Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to through the mill. My name is Mark Elleveld. This is a podcast about the origins of poetry slam, and I am here with our forever guest host subject, Mark Kelly Smith.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Stop there.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: The Chicago icon, the curator.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Yeah, you say that stuff too many times. It makes me self conscious.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's all true, so we're gonna keep saying it. So you're just back from, you know, we started this podcast in part because you're overseas so much and we're trying to figure out what the scene is over there. What are some of the hits and artistically how it's different or the same? They come here to the United States and experience. Italy comes, France comes, Finland comes, all over the world. Singapore comes. Your friend Chris, right?
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Chris Mooney Singh. Hi, Chris.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Hi, Chris. But when we did that and we started that, you yelled at yourself for not having the names ready present. But you're back from tours, France, like a week, so there is no excuse.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: God, but I. You just mess up everybody's name.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: And I was watching you on Facebook and on social media a little bit. You ran a masterclass in Tours, France.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: It was great.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: So tell me who your dear, dear friends, whom you love, the organizers, what their path in slam and making the slam museum in France and everything and anything that you did in France recently and like within the last two weeks. How'd that go?
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yeah, Yopo and Zurich. Hi, Yopo and Zurich.
They're like family. They started the League de Slam France association in France, which now covers 60 cities. They are the main organizers. They help performance poets get workshops. It's in the schools. They do a annual tournament, trophies of slam Duco, which is held at the Petit theater. I can't even remember the name, but.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: That'S just that being slams in schools, that's slamming schools.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: The kids are just wonderful. So that was the first part of my trip was to be at the guest of honor with Grand Cormalade, who's the greatest slammer in France. Everybody in France knows him and he's a wonderful man. And he's got his own. He's come out of the competition. He started in the slam and now he makes movies and he's on the stage doing concerts all year long. But then when we got back to tour, that was in Paris, we got back to tour and they had set up the so what academy.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: The so what now and why the so what?
[00:02:44] Speaker B: Well, everybody in the slam world knows that when I introduce myself anywhere, everybody's supposed to say so what? And they do. And I think we talked about this before that. That was a kind of a gimmick to remind myself and remind the audience that I'm just, I'm just another guy. Don't look at me like I'm a celebrity. Don't.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: So you're on stage at the green mill and you say, hey, everybody, my name's Mark Smith.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: So what?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: And the crowd all yells back at you. So what?
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Right?
[00:03:10] Speaker A: And now in 2024, in tours, France, there's a school, an academy.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: What academy? Master classes was Mark. We had six people that came and participated. Pam, Pauline, Alex, Cigna.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: These are your students.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: Cigna. And.
Oh, I forgot the other two, but it'll come to me. I'm sorry, you guys, but they know. They already know that I mess up all the names all the time. But what I taught was the fundamentals, which I've done for you and you're.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: You know, at Loyola, where Lewis University in 1991.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Right.
There's certain fundamentals that after Ron Gillette and I started performing, we sat down and analyzed what we were doing. So we have analyzed and found certain fundamentals of performance poetry. And there's, they run from simple to more complex. So the first part of the workshop was teaching these slammers, ten year veterans going over these fundamentals, which they've been doing, but they haven't ever named that. So it's, you know, they're playing their music, but they've never named the notes or the different, you know, rhythms or stuff. So naming stuff helps you better because you're more clear on what you're doing. So. But then the exciting part was the ensemble technique, which is, I have a list of like 20 different techniques that you use in ensemble work to combine the words. You take one poem and you put it in 2346 voices.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And you're talking about when you were at Lake forest college for me recently.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yes. Right.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: And you had my students doing that. And they loved it.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: They loved it.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And they performed at the Green mill, too. And they did. Fantastic.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Oh, that's right. They came.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: They did.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: And a lot of them were underage. And you got me in trouble with Dave Gemolo. We snuck them in there.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: So now we're not this far in the history, but for you and I, in kind of talking about the United States, but from the green mill, there became a national scene in the US and that was directed and we had a national poetry slam and we're going to talk about that. And we had nationals every year, which was very intense. 120 different cities in the US would come together it was.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Well, not all at once, but there was 120 operating and I think the biggest amount was 80. Maybe there was more in the later years when I wasn't involved, but the last one I was, I think it was 60 or 80 and was too many. I never wanted it to have so many teams.
I wanted the national art.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: They used to call it the Slam family.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: The slam family. I wanted the slam family to do regionals. Yeah, because regional shows would have been just as powerful as a national show. And then you could have the regional shows feed maybe eight teams to a national event and that way the poets that participated would have more opportunity on stage. But when it got up to like 60 people, 60 different cities, poets would come, you know, like travel miles and maybe they'd do one, one poem and they'd be eliminated in it. So it didn't make much sense to me.
[00:06:33] Speaker A: But.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Sorry, I got off on it.
[00:06:35] Speaker A: No, it's perfect because it's exactly. I mean, we're going to cover all this, but there was an implosion. We used to refer to it as NP's, which was the national poetry slam. And for whatever reason, we'll get into that later. But you see a purity in Europe as this thing is growing. And so when you're talking about your friends in France and tours and how they're doing it differently and doing it right, and we're bragging in a great way about that, they have 60 cities that they work with. There must be some difference or some. The difference is something's calling you that and they need you over there. I'm wondering what that difference you see is.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Or I think the difference we attribute to Yopel and Zurich, who I've been working with them for years and years now. And they know, they have such an understanding of the roots of what it is. In fact, when I'm over there speaking, Yopo's translating for me.
She knows all this stuff. She don't even have to get it right because she knows she'll come across and tell the story. They know it so well. But they've also had kind of an arc in the slam or a kind of a trend that happens is that it starts out total communities are just people anywhere. And then people start to get succeed on the competitive stage. And these people who win on the competitive stage get some big thing like maybe they're on television or something, or maybe there's a newspaper article, or maybe they get other gigs. Then everybody stops wanting to be themselves and starts copying the styles that win. And it turns into this serious competition. And one of the first things that gets taken away is the collective work. Because as we've talked about, the whole thing started with the Chicago poetry ensemble, ensemble work. And in our national slams in the US, in the beginning, it always had to have group pieces, and they were fantastic.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah, we've listened to Jean Howard, who, she tried out the La scene first and couldn't find it and couldn't find the connections. And so in the nineties, when she comes to Chicago, that's the first thing she was talking about, is the community and putting a group of varied and different voices and styles together. So that must be going on in tours then.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: So it's coming back. It went away, and now it's coming back again. Covid had a big crippling effect on it because they were able to send an ensemble to Chicago to work with the Chicago speaking ensemble for seven years in a row. Covid kind of knocked that out, and it got back to just individual poets. But now it's coming back, and they teach this in the schools. And when I did this workshop with these six people at the so what academy? So what academy? It was not only to teach, give them instructions and make them better performers. They all are organizers, and they're all gonna go back to their cities and they're gonna bring back this, hopefully this collective work. It's so uplifting to you. Not only make a work of art, you get to know each other in a deeper way. They'll be friends. These six people that didn't know each other, they'll be friends forever. And there was one from Switzerland also. There's already. They want another one. And there'll be people from Portugal.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: And so what are they doing different? That's succeeding. Yopo and Zerik.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: They understand that it's slam is for this community, to breed a community, to enhance a community. And they understand the value of mixing the medias. Their first national event, which was in jeurs d'tour, they had several different sideshows outside the tournament that were showing poetry with music, showing poetry with movement, and mixing the disciplines.
They understand the root of what we talked about, the Chicago poetry ensemble, and all the risk taking that we took at the beginning.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: So let me bring you back in the nineties here in Chicago, you had.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: The Osaka competition, the Osaka competition, which you remind me now that how things spread. I know that Michael Brown, who was from Chicago, he was married to Patricia Smith for a while. And he actually, him and Patricia started the second national slam. The first one was in Chicago, we had a citywide slam competition where any poetry group that wasn't even, you know, associated with the slam, the poetry of society, of the little old ladies from Winnetka or something, they could hold their event. Billy Lombardo held one at a tavern next to the first district police station. The judges were all these policemen.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: So each poet, every poetry group in Chicago was invited to make a champion through a competition. And we had something like 40 different people. Then we had a semi final. And then we had a final competition at Navy Pier for the first ever neutral turf festival. And the prize was to go to Osaka, Japan. And this is courtesy of Lois Weisberg, who was just the cultural commissioner of culture in Chicago, who was just wonderful to us. She believed in what I was doing and supported it. And the slam world owes her so much because she was a spark for this broader thing, the national thing. So Patricia Smith wins. Beat Michael Brown. He was in the finals, too. Went to Osaka, Japan. And so they were exposed. And this, I think this is 19, 80, 89.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Okay. I was gonna go 96, but you would.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: No, no. 1989. So.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: And you mean Michael Brown or Michael.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Michael Brown. Michael Brown.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: So it was. The husband and wife were in the.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Finals against each other, I think, before they were married. But. So she went. She. She went to Osaka, Japan. And it was a big deal. It was part of another festival sponsored by sister cities in Chicago. So it wasn't just that, but we were just one segment of this thing. I think I got it correct. They had, like, this is before this video stuff was big, but they had a giant video screen behind her in this. It was pretty spectacular. And then the next year, since the Lodz went to the Czech Republic.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: And this is through. So now is.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: This is through the sister cities.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Sister cities. Okay. And so Lois Weisberg, the commissioner of arts for Chicago, who was supported by Mayor Daley. Yes.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Maggie Daley. It was a great time in the city when Maggie Daley was around for the arts. It was terrific.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: So then Sinslochko is the following year for sister cities.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: And Ronald Nino went to Mexico City. And there may have been another one that I don't remember. Those places got exposed. What is. What you. This is a slam poet. What's a slam poet?
But then around that same early nineties, Michael Brown made contact with somebody in Germany and in Berlin, the green mill show had been covered by a tv documentary from Germany, maybe German France station. It was a travel documentary. And they covered the green mill as someplace to go. And they covered the slavery.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: I remember this now?
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And the first manifestation of slam in Germany, which could be the first one of the first overseas. These guys read the newspaper articles and saw this tv coverage and they tried to make some kind of, I don't know, like wrestlers, all star wrestler thing out of it. And it worked for a little bit.
Kaput. Then Michael Brown made contact with another person in Berlin and they started it going. And that guy kind of got it going. But it was Raoul Patzak and Kolblinski. They're the ones that spread it all over Germany and into Austria and exposed it to Switzerland.
Those were the first big things. Also, though, Erky Lapelainen from. I think he's from Norway or it might have been from Finland.
He got exposed through Michael Brown, too. And he actually came to the green mill to do the show. And this is early nineties, I think. And he did a poem, Silencio. And he got up on the stage as if he's holding a manuscript and just stood there and silently turned the pages and he got like the page five and he started to boom off the stage. He was such a character.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Very Andy Kaufman, right?
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think probably early nineties. Sweden had got a team and they came to Chicago. Somehow I forget why they came. They got up and did a collective work and it was so, it was like so serious. And I said, well, what was that about? It was about going to the toilet. It was hilarious. It was hilarious. They were so severe, but they were making. It was all fun, but they didn't let it out.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: So the seeds have been planted internationally without it being pronounced. It sounds like a little bit, right?
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: And then your return from. So you're just back from France. I feel like we say that at the beginning of every podcast, but you're headed back there. What's the next step? So you did the. So what academy. You've been in the schools recently again, you were in Paris with the big, big organizer too. What are you doing when you go back there?
[00:17:02] Speaker B: When I go back in June and it'll be for the league to slam fans. Final tournament.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: I was there last year and that's where they gave me the key to the city of Tortoise. Unbelievable. Because I'm a knight. I think I said that, but I'm a knight.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: You are a knight in France.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: A chevalier.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: Yeah. What sort of awards have you gotten in Chicago?
[00:17:26] Speaker B: None.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: It wouldn't feel right if you did either something. If they had one, you would not show up for the day.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: I was old, Mark. Sunday night, two guys came in and said, hi, who are you? You know? Oh, who are you? I'm Mark. And then I get on stage and I get up there, oh, this motherfucker don't even know who I am. I'm a fucking knight in France. Nobody knows who I am in Chicago, but I don't care.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: So when we're talking about your model that they're using in France and beyond France overseas, what is something you've seen or participated in or heard that has blown you away and it's maybe a modification, even on something that you.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Well, you know, what comes to mind when you asked that question was in Mount Fanconi. Mount Fanconi in Italy. I went there, and Reggie Gibson from Chicago was a participant at this event.
[00:18:26] Speaker A: I published Reggie's book with Em Press.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah, right. So it's Mount Fanconi. And it was in this great performance space that was known for multidiscipline stuff. So they had their tournament.
It was an international tournament, I think, too.
Maybe Richard was just a guest.
It might have been an international tournament, because the international tournaments started in Rome, at Roma Poesia, where they put the screens up. Well, at this one, they had a videographer, artistic videographer, would operate it while the poet. While the poet is performing. And I think the words are up there, too. But he made an abstract video thing behind it. He was interpreting. He was interpreting their performance in poem with the videography on the. On the screen and everything. It was fantastic. And at the same event, they mixed the poetry with music.
And they had this from Sicily, this. This band from Sicily. I can't remember what the name was, but they would take, like on the. People can't see this on the podcast.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: But they got these.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: We got some glasses on the table. They would start.
This is. They start their music like this, and then they get a bass going and everything. They're making all kinds of sounds, and then the voices coming in on top of it. It was just a joy to see their openness, to take a chance and experiment with the words and all other disciplines. So that's what come to mind.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: That sounds like the opening of your Christmas show, actually.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: My Christmas show.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: 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. 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.
