Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Anyway, this is called poem for Lennari.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: It doesn't seem big enough now for.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Softball games, but this was the play lot. This was right field, this left. These houses were not here then. There were fences and bleachers and a league of boys across the street there. And this is when you took my hand, was the bakery. That window three floors up, my mother's window. And these black lines of iron, the skeleton of folding stairs bolted to the bakery. For example, the fire escape we had hoped to never use.
I told you that day about the pilgrim virgin we prayed before to save us from the fires of hell, which we hope for still.
And the time I dropped my allowance. A single skinny coin that rolled into a crack on the stairs and was gone. The sadness of a gone thing. But I didn't tell you everything.
I did not tell you about Robbie, who woke up a black man asleep on the bus by breaking his arm. I did not tell you about the sound a broken arm. Or of crazy Ray, who beat up a Mexican with a baseball bat in front of Bernie's. The way the Mexican's knee bounced on the iron step of the store, almost alive, as though it might be used again. I would not have told you that.
Neither did I tell you of Leonard Clark, the black boy who had come to Bridgeport that spring to get air for his bicycle tires. Not much to ask, it seems. Air.
Instead they took life from his brain, traded him a coma for a bicycle. I would not have told you that.
I told you about the fire, though. Fire is different. How I stood in a room of gray smoke and looked for my shoes. And in the smoke, the smell of bread. I told you about fire.
And there is the door to the stairwell. And inside the door, still brown stairs. 33. And how did I know there were 33? Because I used to count them. I counted them until I could not forget. I counted them until the. The reason for counting was gone. Memory.
And what set the note that was taped to the wall? It said that people live here. That these were stairs to living people. It was not a toilet. This place. It was not a place to piss.
I gave you that word.
I could have said p you were only five.
But I was not thinking. Look, I said, this is the place that I lived. The place I was five. I was a boy here. And there was fire and fear and there was blood and hate. There was glass and ice and lost.
There were fists. And after the playlife there were still these baseball bats.
And now this sign on the wall where I was once a boy. But I swear to God. There was a play lot here across the street. The older boys would come here to my lemonade stand and to lust my hair they must air them.
And a bakery too, right here. There was bread and there were donuts and cannolis and Jesus to smell that every day. It was some kind of way to live. This was a place once, and now this.
And we were going to leave. The key to the car was in my left hand, me wondering what there was left to give you now that everything seemed gone, now that you had reached the remembering time. But when I put the key in the door, you put your hand on the crook of my arm as though to stop me, as though to say a thing to me before we left that place, as though the thing could only be said on the hard scrabble streets of that place. And on those streets you told me you were honored to be taken there.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: In front of an old bakery that.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: Had fire and hatred to remember, that had glass and blood and smoke and fist. This is the trade we made that day. You were five and held open your new memory. And I thought I gave you piss to put there. But before we left that place, you gave me honor. Taught the old man something about honor.
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Welcome back to through the mill, the podcast on poetry slams. The origin of poetry slams my name is Mark Ellevelde. I'm the editor of the spoken word revolution series, and I'm here, as always, with Mark Kelly Smith, the poetry slam founder, the Chicago icon, the curator. And we're back with our special, special guest, Ridgeport poet, Billy Lombardo. Hi, Billy.
[00:04:31] Speaker D: Pretty boy.
He was so cute. All the gals called pretty.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: He's so cute.
[00:04:37] Speaker D: He's so cute.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: And I was, I really was.
I mean, I really was, you know.
[00:04:43] Speaker D: You know, the last, in the last episode, you said something that there's, you know, we have the kinship because you're true, Chicago mentions his parish that, you know, that's one sign I would have thought that you had written before you started up there. But you kind of like, kind of similar to me that I ain't no book. I don't read no books. But did you secretly read books or.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: No, I had. I mean, I always say that I grew up. I grew up in a house with very few books. You know, we had a, we had a couple encyclopedias and I remember my mom reading Bonfire of the vanities, and I just don't. And I remember rich man, poor man, and those are the books that I remember. And yet we had to read like my father would make us read an hour every day.
[00:05:28] Speaker D: Really?
[00:05:29] Speaker B: He'd make us read an hour every day, but it would just be, like, from these three books or whatever that we had around.
[00:05:34] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:05:34] Speaker D: But it seems to me that that's kind of a. A blue collar tradition, because the guys I hung out with in high school, we call ourselves the duds, you know, and most of them went to Carmel, Mount Carmel Catholic High school. I got exposed through them once I started reading. I didn't read till I was in 7th grade because they, they were these blue collar intellectual types.
Kind of goes back to the wobblies and all those, you know, the college of complex and ideas. But maybe it was similar people like us that, that didn't get exposed to it, but something inside our intellect grasped onto it once. Once you started to, you became an avid reader.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Right, right. And part of it was, in 1993, I started teaching at a school, and all the, all the kids there were just like, they were so well read, and I just went on a tear reading, but I still. None of it really sunk in, but I was always thinking about what was it that drew me there?
What was it that allowed me to come out with logic of a rose without any studying, of craft, without really any serious reading. And I feel like it was the same thing that gave me some kind of success at the Green Mill. And that was just, I was. I was really observant, and I was. I mean, I just had profound empathy as a kid.
[00:07:09] Speaker D: And going back to that, at the deja vu, like last episodes, we talked about how Billy got introduced to the slam through the poem for Osaka contest. Why did. For somebody who wasn't into the reading or writing, why did you think, well, did you just want to go to Osaka, Japan? Was that all what it was about?
[00:07:30] Speaker B: I just felt like there were a couple of. A couple of experiences I had growing up where I just, I felt, one was. One was this girl, she came into the neighborhood, Gia Sperasino. She was somebody's cousin. And I just fell instantly in love with her. And I wrote her a poem, and it was called a dream, a ring and a memory, which is a ridiculous title, but there's no doubt that there's some language going. There's some rhythm going on there.
[00:08:01] Speaker D: There's another similarity.
[00:08:03] Speaker C: But you two, even so. And you had already, and it goes back to episode one, asking about the street corner, your pal. So you recognize. So my wife is Southside Irish mother McCauley. That's how you people.
Yeah, you just mentioned Mount Carmel, but the parishes, there's a strong, strong connection between Chicago and the churches.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:08:27] Speaker C: And for all the different ways to unravel that, one of the things that churches did, I mean, Lewis University, we mentioned Dick Prince. For all of his wonderful faults, he was highly intellectual, because there was reading going on. There was a preservation of ideas by the Jesuits, by the Christian Brothers. These were traditions that. And as a kid, even if you weren't into opening up the proper book, it was going to get thrown at your head one way or the other. It's the background of growing up in Chicago. To a certain extent, even when you defy it, you're defying against, pushing back against something. What is your favorite street corner in Chicago?
[00:09:06] Speaker B: So the ones that come out to me at 33rd and Wallace, which is where the Drussel's bakery was, and then across the street from that was the Wallace play lot, and Joe Harris Hardware was on the other corner, and then just a tavern, but 30.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: And is that all pissing distance to comiskey?
[00:09:25] Speaker B: Yeah, pretty much. And then 32nd in Wallace was a corner store that I started on fire kind of accidentally, but that was also a Chicago. Terrence, wait a minute, wait a minute.
[00:09:43] Speaker D: Started on fire. What's that all about?
[00:09:45] Speaker B: It was one of those irons steps at the top of it, and two gates came along. Those accordion gates came along and locked in that little hole there. And I just had a book of those blue tip matches and that you could strike on your zipper, your teeth, or a wall. And I just was putting them down in the hole and looking down there, and just all of a sudden, you know, I learned that there were winter coats and burlap. Who puts burlap sacks and winter coats right underneath a hole in the ceiling?
[00:10:19] Speaker C: Statues of limitations are up, though.
[00:10:20] Speaker B: So I ran. Yeah, I ran west to the Chicago today office for an alibi. And then by the time I came back, every kid in the neighborhood was like, walk. And I started walking around with them, looking for the kid who started this fire so bad.
So that wasn't. That's an important question.
[00:10:37] Speaker C: Let me ask you first, and I'll ask Mark, as a follow up, do you think the poetry slam could have begun in a different city other than Chicago and the Green mill and mark?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. There must be other towns that kind of had it, but. But my experience with Chicago has always been.
There's a generosity to writers in Chicago that you don't.
That I haven't found in other places. I just. I don't. Never thought about it as competitive even though competition was the sort of game. Yeah, the game of it. Exactly. I felt like there's a place for you, no matter what. I still feel like that, you know, when people get competitive about each other. When a little part of you dies, when someone succeeds in your circle. Just never understood that. Cause I was just like, you gotta. If you could make people shut up at the Green Mill, then there's no. There's nothing. There's no competing. Just let someone else do it. And it's not a zero sum game.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Do you think you could have started, Mark? Is Chicago vital?
[00:11:43] Speaker D: He hit upon what I believe is true. And I think other people have said it too. That Chicago is very welcoming to people that's starting something. Starting something out.
When you're starting something just on, you know, a hope and a prayer. They're with you, the newspaper people, totally. You know, that's why they covered the early shows so much. Because here's this ex construction worker trying to start a poetry show. What's that about? I think that that spirit. And I think the. The public also appreciates the daring. They appreciate the daring of what we did. Because we were taking chances.
We were making it up, most of it as we go. And we were in opposition to the established poetry world. Which was saying, that's not poetry. What are you doing?
[00:12:38] Speaker C: But that was in Chicago too, wasn't it? The established poetry.
[00:12:41] Speaker D: Oh, yeah, that was here. But nobody was going to the shows. I mean, they had these readings and a few people attending. Because they were so snobbish. You know what happens in Chicago? Sorry, Chicago. But you start out at the bottom. You get great support. You move up and you're at this middle level. They forget about you. You gotta go to New York like Tony. Tony's this great artist.
[00:13:05] Speaker C: Tony Fitzpatrick.
[00:13:06] Speaker D: Tony Fitzpatrick, great artist. The galleries in Chicago want to pay attention to him. He goes to New York, gets attention years later, comes back now he's in a. You know, he's in the museums and that.
Chicago, I don't know what that is. They don't treat people. I know. What's your experience? Because you've had much success now as a writer.
You did hook up with Stuart. Stuart's been.
[00:13:34] Speaker C: Stuart dieback.
[00:13:34] Speaker D: Yeah, he was. Been taken care of by the powers of me. But maybe that's just me. Because I'm contrary and staying on the outside.
I feel like they're nothing as generous to you once you succeed as when you're starting out. Chicago is very generous to me at the beginning. But what's your experience?
[00:13:56] Speaker B: I feel that, I mean, there's, it's a common cry of writers from a lot of places, though, that you're not appreciated in the place where you're from all that much. And so I don't know how much of that is kind of going on there.
And I feel like the business has changed. So it's a little tougher to get published, it's a little tougher to get agents, and that sort of route to publication is still pretty tricky. But I still think there are places that, like the green mill that still welcome you back and that are still stages for you to start off, no matter what you're doing. And that's one of the other things that I realized early on, that there was a place where you could make a mistake and be forgiven. And I was gonna read, if I read a bad poem there because I thought it was gonna do something at the green mill. And.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Yeah, but that's, that speaks to your talent, too, Billy. You're like, we'll forgive mistakes. If you have nine good ones and you have one bad one, you're batting pretty well.
[00:14:57] Speaker D: But no, he's right about that, that people are, that's why even in the theater world, people starting out their acting career, they'd come to all those, at least back in the nineties, they'd come to Chicago to start out their career, because it was, people were understanding of you. If you had the guts and you're trying something, they're not going to stick their noses up. At least that's my experience.
[00:15:22] Speaker C: I thought this was a recorded Stuart Dybek reading city on the make by Nelson Algren. And I asked him as we were preparing for it, I said, what do you think about Stud Sterkl calling you the new Nelson Algren? And he smiled and he said, well, it's great that he calls me that, but I'm not responsible for any of that. So I get it, but I don't have to answer to it.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Right?
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Which then also kind of this discussion, you know, Nelson Algren, the great Chicago writer, he left kind of unhappy with Chicago. SAUL Bello, everything was kind of handed, not that it wasn't earned, but he hit the, the peak in Chicago. He kind of left a little bit.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: Unhappy is that Sandra Cisneros says the same thing about it. She feels like there's a little bit of attention, you know, house on Mango street. Yeah. She does not feel, she's felt like Chicago.
She's had a sort of a prickly relationship with Chicago. I think it's coming around a little bit. She just won an award with Chicago Literary hall of Fame. But it's, you know, difficult for a lot of people, you know?
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Yeah. But once you make it, you gotta stay up there, right?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:31] Speaker D: Yeah. You know, some people, it's not that you have to stay up there. Some people, no matter how high up they go, they want more. That's the thirsty ghost thing. I feel very lucky in my career that you start out. You want everybody cheering for you. You want to be the best in everything, and you keep going and keep going. And at some point, I learned that it's not about me. It's about what I'm communicating to the audience and where the audience ends up after they hear something I do or after a show. The ego is mostly gone out of me. Not completely gone, but it's mostly out of it. I look at myself as a servant. I think that even from the beginning, I think you felt that way. I mean, you came across. I mean, you really touch people. Everybody was crying at the end of some of your poems. You know, you were in the same.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Way in a good way, too. Yeah, well, I felt always that was important. It was important. I wanted the same thing to happen in my writing. No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader. And it's a little bit like that at the green mill, too. I want. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to language the occasion in such a way that it would be received by the reader or the audience in the same way when I sat down. How did you write it?
[00:17:56] Speaker C: When you're at Warren Wilson getting your MFA and Charles Baxter was one of your mentors, how did those early lessons and having mark on your shoulder mesh with all the pen and paper writers that you went to school with?
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Yeah, that was.
I was one of the few people who had a book out there, too, so there was a little bit of weird celebrity there, but I just didn't. I went because I still knew that I didn't. I feel like that's when I really learned how to read, like, really read closely. But there weren't many people that had. That had books out, and I still felt like this. I still feel that the thing that allowed me to have some success with that book is the thing that is the more important thing of all. I definitely have learned a lot about craft.
[00:18:49] Speaker C: Which book came out of that experience?
[00:18:50] Speaker B: That was how to hold a woman. You know, a few other books that haven't been published yet, you know, but so my understanding of craft has definitely grown. And how to present dialogue on the page.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: Did Charles Baxter and Mark Smith ever in your head, like, fight?
[00:19:07] Speaker B: No.
[00:19:07] Speaker C: They were an image or a line or an idea.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: They were. I felt what I liked about that, that whole experience. First of all, the first. My first piece of communication from Warren Wilson was a rejection. And then they called me up the next day and said, oh, that was a clerical error you were actually in. But then I was in these workshops with these people that were just fucking brilliant, using words that I didn't even know. And I was like, no, I think the mistake was letting me in.
So that really learned how to really. To talk about literature and to figure out what it was that I was doing. So now I could look at a piece and think, no, this is exactly what this author is doing now. And I could see the craft in it. But it was appreciated. It was still appreciated by everyone there, and it was clearly unschooled. They appreciated. The thing that made it successful at Green Mill is the same thing that made it successful, you know, in my stories. And I think that that had to do with just being really observant as a kid and feeling like, you know, sad. When I saw somebody walk out of a bakery and they were sad or whatever, and I just. I felt like I had some kind of gift there. And that was.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: You write scenes.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:25] Speaker C: You write scenes.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:27] Speaker C: It's very visible, and you can. There's an instant, I'm sure, that the green Mill plays heavy and you can see it. Yeah, they're wonderful. You know, where you're at in your stories. Yeah.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: And that. And I feel that that's appreciated. This is the other thing about the green mill that page, poets and poets of the academy don't have. And most of. Most of the people, I think, I'm not positive about this, who are buying books of poetry are poets also. And at the green Mill, it's different. You get people going there who want.
[00:20:58] Speaker D: To hear, wanted everybody open door, and the biggest pleasure was. And it happened many times when you were, you know, the guest, some guys, you know, there with his girlfriend. I don't, you know, okay, I'm going because he want. You know, he wants to get in with the gal, you know, I never thought I'd like this, but I not only like it, I love it. And then they become regular. It's so many people like that because poetry, as we know, had such a bad reputation in the schools when I went to school, I'm sure when you went to school, my God, the poetry class, I don't want totally different. And it was always from the beginning. My thing was that poetry, like Samberg says, it's poetry belongs to all the people. And who are the people? You and I and everybody else. What everybody says is what we all say. You spoke about this, that when you write, you're talking about everyday stuff. What it is to be a human being and everybody is everybody. And I forgot my line of thought.
[00:22:08] Speaker C: I'm old.
I was thinking, I mean, your contemporaries with Patricia Smith. Name a couple of your other contemporary. Who do you. I grew up with this. And when I say that, that doesn't mean you all grew up next to each other. It means your careers as writers.
[00:22:22] Speaker D: Who would you.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Patricia Smith. Sin solace.
Lisa Basconi. Carrie loved.
[00:22:30] Speaker C: We don't talk about Lisa enough.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Carrie lovested. And David Kadusky.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: What about outside of Chicago.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: For writing short stories and fiction? That I feel like the writers that I've really liked are JD Salinger. I just can't believe stuff that he does in, like, Franny and Zooey and then Chicago writers, too. Stuart Dybek and Joe Mino.
[00:23:01] Speaker C: Joe, yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: Kevin Brockmire is another writer who I feel like I always said, well, I always kind of thought that I wasn't going to be influenced by other writers because I wasn't reading anything growing up. But those are the writers that I was reading. Just Charlie Baxter. Those were the writers that I was reading just as I was beginning to write.
[00:23:23] Speaker C: Who published your second book? A beautiful writer herself, Gina.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: Gina Frangello, that was at Dzank Books, and Elizabeth Taylor from the Chicago Tribune. You had great name.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: I remember when that first book came out, you had great support from the Tribune. Elizabeth Taylor was running the book stuff.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Yeah. I still feel like anytime something good happens to me, it's because of one of these people, like Mark or Elizabeth Taylor or certainly the news.
[00:23:48] Speaker D: The newspapers in Chicago, the news writers, they were so great to all of us. They just wonderful. And I think part of that was because here they are. They're professional writers. Journalists know how to write. They got. And they got a right fight deadline. They don't have the luxury to wait for inspiration.
And they just really appreciated the rawness of what we did, but also the precision that could come out of it and that we were just down to earth people, not like the fine arts people. You know, fine arts people.
I won't start. I won't be contrary. I'll stop right there.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: The other thing that I really appreciated about Mark, too, is as much as that, he sort of teased the academy. You would go there and he would read a piece by E. Cummings. And, I mean, E. Cummings turned out to be one of my favorite poets, or he'll read a piece by Carl Sandberg or Walt Whitman. And, you know, that was important to.
[00:24:51] Speaker D: Me, too, because, well, you know, that at the beginning, the criticism from the establishment was stupid, and I wanted to show them the error in their ways that they didn't try to perform. And I made, like a third of my repertoire was classic poems. And here you are. E. Cummings performed it comes alive, and I'm glad you picked up on that. That would happen. And to their credit, things have turned around.
The old curmudgeons are gone, and the academy now has opened their eyes to see what it is. But that's not, you know, I shouldn't be contrary to it, but we had to work. We didn't care at the time because we had an audience and they didn't. But it was rough to read the newspaper articles where the so called scholar was saying, well, what's. What's his. Harold Bloom's famous thing.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:53] Speaker D: That slam poet killed poetry. Yeah. Oh, what a foolish man he was. Sorry, Harold.
[00:26:00] Speaker C: I've got a joke about Harold Bloom.
[00:26:02] Speaker D: Yeah, let's hear it.
[00:26:03] Speaker C: I went to. I got an advanced degree at the University of Chicago, Mark and Billy, I've got a degree from UFC, you know.
[00:26:09] Speaker D: Oh, man.
[00:26:10] Speaker C: And I had David Bevington for a class, the Shakespeare scholar in all the world. Now, he would love you, Mark. So he falls squarely in the establishment, but he would have. I've never seen that man say a negative word in criticism. He was the most welcoming and most enthusiastic. There was never a bad Shakespeare play for him, never a bad Shakespeare movie. He would point out differences and say, I would have gone this way, but this is fun. I'm glad this is out there. But we were talking. I wrote a paper using Harold Bloom, because Harold Bloom made the suggestion that perhaps Claudius was always Hamlet's real father. And it's like a. It's a throwaway line in a Harold Bloom book that I read. I put that in there. David Bevington's comments were really, Mark, you're going to source material, Harold Bloom. So I asked him about it in class, and he said, I'll tell you a story about Harold Bloom. He goes, he's my contemporary. We're good friends.
[00:27:04] Speaker D: We're going to get in trouble for this.
[00:27:05] Speaker C: They're both dead. I'm.
[00:27:06] Speaker D: Oh, so we're good.
[00:27:09] Speaker C: They said a student from Yale knocks on Harold Bloom's door, and his wife opens the door, and the student says, I'm here to meet with Harold Bloom about a paper. And she goes. And the wife says, well, he's working on a book right now. And the student says, oh, I'll come back. And she says, no, he's done. Come on in.
Which is David Bevington's way of saying he wrote too many books, his whole thoughts, which I'm assuming he didn't think through the whole thought on the poetry slam. Harold Blue, as we wrap all this up, what are you working on now? What's Billy Lombardo, the poet, and what's Chicago? And what are you working on now, Billy? And thanks for coming. You'll come back?
[00:27:52] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. Anytime.
This summer I am determined to finish revising a novel, which is a young adult novel about a kid with visionary capacity and profound empathy, as it turns out.
[00:28:12] Speaker C: Do you have a working title?
[00:28:13] Speaker B: The day of the Palindrome, which refers to October 2, 2000, 110. Oh, 2001.
Just to, just a month or so after the 911 attacks.
[00:28:30] Speaker C: All right, next time around, that'll be your final form for that one. It'll be right.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Perfect.
[00:28:35] Speaker C: Last words, Mark, before you head out to France.
[00:28:38] Speaker D: See you, Billy.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: Thanks. It's always great to see you guys. Thanks for having me.
[00:28:44] Speaker C: 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 Kalvo 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 Hugh's over there in the corner. I hope you had a good time, and we'll talk to you soon.
