Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Lizzie's dilemma.
Mint tea leaves pattern her cotton blouse. Dusk sips its soda from a pink striped straw while she watches his words drop one by one like silly lemon drops into her lap.
He never seems to notice how the honeysuckle are bending down to take the last warm rays into their mouths. No, he is talking and their soft lips are silver before he pauses to roll a cigarette.
June beetles wander off in their pinstripe suits like her many cropped off sentences, but still she finishes them slowly within herself and she tries to speak before the moon drops down its china sharp edge like a pendulum above his head. She tries to exclaim before the pomegranate split of his head resounds, the blade touching off a thousand glistening seeds through darkness.
But a night wren scuffles in the sky.
She picks up the tool. When it is done, she wipes it clean.
She walks away, wrapping it in her apron.
I saw someone snatch a purse today. It looked like a school swing or a seesaw the girl swung him round and round the Elms twirled the strap snapped its leather tune and run and run I did at him.
Next to this bed where I keep these poems, there is a gun.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Welcome to episode three of through the mill, starring Mark Kelly Smith, the founder of the poetry slam slam. Poetry curator of poetry Slam International, Chicago icon Mark Smith. And this episode we're focusing on one of the greats, one of the founders with Mark Jean Howard by way of Utah.
When we started the conversation, you were in LA, but I have to imagine there was a lot. You're born in Utah and your mother is a Mormon?
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh yeah. My mom was a Sunday school teacher and my dad picked up my mom on an indian motorcycle. She was waiting for a bus to go to church and he said, hey, sweetheart.
So that was it. She was very low, late, gave the number, he called a month later. So that's how I had the two things going on in my life. But I did write poetry a lot.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Are you a Mormon?
[00:02:49] Speaker A: I was born and raised Mormon. Yeah, I'm. No.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: What does that mean exactly?
[00:02:52] Speaker A: That means you're baptized. Just like Catholic. Like anything else, you're baptized into the church. And in a mormon church, unless you get excommunicated, that means you do something really bad. And I say you are not a member in their books. I probably still am.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: So what would inspire and what subjects when you were young of the Mormon?
[00:03:11] Speaker A: The normal sadness, all that. Normal poetic things.
Isolation, insecurity.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: You know, what's your ancestry in terms of the poets who were you reading, who was moving you?
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Well, again, I loved, and still do Galway Canal.
I mean, here's the deal with Galway, and I got to meet him personally, thank God. But the thing with his work and the poets of that time is that it was very organic, it was very visceral. I mean, I don't know if you remember any of his poems about how he crawls into this carcass of a bear to stay alive.
It was very sensual. That's the other part. So Galway definitely had a big impact. Philip Levine did. And then, of course, when I was young and really young, Sylvia Plath, when you want to kill yourself when you're a teenager or suicidal, and Denise Levitoff, all the women poets, definitely had an impact as a young person. But Galway interesting enough, he was reading at one of those boring readings that I was talking about. It was at. I hate to say it, but it's a gallery, I won't say. And we were having a party upstairs afterwards, the gallery owner. And so I just remember this because people got pissed off, as usual.
So I go to Galway after the reading. I go, he's supposed to hang out with the people that paid for him to come here and do the reading, right? And go to dinner with him. And I go, you want to go to a party upstairs? And he goes, yeah, upstairs.
So that's how I got to meet him. But so, yeah, the ancestry is very much reading the established poets. And really, I didn't know anything about performance poetry. I don't think there were.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Interest is right. There was no performance. Yeah.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Not that I know when you bring.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: It up, it's early years, we were all writers, we were all deeply read the classics and that it wasn't like we came from a performance world. We learned it on the spot.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: But I do agree with you that we were competing against television, and I made that reference often. I said, you have to be as competitive as a commercial.
[00:05:35] Speaker C: Beautiful.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: And that was it. I mean, because think about it, most commercials are made for short attention span. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, hit on those soft spots that we have in there.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: When did you go to LA or what?
[00:05:49] Speaker A: As soon as I could.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: So you're breaking out. You're breaking out.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: And you know what got me into the poetry? After rewriting poetry when I was young, you know, what do you do with that? Right? You just. Nothing. So I go to LA and I'm at a Hollywood party, and I meet this really attractive woman, and we start talking. I go, what do you do? She says, I'm a poet, you're a poet. And it turns out she was a hooker, but she's a poet.
But nevertheless, that's. I'm telling you, that so inspired me that she just flat out introduced herself as a poet. And I went, shit, I've been writing poetry all my life. Why am I not a poet? So I owned up to it. I actually started pushing work out. And that's how I. That's Lester Harper's finally came.
[00:06:39] Speaker B: What was the Harper's piece that was published?
[00:06:40] Speaker A: It was the one about bedside. It was the one that I did to you, my darling, when you're, you know, you're looking. When the moon is dripping from our backyard elms. It's about a woman who abandons her child in the crib. And it alludes to that. There's a murderer there. There's something evil force that's there that forces her to leave her child. So it's a pretty heavy piece now.
[00:07:05] Speaker C: That I think about it. That's, I saw, I met you at the Randolph street gallery and that's the poem you would. I think you did. There you go.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: There you go. And I think they published it because it was a skinny poem and they had some space on the page.
I was not a Wilson established, but nevertheless.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: And then were you doing the normal poet path that, were you submitting poems everywhere, writing every day?
[00:07:29] Speaker A: I was stalking the editors. I was doing the normal. I finally got to one of them. It was not Galway, it was Hayden Carroth who was the publisher then. And I just. Somehow I'd get a word or two from a rejection slip and three words, then five words, and then I know it's just because they had a skinny piece that they needed my thin poem. But that's how it got.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Mark told us about his rejection notice. So you've got rejection notices too.
[00:07:55] Speaker C: Same thing.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Did you do bonfires or what?
[00:07:58] Speaker C: Somebody, I pinned them up on the wall with like, my wall of shame, all these rejections.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: I think we all do. I have a box of them. I think I still have them. We should just do a bonfire. We should do something really symbolic and, you know, flamboyant with, you know, there's.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: So much we could talk about the years that they get me. I mean, at the green mill. We should. We should have you back another time. But for now, yes.
Part of what we're trying to do is we want to see how the slam spurred took you to different spots beyond out of the slam. Because a lot of people get stuck in the slam, especially the ones that are in the competitive part of it, they get stuck in the three minute poem. But people like Gene took it and made something, many things new out of it. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about where it worked.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: I love to do that because I am not, even though I started with you in the slam, I am not your typical slam poet. In fact, I was not really that attracted to that whole competing thing.
[00:09:06] Speaker C: I think we only started doing it because we ran out of. We had more time left in the show than the ensemble could feel. And we just did it goofy. It was just completely goofy.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: It was, it was like, hey Gene.
[00:09:19] Speaker C: Get up there, compete. Let's do it.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: And we would be. Remember we had boxing shorts on and Anna Brown and I would like.
[00:09:25] Speaker C: And it was, it was, it was a joke.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: It was a joke. It's like the gong show for poetry.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: And people don't even know, young people don't know what that is. But, but it was a joke. And then it was gone.
[00:09:35] Speaker C: You're not the tip, but you're not the typical slam.
[00:09:38] Speaker A: But I want to say one thing that I loved about what you did with that. I loved that the judges, the only qualification to be a judge is that you were not a poet and knew nothing about poetry. I just thought, that's brilliant, mark, that's brilliant.
[00:09:54] Speaker C: The academics hated that. They made hate on that one.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: But that was it. That was the point. The point was, you know, we want you, who knows nothing, who's never heard a poem like wha to a poem. We want to seduce you into this poem and live this poem. So to me that was the essence of what that was. And that gave me, and also working with people that you could collaborate and act with and build with, that gave me the foundation for do the things I did. Because then I started creating, collaborating with dancers and choreographers and artists and other actors and I started creating videos.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: You ran the first poetry video festivals.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Not, it was Michael war Gill complex and Kurt Heinz. And they were doing. They only had a couple of video poems at that time. And I went, oh yeah, because remember Tom Scarf? The first thing I did was a video. And I went, oh yeah, that's a horrible whole other world. And now we'll talk about that another time because that's a whole other. But that just, what that did is it opened up all the possibilities that you can collaborate in many different ways and still get that audience immersed. Still. It's not this wall. It's not up on a pedestal. It is right there and in this case, it was very physical until it went to digital. So here's another thing that we need to talk about another time, that whole thing of physical to, like, you're talking about online, how things are so different now, the physical versus the digital.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: I'm not sure. What do you mean?
[00:11:39] Speaker C: I was totally live. Live.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: It was physical. Our bodies. I'm touching you, you can feel my warmth, you can feel my movement. And when I started doing it on digital, which is video, then how do you make that happen? In a way? And how do you do that in a way that you're not over illustrating or stealing from the power of imagination from your words. So that's a whole other animal. But it taught me that there are kindred spirits out there and that there is wealth in collaboration, because someone's bringing some. A whole life, a whole other life and going have some of this, right. So it's like. It's like feeding you.
[00:12:25] Speaker C: So what are some of the other things you did? You did. You went into video? The video stuff, but, yeah.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Well, you remember, you took after.
[00:12:32] Speaker C: Yeah, after I sobered up and couldn't carouse with the Chicago poetry ensemble. You took it over?
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Well, we did a lot of productions. We did psychopoetica. What are you afraid of? That was in an old mortuary we took over. Do you remember that?
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: And my feeling was there was no place that could be untouched by poetry. We did it in pet stores. We did whole performances in, like, he would take us to any restaurant. He'd take us to restaurants. Fitzgerald's, where people were trying to have a nice, normal dinner with their family, and we're like boxing and spitting words out. So to me, there was no place that was untouched that a poem could not enter and captivate. So the poetry went to the biker poet, the biker bars. That's a whole other scene, too.
[00:13:29] Speaker C: Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. Weren't you in the Chicago. Did you have something in the Chicago outlaws headquarters?
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Tell us about that again. I have been so blessed by poetry because it was you that got this started, because there was a biker guy, Santos, who would spray paint his motorcycle orange.
[00:13:53] Speaker C: Everything, not only outside, all the inside parts.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Everything, everything. And he would go, I don't know how Fitzgerald. I think it was Fitzgerald.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Fitzgerald.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: And he saw the slam and I guess he had written up home because. And he was kind of like a show busy kind of guy. Right. You know?
So I think he talked to you. I know he talked with me and I think he talked to you too. And just said, hmm. He said, oh, because I did. I had bike poems. I had a motorcycle poem about my dad's motorcycle. I had a poem about riding on a Harley and about the highway. So I had some poems, and he heard those, and he thought, wow, I could write a poem, or I got a poem and I could be doing this in my bars. And so he invited me to kind of get together with him with these other biker poets and. And do some bars. The first one I went to was not the outlaws. It was a biker club on the west side. I don't even know where it was, but I know that my husband and I drove in a car. Our first mistake.
Secondly, I think Rob Van Tile was in there, too, because he had a poem about a motorcycle. Second one, it was a full out big biker club. So it was a lot of noise, a lot of music, a lot going on. It was a Friday night, second mistake. Right. And we were up there, and I was really, really nervous. I was very nervous. And I just know that once we got up on the stage, same thing.
Started reading this poem about my mom and dad meeting on this motorcycle, and Santos did his poem. And then I ended up with a poem about a man that was beating up his wife and started out again all sexy, you know, give it to me, baby, baby, baby. And then it ends up with, if you ever touch me again, I will fuck you up good.
And that silenced the room. All the bagger cheeks are, yeah.
But that started that whole thing again, a whole other world. And then we got invited to the Outlaws Biker club, where it really is the barbed wire on the top, metal doors, and they torture people on the second floor. So it was the real deal. And because of that, because of that kind of like that pure touch to the heart, right. With those words, we were invited and we did poems that were very well received, and they were, like, embraced. So did video poems. We were invited to the audience.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: The offshoot of that is the Guggenheim. So the field museum has the Guggenheim exhibit of Harley Davidson motorcycle. Motorcycle.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:53] Speaker C: The museum is filled with all these motorcycles.
They asked me, and probably you came to me. They asked you first, asked me and came to Jean to do a show. Show there for it. The first thing we wanted to do, we wanted to drive a motorcycle into the field. Related. No, you can't do that. But what we did do is we had, I think Ted Aliota from was there. Yep. Maybe Santos was Santos. We all came in with blowhorns, with air horns.
Rob was there. Rob is dressed up as a bike.
And we did that show. That's an outgrowth from the work from.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: The Outlaws club to the Guggenheim.
[00:17:40] Speaker C: There you go.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Everything's possible, but the mill. Just to go back to that. The mill and that the possibilities of poetry being more than what we had perceived it to be. And it's a very. It's a very intimate thing, a poem. A very intimate thing. And my feeling about the poem is that once it's out, it's out, and it's not my poem anymore. Yeah.
[00:18:06] Speaker C: It.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: It's out there to cast it out and see what the heck can happen with it. And. And that means everything. So. So, anyway, that it had a profound impact, and meeting him had a profound impact. I hate to tell him that. So now just. I'll go really fast, because a lot of things have happened in life, and I went to caregiver for my parents. They passed away eight days apart.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: So. How long were you in Chicago?
[00:18:34] Speaker A: I was in Chicago for 20 years.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: 20 years.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, 20 years. And then I went back to Salt Lake and a caregiving for a lot of people.
My aunt and both my younger sisters are widowed and became very involved in caregiving, which gave me a lot of poetry and still continued to publish because that I could do without physically. I physically was spent. I was. Yeah, yeah. I was in this role, and I was running also a company and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, but now. But now here I am, and I'm at that age where people are dying around me. You talk about right now, right now, like, Tommy. Tommy. I wanted to have him come to this performance. He's not here. You know, his work is here, his spirit, but. And I also have nephews now that have become artists and people that are picking up on the seeds and are growing from seeds that were planted a long time ago and they were before the web. So it's. Again, it's things that were not recorded. People don't have. Young people don't have access to. To this information.
I'm also learning from my nephew about, with the Internet, there is a, again, another universe of how to touch people, and it's very different, but it's also very same. So there's a big learning, a big frontier. It's very much energized me. I've wanted to document, I've wanted to recreate. I'm creating a poem, another video poem coming up. It's about my nephew who got tattooed in Samoa. My sister married a samoan, so now I became a whole part of this samoan chief in his family.
So I'm into that. I'm getting more work. And I guess my point is that it's very important at this time that we record that we get some of the work. And then I also feel like young people, just like when you get your ancestry done, you want to know where it's coming from, you want to know the seeds, you want to know what's creating your DNA, what's wiring you to do some of the things and what's influencing you. And I think there's a lot to teach. I think there's a lot to teach and there's a lot to learn. There's a lot to learn for us.
[00:20:55] Speaker C: That's the whole point of doing this now, even though I'm not the right guy for.
I started the show, as you, you probably remember, is a reaction to people watching tv. I want it live. I've always been this live guy. But just as you elegantly said, people, younger people, mostly want to know.
That's a good way of saying that where their DNA came from. And it's been really great. And I like the audience out there to know that Jean has just scratched the surface on all the stuff that she's done, you know, the 20 years in Chicago and all the time afterwards, it's just scratching the surface of everything she's contributed to the world. So thanks so much for being here with us.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you've been listening to two of the originals, that's for sure. Gene Howard, thanks for being here. And we're continuing with our story with Mark Kelly Smith and the origins of the poetry slam. Thanks. You've been listening to through the mill, our podcast about the poetry slam. My name is Mark Elleveld. I'm the editor of the spoken word revolution books. Emily Kelvo is here with us. She named the podcast. It's an anthology she's been working on since the early nineties. 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.
