiliated. I mean, it was such a vulnerable place to put yourself when you're a performer. You're opening up to the world, a part of you that, you know, your private world doesn't see, and it's a very vulnerable spot. Fortunately, at that very first reading at the left bank, I met Ron Gillette. Ron Gillette became my buddy, that I would go to these things. In fact, the first. The very first night at the left bank, he came home to the house.
We stayed up drinking all night.
He had a regular job. I had already passed, left my job.
He talked about poetry all night long. I went to sleep and Sandy stayed up with him, and then Sandy went to sleep, and I got up with him. He's talked. Ryan, I'm sorry. I'm telling this story. But he didn't go to bed, and then he just washed his face and went to work at, like, 07:00 in the morning.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: What were, and we don't have to spend because it's too big a subject. But what were a couple bullet points of what you were learning about performance in those very early days? Memorization is one of them, I imagine most.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: I don't know if I. At the very beginning, I was memorizing. Later, I found, you know, I realized, like, you know, you watch a jazz player and, you know, he's, he's not.
He gets into a zone when he's off the charts, looking at the charts, so.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: But you were moving around, too, so.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: I'm learning on the spot, okay?
I'm learning on the spot by, if I see somebody yawn, I got to do something different, okay. I was so insecure that if 50 people were listening intently and one person was yawning, I would think I failed. It was just a super fear of failure. And, of course, at that time, unfortunately, like many artists, I was finding the courage to get on stage by drinking. And, of course, you get drunk, you know, you get enough beers in you now you're really gonna be uninhibited on the stage.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: But you're. I mean, what you're learning, too, though, that. Cause we talked about this last podcast. The professor brings his ten students, has the podium, opens up his book, quietly reads, and it's antithetical to performance. So you start moving. I mean, even when you're just reading, you're moving and working a room. You start the volume.
[00:07:17] Speaker B: It was, it was just me, naturally. It was just like, if they had a video on me right now, they'd see my arms are going over. I'm that type of person that that happens. And it was learned on the spot. And I can't remember really recall those very early poetry readings, because it was mostly poets reading the poets. There wasn't a real audience.
There's not a real audience here. It's poets reading the poets. And when you're reading to the poets, other poets, they're more interested in their poem that they're going to do. They really don't care. Like the first reading, when Ralph was the only one got up and applauded, I knew I had the juice, and I'd go and I'd let everybody know.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: That, all right, we'll come back to the juice in another podcast. So you're with Ron Gillette, your partner, who's kind of starting it with you a little bit. And then are you going to art shows?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: You're open mic and what years. At that time, performance art was big, and I was hanging out with artist Baltazar Castillo. He was my. Also a drinking buddy. We would. God, we would go to these art openings because there was free booze and free food, and then we just criticize. Oh, that's. That's just decorative art. Oh. Oh, look at that. You know, anybody could do that. We were so arrogant and insecure, you know, about it. But at those performance art shows, they incorporated other. It was mixed media music with it, poetry with it, acting with it. So it was a fertile ground to see how people were doing poetry that was a little more expansive than normal poetry reading. So they didn't call them. They called them performance art exhibits. So it wasn't like the legit poetry world. And we started to go to those.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Is Baltazar performing with you?
[00:09:13] Speaker B: No, no. He was just an artist, and he was kind of snobbish. Like, they don't know what they're doing, you know? But he was my partner, and it so happened. He lived in the Bucktown Wicker park neighborhood. And as soon as I'm going to these poetry readings and doing it and seeing how they're conducted and seeing that there's no real audience for it, real everyday people, now I want to have my own show, okay? And we're sitting on it. We're sitting on a porch out there. He lived on Polina street.
We used to sit on his porch in plan. We had a couple other guys that were with us, and we would do these fake opera things where we try to make up an opera on the porch steps.
It was madness.
And he says, you know, there's this place down the block, the get me.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: High lounge, the famous get me high lounge.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: The famous get me high lounge with Butchie. He said, you know, that might be a place that you could do it. I went over, and it was perfect. It was jazz records tacked to the ceilings, graffiti on the chalk, graffiti on the ceiling. It was a jazz place.
And small enough. I knew I need a place that's small enough that if there's 20 people, because that's all that would go to poetry readings at the time. If you had ten people was a success.
Small enough that if you had 20 people and it feel crowded, but that it could also hold a lot more. I go in to see Butchie, to ask him to have a Monday night poetry reading because I knew I couldn't do it on Friday. Had to have an off night. So I go in and I want to have Monday night for poetry reading. And I go in and, hey there. Hi.
And he goes.
He just snaps his fingers. Yeah, well, can I have a Budweiser?
Or how about a special export schlitz?
And I thought the guy couldn't talk, you know, and I'm thinking, whoa, how can I approach this guy, you know?
[00:11:33] Speaker A: Sounds like your place.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: I left with Baldassarre. Like, this is madness, you know.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Because I couldn't get a suit of the guy. So then we go and I said, we'll try again. We go, and maybe not the next night, maybe a week later, because I was still shy about asking to do this. What do I know about it? We're going the next time. And I say, hey, how. How about a schlitz? Yeah, you gotta say, now he's talking. You know, so it's goofy. But I asked him if I could have Monday nights.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: So what years does that start and how long does to those Monday nights go?
[00:12:08] Speaker B: It started November 1984 was the first show.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: How far after the Left bank bookstore would that be?
[00:12:17] Speaker B: That's months. Months. Okay. All right.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: Yeah, you're on then.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Oh, no. Those first years, things were happening so fast.
So I start this show.
My model for that show wasn't too different than the regular model for open mics where the poets were dominant and they were all these kind of self centered, insecure. Self centered, you know, insecure arrogance inside. They don't feel valued, but they have to put on this show. And I would. I was generous to let them read and then that some guy would get up and read on and on and on. And anybody who was just in the audience, they're not going to stick around for this.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: So I did that for a few months and I said, this ain't gonna work. But. But she said, no, no, you gotta. You gotta come back. I don't know how many. I can't remember because I'm drinking a lot in these days. I can't remember how many months I was off, but I came back. But I came back with a whole new idea that if the poet on stage even starts to bore the audience, the audience can say stuff. And the rule was your heckling had to be more intelligent than the poem that you were heckling.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: How much of this is born out of you? I mean, this is really. You're manifesting yourself in all these different forms and correcting things as you go. Before I'm gonna forget, but to get me high, didn't President Jimmy Carter pop in there?
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that was, that was when it was really started. Got rolling.
Yeah, Jimmy Carter showed up. We couldn't believe that the first lady had to use that bathroom in the place.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: It was like, so now and are you inviting, do you know enough poets and artists? Are you inviting people yet or no, no.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: That started when we re geared the show. Ron Gillette would make the flyers. Those flyers that he made were just fantastic. Anybody's got em. They were works of arts. We'd have special guests. And the big thing was this, if you didn't like the poets, you could say something. And then I had tricks like, if the guy was boring, I would not let anybody bore the show. So they'd be boring and then have a little pause in their poem. And I go, hey, wasn't that great? And they were left, they were off.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: What time did it start, and how long were those shows?
[00:14:58] Speaker B: The show started at seven, I think we put on the flyer 07:00 but we never got going. At 730. We ran till nine. Steve Hashimoto and his band, who I later worked with, this is the great.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Bass player, the great Chicago bass player.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: His group set up at us and started at nine.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: You're regearing the show, and I suspect that although we're talking in all these different manifestations of you becoming an artist and what poetry kind of means, but you're very conscious of the fact that you want to keep creating and creating shows, creating entertainment, there's that.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: More important than that, I wanted a real audience to be there. And when I changed how I did it, you know, putting pressure on the poets. First of all, the poets now were at, there were some stakes. They could get up there and get booed off, heckled off, and they had to get better. And the audience kind of enjoyed that. They enjoyed seeing somebody really take a chance up there.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: Why do you think otherwise? Poets are coming at this point, it sounds like there's a lot of conflict here, but that seems to be a good thing. This is a reverse.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yeah, the poets.
There were poets that succeeded very well that headed up there and they learned, we all were learning in the moment to make things happen. And about the same time I thought to myself, how come it's always just a single poet on the stage? Right?
[00:16:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: I said, you know, why not like theater? Let's have an ensemble of poets. And I started going out to poetry. I still go into all the poetry readings because I got my show. And now because of my insecurity, I got to go to every other show to see if they're anywhere near as good as my show because people are starting to come. Now we have nights that there was only eight people and then there's twelve people. And now pretty, pretty, pretty soon we got 30, 40 people in this joint on a regular Monday night basis. So I start to find other poets, like from Nancy Oparka, because she was on a bopin mic and had balloons. Okay. Yeah. This person has a sense of performance.
John Sheehan, who had this beautiful voice at the guild complex readings, I started recruiting them into an ensemble.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: And we started working different places around town and it was like, you know, the guerrilla theater where, man, we are.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Your costumes in blocking yet?
[00:17:44] Speaker B: I think I was wearing, started wearing costumes when I redid the show at the get me high. I remember some pictures of me with goofy stuff. Yeah.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: I've got a picture in the spoken word revolution. I think it was circus chatter at the deja vu. And you're. I think you're a clown.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Well, that's one or mine. That one of the two?
[00:18:03] Speaker A: Yeah, if there's a difference.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
That's when the ensemble was getting to a peak. Because it was in the performance art world too. Was really booming at that time. I'm still going to those things. I go to the Randolph street gallery for a reading. I think it was Balthazar that was. That was with me. Might have been. Ron Gillette was with me. Ron is doing costumes at this time too.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Ron had the Vietnam vet at the bar who gets up and starts.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: That was Rob van Tao, but Ron. Ron Gillette. We had an act where I would come out and do a poem as myself and he would do a poem as himself, and then I'd do another poem. And while I'm doing another poem, he's getting into a costume and coming out and doing this in the dialect of the thing. So the costume stuff started, but when we got to this Randolph seat gallery, we see this beautiful gal poet on the stage and boy, she's got the pizzazz. I mean, you know, and I think it was. Ron might have been there and Baldassarre probably was there for sure because we were the three drinking partners there. I'm looking for people to.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: You're recruiting?
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, recruiting. Nobody ever heard of a poetry ensemble? No, nobody. Nobody did that.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: What name was that?
[00:19:25] Speaker B: That was Gene Howard.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: Gene Howard. How'd you meet Gene Howard, Mark?
[00:19:28] Speaker B: I met her that day at the Randolph street, I think I did. I'm pretty sure that's how it started. She's our guest today.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: Hi, Jean.
[00:19:37] Speaker C: Hello. Trying to keep my mouth shut all.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: The way from Utah. Everybody. Welcome Gene Howard, one of the original slammers by way of performance poetry. And she's our special guest on this podcast, hygiene.
[00:19:51] Speaker C: Hygiene. I'm so happy you guys are doing this. I'm happy to be here.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: How are the fidelity of Mark's stories? Are they accurate or are we.
[00:19:59] Speaker C: Well, there's some truth in there.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: How did you meet Mark Smith?
[00:20:04] Speaker C: Well, he has a lot of this cracked, I believe. Oh good. Yeah. A lot of it not, but, but here's, let me give you a little background on how I got into it because that's how we intersect.
[00:20:16] Speaker A: Wonderful art.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: Wonderful.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah, wonderful. Please.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Okay, so I moved to Chicago in 79 from LA, right? And I was published at that time. I was published in Harper's magazine when I was 21. So, you know, I thought, woohoo, I'm a poet, right? So I come here in Chicago and this is the first time I've gone to poetry readings legitimately. And so I got, was there no.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Scene in LA at all?
[00:20:42] Speaker C: There was, well, LA is just a big old spread out place. I mean, I really didn't have any poetry readings at all in LA. So when I come here, they have them, I'm going, oh great, right? So they're in like libraries and some galleries and of course the poetry center. So I go to these and it's a small group of people. And a poem that is well received gets a.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Polite applause.
[00:21:12] Speaker C: It's not even applause, I mean, it's just this quiet little moan or grunt. So, and then I got to see some people, like, people I idolized, people I had learned from poets, great names that I saw perform. And I go, oh man, I wished I hadn't seen that. Yeah, I mean, I just was disappointed and I would have rather kept my memory of the power of their words. So that's the scene. So that's where I come in.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: So Mark's correct in that there was a lot of different things happen, like between. Cause you're coming out of the performance art you published, poet. But I always think of you as like the merger of performance art coming into slam.
[00:21:54] Speaker C: This is how that happened. Let me tell you this fun story. So my husband and I, he came with me, we're walking around some neighborhood and we see this sign that says children of artists art show. And we go, oh, that sounds cute. So we go down into this basement, and there's this beautiful neon piece. It's this metallic blue fin with this stream of fuchsia neon in it. And I go, oh, my God, I want that. I need that. And I can afford it because it's not an established artist. This is Seton Scarf. He is the son of Tom Scarf. Tom Scarf was a mega pioneer in neon metal sculpture, and he had big pieces throughout the world, Fermi labs, corporations. So anyway, I buy this little piece of art, and guess who comes to install it? Seaton and Tom Scarf. So Tom Scarf looks at my house, says, this girl has no art. These guys know nothing about art. And he proceeds to become my friend and actually shows me and opens up the whole world of art in Chicago. All the gallery owners, all of the scenes, all the different artists. I mean, he was a man that changed my life, and he just passed away April 1. So my heart is breaking, but you can just see. You'll see people are pouring in with that. So I become friends with him. He learns that I'm a poet. He's got a local television station that's going to do a piece on one of his sculptures. And he goes, well, it's video. He goes, I got to have some movement. I got to have something with that. He said, do you want to collaborate? And I go, yeah, I have no idea. But sure, yeah, yeah. So it's this big, beautiful yellow neon ladder, and with metal, his major metal and everything. So I create this Persona of this woman that is ruling this world of Argonne, because that's the gas that runs through yellow Argonne. There are no children, no men. I'm in like this Madonna Bustier outfit, right? I've got a sword. That's Tommy scarf. And I'm really, you know, sexy and alluring and threatening at the same time. And so this video crew from television station, they film this whole thing, and at the end I go, because, come here, and we will speak of Argonne.
Ridiculous.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Your style, all our styles back there were not the pastoral poems. They were pretty edgy.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: But that just opened up that whole thing of, I went, whoa. You know, poems could have visuals. Poems can have movement, could be with art. So that really opened up a lot. And I started collaborating more with him.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: I'm so glad you used that word when you, that collaboration piece that sounds like you guys were meant to meet that.
[00:24:59] Speaker C: It was exactly because of that. We did a piece. We did a performance piece, two of them actually, two different galleries. And this is where I'm not sure which one you were at. We did one. It's called Climax Deluxe.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:25:16] Speaker C: All red neon, big, huge scene sound and everything. And Tommy Scarf did it at a very well known gallery. And he put cameras in the room, and he closed the door so nobody could see what was going on. And the whole gallery audience could only see it from these two monitors on the wall.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: And there was all these sounds and stuff like, what the hell is going on behind that screen?
[00:25:43] Speaker C: Fog machines. People were.
That was a very angry audience. Very angry audience. But that's what Tommy's gig was. He was a provoker. He provoked, and he loved it. And that's what I loved about him, too. So I think it was in that piece. We did another one at Randolph street, too.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: Was that the one at the Randolph that I was part of? Yeah.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: So all I know is that at the end of that, some guy comes up to me and he says, well, are you interested in doing poetry with us? And I go, who are you? And what? Yeah, what are you talking about? And. Yeah, okay. So it turns out another very important man in my life that I met, Mark Smith, because that's how we started. And there was a very vibrant performance art scene in Chicago. Karen Finley got kicked out. You know, she went to the Supreme Court because she was marrying feces and chocolate all over naked body. And it was grant money. And, you know.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Is this Mary Sheen barnage?
[00:26:44] Speaker C: No, no, no. Karen Finley.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Karen Finley.
[00:26:47] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Laurie Anderson was out there. So. And I went to gallery openings where guys would come, and they'd have the audience. They'd have tubs of mud. And these two guys would come up to the audience members, and they would take a slab of mud and throw it on their heads. And then they would be all covered with mud. And then they would come around with a box of stick matches. And you would stick the stick matches in their heads. So their heads were covered with stick matches and mud. And then they would have someone from the audience, like one of the matches on their head, and the whole head would be aflame. And then they would put smoke smoke detectors above them and make music.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: And needless to say that the poetry world they established poetry world. Who didn't even want you to raise your voice when you were going. They weren't. They weren't for this kind of mo. They were nowhere near accepting of that kind of the lengths that you went, the boundaries that you broke in that to include audience. And a lot of that work, a lot of that stuff had spoken word in it.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Also.
[00:27:56] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: Karen Finley and Laurie answers.
[00:27:59] Speaker C: All spoken words. It was all spoken words. So we were up. I mean, we were up for it. The temperature was there. The climate was there. It was so vibrant in the art world. So that's where I came from. So when he invited me to be one of the poets at the get me high, which was graffiti, you walk onto the stage to get to the bathroom. It was disgusting.
But in, it was where we were invited, right.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: And kind of wide open in a certain sense that didn't have all the costume or the visual stuff, but it was wide open for your soul and your words.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: It was completely because there was nothing to lose. I mean, I really feel like, because there was no business, there was nothing going on, you guys do what you want. So it was like freedom for us.
And do you remember Tim Anderson? I mean, Tim Anderson.
We would have this kind of a motley crew of people that he got together. We'd have Tim Anderson, who's sitting there in the midwestern looking like a farm boy doing a poem about butt fucking in the cornfields drop drawer, you know, okay.
And then I would do a poem, and here's the deal with the get me high. And this is why I think it was acid test. It was a great place to start because you'd have guys. This is a blue collar neighborhood.
[00:29:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:27] Speaker C: Guys are sitting at the bar after work trying to have a beer and watch the Cubs game, right. We're on stage. You want to read our poem, right?
[00:29:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:34] Speaker C: You came here to read a poem right now. So I would.
Whatever it took. So I would light a candle and I would walk up to the guy watching tv and I'd say, my darling, when you reach. While the night is dripping from our backyard elms and grab emptiness by the hair. You'll pull it toward you for comfort and feel nothing. Remember mommy was there before the moon hid from the outlaws. And all the while the jackals scratched at our windows. That guy could not avoid that.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: At this time, the get my house.
The poets that are coming to do it know, just like Gene Dung, they know they've got to do something. And now you've getting a regular crowd. And the way I would explain that, that early audience was, it wasn't just, you know, everyday people drinking beer. The neighborhood was kind of a place where all kinds of artists came to live because it was so cheap. But these were the very, very intelligent people that weren't smart enough to be up there in the high echelons of intelligence, and they weren't they were too smart to be down in the regular world. They were very eccentric and appreciative of the chances you were taking, because they were artists. They knew you were up there being vulnerable and taking chances, and they appreciated it. That's my take on it.
[00:31:07] Speaker C: Oh, no, I do agree. I think that became the draw for the get me high. And then people like, you know, Dave Cooper, he would. I mean, again, all of a sudden, you'd hear someone in the door going, who ordered a cab? Somebody ordered a cab. And then he would go through the whole damn place going, who ordered the cab? And just spout his poem on and get more agitated. And we were wondering if we had to call the police. I mean, we're at that point.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: How is it possible that in the mid eighties, you were more open and creative with all the World wide web and all the different devices these days? It just. It sounds so refreshing that you were creating and doing new things.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: It was the whole thing. You were learning on the spot. And all of us, I think, adopted this. We got to do something. You can't just be let the audience be passive. You have to make it happen. You're an artist, you're communicating, and you have to do whatever you can do to make that happen. When the ensemble stuff started, you know, now in this little get me high, and it's, these things are like days popping up and doing this. It's, wow. Like, whoa, what's going on? And then we would go. Then we started going around. We would go around to places, back rooms where they.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: Estelle's or.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: No, it wasn't Estelles, but we would go with unannounced. We'd walk in and we'd just start unannounced. The ensemble stuff happened. We did that for a while. It was. Rob was in it, then Karen, Nancy Oparca, Mike Barrett, Anna, and a couple others. Joyce Caskey was Joyce Caskey. Right. It was engaging and compelling. And then we had some regular shows that were just us. It wasn't the guerrilla theater and everything, but it got to a point where the get me high was so small, we needed, I knew we needed a bigger stage and lighting and a good sound system. We had done a show for Dave Gemmelo at the deja vu Sunday afternoon.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: So Dave Gemolo is from. He's a former USFL football player.
[00:33:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: He took his money and invested in bars in Chicago.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:33:24] Speaker C: They wouldn't be without Dave. Right, right.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: We did a show, and the ensemble is pretty well established now. We've been performing one night stands all over Chicago. We put together circus chatter.
[00:33:37] Speaker C: Circus chatter.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: Ron Gillette was the ringmaster with a top hat. And I think he had the white face on.
Rob was. Had his guitar, I think, and.
[00:33:48] Speaker C: And had his brother. They were cloud, right? Yeah.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: And we put the show on circus chatter.
And at the deja vu Sunday afternoon, I think we had maybe 50, 60 people in the audience. You know, Dave was. This is good. You know, got all these people Sunday afternoon for poetry I'm preaching.
[00:34:11] Speaker C: Yeah, that is Dave.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: And it was at that show, Dan Clary, one of our poets, Irish American, was one of the get me high poets who would. I'd always make him sing an irish song after he did his poem, he said, you know, dave is going to buy. Dave bought the green mill and he's going to open the green mill. And it was at that show that I thought, oh, he wasn't going to do jazz on Sunday.
Maybe he'd do have a poetry cabaret show. And it was really, the thought was for a place for us to work out the ensemble.
The show was going to be for the setting for the ensemble.
That's when we started. And when he said yes to us.
[00:34:59] Speaker C: Yeah. Because he had nothing to lose. He wasn't getting any money at that time.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: Let me know if I'm right.
I think that we actually auditioned. Didn't we audition people?
[00:35:12] Speaker C: We did. We audition people for some parts. Yeah, we did. We were just trying. It was such a challenge because we were trying to put together. These full productions are almost like mini plays with. With poetry. They'd have a theme like war, the circus, or the white, you know, white chapel. And I did one, you know, that this is where I ripped off into psychoporia, what you're afraid of. But it. And I'll just kind of flash back to the deja vu, because I remember the deja vu. There was something seriously magical happening that night. It was kind of like a bar. It was Lincoln Parkish and it was a little yuppie kind of bar.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: I remember the turtle races.
[00:35:56] Speaker C: Oh, my God, that's great. Yeah, that's Dave. Yeah. But it's not like this was a. That was a huge experiment to just have us on, period. And I don't think we knew what was going to happen either. We just had these characters and we did full costumes, like you said, and some people have poems and then, like, Mark talks about this, but then all of a sudden, when you've got a bunch of people that are kind of like, on dates or trying to get together and talk, and they're silent. They're silent and they're listening to every word. We're going, holy shit. This is, this is something. This is working. And that's where I personally think that performance was, the performance where we went, okay, we got to do more of this. This is just super exciting. Something's going on here.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: You're in Wicker park. We're at the get me high. What was the fever and the setting for 1986?
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Yeah, well, Wicker High park was this neighborhood. In this Wicker park, Bucktown. It was a neighborhood that was real cheap rent. Real cheap rent. When I was there at the get me high, they were selling those Chicago cottages for $17,000. They're half a million dollars now. I had to put a map on the flyers to tell people where it was. And you had to walk over dead bodies to get there. But it was a place where there was all these, these artists. And now that I think of it, you know, my style is still. I'm still kind of angry, still raw. Our styles are really, you know, not, not flowers and birds, knives and guns. And there was a certain part of the audience that, you know, was kind of thriving on that, and it was, it was, it was a. It was a time of purging. Do you think that's, that's.
I mean, we're not, we're not criminals. We were good people, but there was something in our stuff.
[00:37:58] Speaker C: I think that that's why the whole format of performance poetry, and especially the slam, thrived. I think it had a lot to allowed people to do that purging. That doesn't mean it was always good, but it was an outlet. It was an outlet for people to just pull that angst out and play it.
[00:38:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Now that you.
[00:38:21] Speaker A: And that's, that's still, that's Nelson Algren kind of territory, too. It's a hangover from Algren that you're bouncing into, right?
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Very definitely.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: So I want to do, we're at the Green Mill now. The famous story of Mark's. One of the famous stories is, did you audition poets? Were you in on that, auditioning poets to be able to perform?
[00:38:42] Speaker C: We did, and I can only remember a couple, but we really needed to expand because.
[00:38:47] Speaker B: Yeah, because the show was going to not just be the ensemble, the emblems. Sambo would be a feature part of it, but we also wanted to have special, special guests in that. And we're coming up to have. The first show was in June, so we had a month or so to see who that would be. And we. I think we put out a must have been a flyer.
[00:39:10] Speaker C: Flyer back then.
[00:39:12] Speaker B: Some maybe in the reader we put out to get people to come in. I remember John Dixon was one of the people we interviewed. Marvin Tate was a person that we interviewed, probably a few others. And there was a few poets that had the juice like Gene had, and others like Mary Jo March night. Do you remember her? She was one of the first guests.
Bob Rudnick, the old white panther guy. But we interviewed them because we had. Now, as Gene would say, we now understood that it wasn't just the poets that had to have the juice. You had to create a show. The show is an art form.
[00:39:57] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: And we did that. Think we planned it out in like five minute intervals.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: You're going back.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: It's still a matriculation from the left bank, feeling a particular way, creating as you're going. The evolution's right in front of you. And get me high performance poetry with Gene being brought out here. And you go to the deja vu for that magic night. You were speaking of costumes and blocking, and still seemingly everybody angry in this everyday kind of atmosphere. But you're putting all this together for the green Mill. I have to imagine you're scripting and writing pretty heavily. Weekly or bi weekly, whatever you put on shows. Oh, yeah, these are shows. These aren't made up on the spot.
[00:40:40] Speaker C: Yeah, well, it was a lot of work.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: You tell me if I've got it wrong. But our, the ensemble, because, like Gene said, we came up with a new skit. I call him Mike Barrett. Hated me calling them skits, but it would be a new skit every week. So every week we were writing a new show, rehearsing the one that was going to go up Sunday, rehearsing the one, and then performing it every week for weeks on weeks.
[00:41:08] Speaker C: Yeah, it was nuts. It was nuts. We were doing it, though. It was nuts. It was just too much. It was too much to do. And especially because we remember, we're poets, we've got poetry. And writing poetry on demand is also really wacky. I mean, it's a very strange thing to do. And it's not like some people had poems that fit, that would work, but often we were writing original work.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:36] Speaker C: And that is just a. That's a forceful. It's a stressful thing.
So that, that happened. And we knew, though, we were loving it and thriving it, and we were.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Getting audiences for it, were the audiences, they were coming from the get me high some some people from there, deja vu. And then showing up at the green.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Mill at the time the get me. So by the time we're going to do the green mill, the get me high had gone from 20 people in a night to sometimes 80 p. I don't know how we got 80 people in that joint. So we had an audience base. When we started at the Green mill, I would go, I would sit at the front door every night wondering that nobody's going to show up for a year. I would sit there, nobody's going to cope. But they came and steadily got more, and they came because the rawness and the courage of the ensemble work was just unbelievable. I mean, some of the times we fell on her face, but boy, it was vulnerable. And people like to see the artist vulnerable.
[00:42:45] Speaker C: I think so, too. I don't think we've thought of it in that way, though. I think that you're right, but I think we just had a place. We had a place where we could do it. We could actually try things. We could. There was no format before this. So here we are, trying all these new things, and everybody had a strength, you know, and brought it.
My darling, when you reach while the night is stripping from our backyard elms and grab emptiness by the hair, you'll pull it towards you for comfort and feel nothing.
Remember Mommy was there before the moon hid from the outlaws. And all the while the jackals scratched at our windows. And I tried, yes I did, to wait at the station of your sleep for lonely strangers to stumble from your lips and feel home.
But a man came with a gun barrel black as Reed Lake, he placed its cold mouth in my ear.
We listened to the ghost whimpering and lost in its long canyons, until I shifted, oh darling, I left not out of fear of my own life, a brown paper bag of litter left out by the door, but from sadness dressed in dark flannel and armed by your crib, the water of moons in his eyes.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: Gene Howard, this has been wonderful. This is. We're only scratching the surface. This has been through the mill podcast.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: We gotta get her back.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: We're gonna get her back.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: We have to put her through the mill again.
That's too much. There's so much. So much. Thanks, honey.
[00:44:45] Speaker C: I am so glad you did.
[00:44:48] Speaker D: You've been listening to through the mill, our podcast about the poetry slam. My name is Mark Eliveld. I'm the editor of the spoken word revolution books. Emily Kelvo is here with us.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: She named the podcast. It's an anthology. She's been working on since the early nineties.
[00:45:01] Speaker D: And we're here with Mark Kelly Smith, the founder of Poetry Slam. We're going to be bringing some podcasts and shows to you to hear the origin stories from a bunch of different poets and a bunch of different organizers. Our director Hughes over there in the corner. I hope you had a good time, and we'll talk to you soon.
