Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: A poem for my wife while she sleeps.
I wrote it about a week and a half after I got married because I was trying to figure out how not to fuck this up, and I'd never written a love poem, so here it is.
A poem for my wife while she sleeps.
While you sleep, rain plays our window like makeup music for blind cats.
Buses crawl by, purring and unloved televisions burn snow lonely in other windows for other ghosts.
Night coffee goes cold.
Penny candles blink from somewhere far, like china, like Cuba in your sleep foreign radios shake slow and oily and even cooler by the lake and at the dark end of the avenue where the last cool is smoked under heavy eyelids and the gospel is taught in whispers and sign language.
Even the tap dancer tiptoes home through sand.
Hummingbirds hurl their silence clear through the Milky Way without a single echo.
While you sleep, the yellow calves run fast as leopards, moon chalk dances on the l tracks, a moth lands and blue hair pirates crawl into dumpsters and mumble acts of contrition.
An old greek bakes pastries and curses the nothing that becomes him.
An old woman with bad eyes strings her loom.
Her spoons hang even as soldiers, quiet as ice in your sleep.
The litanies of the sidewalk are written in spray paint and blood circulation trucks toss their bundles of hard noose to empty corners.
Sailors throw up at the train station, pea coats turned up at their ears.
A dogfight ends as the winner licks his cuts.
A white rose opens like a lover's mouth.
While you sleep, moons abandon stray places and hide in bird nests and mailboxes.
An old girl puts on a house coat. A young girl takes off her dress while guitar music calls to the crickets.
Night rolls out its dirty carpet like chinese silk. Night rolls its filed dice down rat holes to the earthy subways.
In your sleep, rain washes the concertina wire deathly clean and the late laps quietly at sandy feet, offering up alewives and smelter slow for the breakwater.
The ghosts of grandmothers hem aprons and leave a rosary in holy water.
In your sleep I hold you close as a prayer and drift in night part of the secret deep and blue.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Welcome to through the mill podcast about the origins of poetry slam. My name is Mark Elleveld. I'm the editor of the spoken word series on spoken word. I'm here with always the Chicago icon, Chicago poet, the legendary Mark Smith, the founder of the poetry slam. Hi Mark.
[00:04:09] Speaker C: Hi. Hi Mark.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: And we have a really special guest, one we've been talking about for a while. And if he listened to the podcast, he'd probably hear his name many times. You want to introduce him?
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Yeah, it's folks out there. It's Tony Fitzpatrick. We've already had a half an hour of him talking before we even started the.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: He never shuts up. Fucking guy. Never shuts up.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Hi, Tony.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Hey, how are you?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Thanks for coming. We appreciate it.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: It's, you know, it's a joy to be here. I mean, I.
I hadn't been to the slam, I think, in 25 years, right?
[00:04:41] Speaker B: So that's. That's how I know and became familiar with your work. Going to the Green mill every Sunday and Mark telling stories about the famous Tony Fitzpatrick. And so once we start.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: I mean, when we.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: When did that start for you? You guys, the two of you?
[00:04:55] Speaker A: You know what? I think I might have been the first feature reader at the slam.
Yeah, you came to my book signing, and everybody goes, that's. That's Mark Smith.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: What year would that be?
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Maybe God, 1986. 85. 86. And I had a chapbook published called the neighborhood. And I did a reading at Guild Bookstore and the late, great Guild bookstore, which was run by Richard Bray, who was, again, one of those guys like Mark, who was, you know, absolutely foundational in the furtherance of spoken word in the city.
And Mark was at the reading, and I didn't really know him yet, but I knew him by reputation. Everybody said, you know, you want to hear a guy read poetry, you got to hear that guy.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: And I knew about something at the get me high lounge, and there was this guy who I went there a couple of times, kind of asking about the poetry.
And there was this bartender. His name was Butchie.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Butchie.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: And he'd go, get me high.
And then he finally let it out to me, figured out I wasn't a cop, but he was disappointed I didn't have any drugs.
I was, again, a little intimidated to go, and Mark invited me to read it to slam.
And before that, I did not know how to enter the world as a poet.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: I knew. I knew what poets that I read and that I liked. I mean, I was at the point where I was familiar with good, serious poetry, with James Wright and John Berrymande. I loved Cummings. I loved those leaps of imagination and leaps of faith. I loved Weldon keys. But there was a poem called when Autumn begins at Martins Ferry, Ohio, that just took my hand and never let me go. It was this gorgeous, tragic, blindingly sad poem about the beginning of football season.
And if you've not ever read it, you know, treat yourself. But it was also written from a working class perspective. I mean, until my drawings and paintings started selling, I mostly had a job as a bartender and a bouncer, and for a while, I was a union cement finisher.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: And Mark was in construction.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah. You have similar backgrounds.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, so we. We began to talk to each other, and I realized, you know, we were from the same part of the world. You know, lived in the city. When I was little, we moved out. We were part of the whole white flight. And as a working class guy and kind of a chip on my shoulders, but I did have a need to write poems and had since I was a child, you know.
[00:07:58] Speaker C: You know, there's something in what he said that is really important to that. Those early days at the get behind the green mill that gets lost. What a love of literature that he. Before he even got up there on the stage. A love and understanding of literature. And those early years, those who were the people that came to the shows, that people that had been loving poetry for years and years and had a deep knowledge of it, and then they saw it come alive on the stage.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: The way he was speaking about it, that's important. It's important also, you know, I loved the songwriters that most people think of as poets. I love Bob Dylan. I loved Leonard Cohen. Was huge to me.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: Your good friend Lou Reed.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: My friend Lou Reed. I never really confused lyrics with poetry, though. They serve a different master. They're both equally important. I didn't have any quibble when they gave Bob the Nobel Prize for literature. I didn't have any issue with that. I do think songwriting at its base. Yeah, I think it is literature, you know?
[00:09:10] Speaker C: Yeah, we want to get into that early history, because the whole idea of this podcast has been.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:17] Speaker C: To get that history down. And in our history days are we.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Know where the bodies are buried.
[00:09:25] Speaker C: I don't know when I started picking you up. Yeah, take it at a green.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Week.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: And then we would conspire on the way there, because there were people who went to the Green Mill purposely to kind of, you know, shit talk it and kind of derail it, you know? There were a few of them and more than a few between the two of us. Yeah, we tag team these motherfuckers, man. I mean, you know, when he made me slam ref.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: So what? So you're coming?
[00:09:58] Speaker A: This. This is.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Now we're up to, like, 88, which.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: Would have been 87 after. At 87, I had my first big show in New York, and I got a review in the New York Times.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Brilliant.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: And I worked for the loop, and all of a sudden, I was famous.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah, no. Is this. Is this so part of the podcast, Joy, is that we bring people here to match up stories.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: Believe me, I'm gonna tell you.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Here it is. Okay, we want the New York story.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: But, um, the one thing happened. The slam kind of caught on, and all of the sudden, it became a place to be, and the foment of celebrating the written word was, like, in the air, and it was big, and a lot of people who just like me didn't realize, didn't know how to enter that world. Yeah, we all found each other when.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: You were talking about it, even at the book signing get me high, the car rides that Mark's picking up, going to Green Mill. You must have been a tremendous support system for each other and all the.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Others that were absolutely. I mean, that's what every artist. Honestly, even after my book came out, I wasn't. I wasn't really sure that I was a legit poet. I wasn't. You know, nobody told me that. I mean, I'd gotten a nice review for the neighborhood in letter X, which. Which helped, you know, I mean, which.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: And Letter X was the Chicago.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: It was a Chicago ran.
As the slam began to pick up a little bit of momentum, Rick Tellnder wrote an article about the slam. When he wrote it, I thought it was gonna be, you know, I thought it was gonna be about Mark, you know? And the thing came out. It was Tony Fitzpatrick in the slam. And I felt guilty as hell. I thought, man, this is Mark's baby. You know, I felt awful. I felt like I had usurped my friend. I didn't quite really know how to navigate it. But the one thing it did do is it brought people into the slam, you know? And, you know, when they got through the door, they realized the big guys wanted Tony's just as enforcer. Tony's just like his igor, you know?
[00:12:03] Speaker B: I mean, no, that's not what he's. I mean, one of the episodes, he even said, you know, I looked up to Tony, and Tony was such a good influence.
I'm running this show. I'm trying to do things I've never done before in my life, figuring it out. I've had all this artistic integrity.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: Well, we talked about it a lot. We spent a lot of time not at the slam talking tomorrow on the phone, or he'd come to the bar where I attended. Bar at. I was newly sober. We'd shoot pool. We'd just discuss strategies to keep the thing interesting, to keep it moving forward. And to his credit, I mean, Mark always had this expansive idea of what the slam could be and where it could go. And the idea that the slam, at a certain point, would propagate a common language of poetry.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: Look at that.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Look at that.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: And you know what? That happened. It happened, and it happened pretty damn fast. I remember when we were filming patriot the second season. We were filming it in Paris.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: This is your tv show? Yeah, yeah, just a couple years ago.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: So I didn't. I didn't show my ass. I'm okay. I did my job. But a guy from the crew came up and. And he was looking at one of my books. I'd given another fellow from the crew a copy of Bumtown, and he said, you know, in Paris, we have ze slam.
And I smiled at him and I said, I know the guy who invented.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: There it is. There it is.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: You know, it was like a mic drop moment. I said, you know, that started in.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Chicago and you were the official referee.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: So at first, yeah, he was free.
[00:13:42] Speaker C: Were you doing it before I sobered up or after was 19.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: I was doing it before you sobered up.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: Oh, God, you were brutal.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: You know, they needed it.
[00:13:52] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: What does that mean? He was brutal?
[00:13:54] Speaker A: There were some people who were really, really mean to others and wanted to grind them into the dirt. And I went after those motherfuckers. Yeah, I went after the bullies, you know?
[00:14:04] Speaker C: Well, you know, the thing that made things click was that there was no pretension. You know, you couldn't get up there and be pretentious.
[00:14:12] Speaker A: Who is the guy who read the same poem every week? It was mostly you.
I fell in love, as most men do, for years.
For a year or so. It was most mental.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: They commit any of these crimes of talking too much about themselves or.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:14:29] Speaker C: Or in their poetry.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Como poetry slam. It's like, oh, God, you needed to go to sleep, you know, get a ring up.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: So if you got on stage and you weren't very good, or you kept doing the same thing over, you were told anybody.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: I never count anybody for not being very good.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: But for. For being shitty to somebody else.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: And then did the. Did the New York trip come before all this?
[00:14:54] Speaker A: After that? That was after that.
[00:14:56] Speaker C: I pretty sure was.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Was when I had the one man show at Todd Kapkel.
[00:15:02] Speaker C: Right? That's what.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: What's that give us?
[00:15:05] Speaker A: The New York stir fleabag on 14th street.
[00:15:07] Speaker C: That's right. I just remembered that. A story from that. And, uh, so he and I are hanging out that end of 1986 into 1987, and, uh, we drove out there march.
March, march. Or February, I think was February.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah, we drove out at the end of February, 1986. 80.
[00:15:30] Speaker C: 86.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Or it was 87.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: I'm sorry.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: And, um, we had, like, kind of a marvelous ride through, like the american.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: And you're going to New York to do what?
[00:15:42] Speaker A: I'm going to New York because I'm having a one man show.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: You're selling your art.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: It was a big deal.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: And.
And the show, like, sold out. Yeah. Immediately. I met the filmmaker Jonathan Demi.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Became my lifelong friend. We tried to check out some poetry venues, and Mark diminity set foot in New York. Fucking hated it. We were at Life Cafe, and he heard some guy two doors, two tables over talking about Wilson Pickett. He's not old enough to really remember Wilson Pickett. He maybe listened to his older sister's record of Wilson Pickett. And Mark's like, his third pint of beer. He's wearing that hat.
Look in his eyes are rolling like quarters in an alley. And he goes, you hear this asshole talking about wicked Piggy. Doesn't fucking know. Jesus Christ.
He's gonna be a charmer the rest of this trip, you know? So we went to some poetry venues, and we went to ABC. No, Rio. And this is before Bob Holman had gotten that whole thing rolling there. And I. It was just like an open mic, and a lot of it was really horseshit.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: But the guy who moderated it read a bunch of short pieces from essays by Elias Kinetti. And those kind of reached me. I mean, those kind of made a sense to me. And I thought, you know, this is not nothing. It's not nearly what we got in Chicago. I mean, I had a really fucking mental pride, heart on going. I thought, you know, we'd eat these guys alive, you know? But I couldn't. I could not.
[00:17:28] Speaker B: But you were there to sell your art. This was a huge show.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: It was my first big one man show, you know, and I was. You know, I was kind of scared to death.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: And Mark was not behaving.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: No, he wasn't. You know, he didn't misbehave to me. You know, I mean, well, that's because.
[00:17:47] Speaker C: Early on, you said, mark, go your own way. Because I was drunk all the time.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Well, I said, go find some poetry venues.
Go scout them out. Yeah. And we'd meet about four or five in the afternoon. He'd come back, and I went to this place. It sucked you know, it fucking sucked, you know, and I tried to direct him to. I think we did go to St. Mark's bookstore, which had. Which had a phenomenal poetry selection, and I found some stuff that I liked a lot.
I mean, I was so goddamn nervous about the show opening, you know, and we were staying. This friend of mine owned an apartment which was a hovel. You know, I mean, there was a mattress on the floor. Yeah, yeah. Mice running around everywhere. It was like. But it was kind of. They'll let me stay there. I mean, neither one of us could really afford a hotel room. And about the fourth day there, Mark's car got stolen.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Oh, boy. Mark Smith's car in New York stole Mark Smith's car.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Exactly. Parked on 14th street right outside the Sylvania factory.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: And whose car was it really?
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Between B and C? I think it was your car, right?
[00:19:09] Speaker C: It was my mom's car.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: Oh, fuck.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: And are you drinking at this point?
[00:19:12] Speaker A: No. No, I was newly sober. I've been sober since October 5, 1983.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Okay. And did you know Mark was tedded down a bad path or.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: I know that when he drank, he became somebody else.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: But my only admonition to him at the time was, you know, there's another way. If you want to be done with this, I can show you.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: I didn't want to preach. I didn't want to proselytize on this podcast.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: He said, you got him sobereze. That you?
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Well, he called me up one night, and he said, I got a string tight around my tooth because I'm gonna pull the fucking tooth. That some guy hit me with a tire iron, and he's drunk. You know, it's one in the morning, and I don't know if it's my tooth. And then he realized it was part of his jawbone. I said, you know, I would think now maybe it's time to talk about putting it down. I don't think he ever had another drink.
[00:20:11] Speaker C: Never did.
[00:20:11] Speaker A: No. Yeah. You know, I was sober for 33 years, had a quadruple bypass, and had a surgeon tell me that a couple glasses of dry red wine would thin my blood. And it did, you know, for three and a half years. And I, like, fooled myself. I switched seats on the Titanic, you know, and then my best friend, Nick Boobash died. And my two or three glasses. One, two or three bottles.
But I stopped and, you know, I made the meetings, you know, with. With me. I don't discuss the recovery meeting, the name of it that I go to, but, you know, there's an emphasis on the idea of a higher power, you know? And I decided that all of those gathered to try and keep me alive were a power grader myself.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Wow. I believe what crazy horse believed about, you know, like, a higher power, I got. I believe that, like, I'm probably not meant to understand it, and I'll figure it out when I get there. Yeah. But, you know, I've been sober for 25 months, and I know I'm not gonna have one today, you know? So, yeah, I think. I think with both of us, when alcohol got out of the way, I mean, both of us were able to kind of soar, you know, for sure. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, you know, this slam picked up head of steam that at a certain point, really, nobody could stop it, because more and more people were coming every single week, newer and newer people. And I went every Sunday night for about five years until I got married, you know, and then I had my son. And, you know, the Geneva marriage accord say, hey, look, you're not going to a bar on Sunday night. It's like, everybody's heard all your fucking poems. It's like, stay home and write some new ones.
[00:22:15] Speaker C: There's something that I just remembered important to the history of going. So I get sober.
I ain't gonna go back in a bar.
I think, you know, you're supposed to stay away from bars. So I'm going in to Tony's, still going to. I think you're still being a referee at the show. And I go to.
After I get out of treat, out of treatment, I go to the show with Tony and I just sit there watching. And then we go to the mexican restaurant afterwards.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I say, and eat eater, awaiting burritos and tacos.
[00:22:57] Speaker C: And I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna do it anymore. And he's. The guy said, what? What are you talking about? This is your thing.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:23:06] Speaker C: You have to get back there. And if it wasn't for him telling.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Me that, well, I also set it.
[00:23:11] Speaker C: Again doing the show.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: I also set the example for him and that I was sober and I was working as a bartender. Right. And honestly, that job kept me more sober than any other job I've ever had. Because my friends had come in around 07:00, and by nine or 10:00 the fucking creatures had come out. You know, it's like. And I recognize, it's like, oh, man, I know that asshole. I'm that asshole, you know? So I learned, you know, kind of the gentle art of dealing with drunks you know, I learned how to remove their keys and get them a cab. And you know what? 99 guys out of 100 will. Will absolutely thank you. The next day, you know, and take that grace note as a courtesy. You know, every once in a while, you get an asshole.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: I'm so interested, though. How does this inform your art? How does.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: Chicago.
[00:24:05] Speaker A: Chicago thing. Yeah, it's a crucible we were born in. It was.
It was the thing that shaped us. I mean, we. We learned by being Chicagoans that, like, we may not get famous, we may not get rich. So instead, what we're gonna do is get good.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Yeah, cool.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: You know, we may not see ourselves electronically reproduced.
We may not even be celebrated.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: Yeah, but you are. Both of you are.
You are, though, because you stayed and because of the work you've done. I mean, you guys are revered.
[00:24:41] Speaker C: I like what he just said.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: This is for people who have no choice. When young artists say to me, I don't know whether to do this or that, like, I always ask them, do you have a choice?
And if they say, yeah, I could. I could go into the ad game, or I could go into it or something like that, I would tell them, do that. This is only for people who have no choice.
[00:25:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree with that, that you're going to do it no matter what. It doesn't matter.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:25:14] Speaker C: You're going to do it. No, you're going to do your art no matter what. And that's how it was. Not just for us two, but for everybody at those early years.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Absolutely. You know. You know, Steve Conrad asked me in an interview that we did when the museum show was up, he said, well, what do you have for a plan b? What would you have done if you had not done this?
And I.
It was the first time anybody ever asked me that, believe it or not. And I just thought.
I'd never really thought about that. I just. There was never a consideration that I was going to do anything other than draw pictures and write poems.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Is that what keeps both of you still going? I mean, you've been doing this for a long time now.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: I told my wife I'd like to be a kept man. She asked me how I was going to live on $6 a month.
[00:26:05] Speaker C: You know, this guy, when I used to go visit him in Villa park, first of all, his studio was in front of the center, a center. And his. His, what I would call his studio was like a closet. All his pencils are there. And he'd work standing up hours and hours and hours every day. That's this guy.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: Every time I get awarded a show in new York, because the first show I made money. For, the first time, I made, like, real money. I went there, and the show sold out. And this is how approachable my work was in price back then. My payment was $9,000, and I had them get it for me in cash, you know, because right when I got off the plane in Chicago, I went to the Harley dealer, and I bought a.
I bought. I bought a clunker of a Harley. That was the last of the fat boys, you know. And my friend Dave Elliott completely refurbished this thing. It's now in the Harley museum.
Cause after I married Michelle, she goes, what are we gonna do about the Harley? You know?
[00:27:21] Speaker B: That was good advice by your.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: I said, what do you mean, what are we gonna do about the Harley? She goes, well, you don't wear a helmet, and you ride 100 miles an hour down the expressway.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Sounds like she knows you.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: And we're gonna have a child.
I have somebody who will buy it.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Well, let me go back at it this way, then. Have you ever been pissed off at Chicago?
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Every day.
Every morning when I wake up and I listen to WBBM and I hear the litany of cruelty and thoughtless, cruel, grinding poverty and crime, I think, why can we not, as a city, elevate ourselves above this? Why can we not move forward?
[00:28:07] Speaker B: But in the art world, like you're.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: You're.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: I mean, Nelson Algren, you're a huge Nelson fan. He left.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: He was angry with reservations. Okay, well, because he could be an incredible asshole, and he. He could be really rotten to his friends.
[00:28:24] Speaker C: Yeah, but in regard to your art, that was the same thing that happened to you. That's why you went to that very first when I took out New York, because they weren't paying attention. You weren't paying attention to you here.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: Fuck them. You know? I mean, you know, I couldn't get anybody to look at my work because they were like, we look at slides on Monday, and you can pick them up on Tuesday, you know?
And in New York, you know, the one thing when we first went there, I mean, the East Village was this, like, wild, hot house of activity, particularly for visual arts. Between 14th Street, First Avenue and Avenue C and West Broadway, there were 60 galleries. And those guys knew that if they didn't look at your work and it happened to be good, then the guy down the street is going to make some bank on you hanging out with studs. We spent Christmas Eve with him very often, you know, and nobody shaped the way I saw the world more than he did.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: He was a profound influence. Sure.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: So he influences you. You guys are influencing and supporting each other. You have generations underneath of you now that know, I mean, the slam is in, like, its 6th generation, 7th generation of people. Has your families. Have your families. Are they. We've talked a little bit about Mark's grandson, Gideon. How's he doing? How's the slam going with him? And your son's a filmmaker as well, and an actor. How was that? How's that work? How are your family and the arts?
[00:30:11] Speaker A: You know, both of my kids, you know, my daughter is a serious writer.
They're both writing screenplays. And.
[00:30:25] Speaker C: You know, one thing we should say about Tony's stuff at the Green mill, which we'd be remiss and not mentioning it when he would do his performances and many performances at the Green Mill, we had an old movie screen from a super eight.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: We used slides, slides with him, and.
[00:30:45] Speaker C: He did, he did his poems with the, with the, with the, the images, because that first book, the poems were connected to.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. To the paintings and all the Coney island things were.
We had images of. And, and, you know, the shows I did at Steppenwolf, we, we found some really marvelous filmmakers, and we did a memorial for Lynn Bramer last year after we lost Lynn. John Langford's son is a whiz with, with digital imaging and stuff like that. The show I'm writing right now, I'm hopefully, I would like to hire him to do it visually.
We hope to bring it back to Steppenwolf. I'm still writing it. It's a lot of storytelling.
And who is your director?
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Previously for September, Amy Ann Filmer. And Filmer.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: She directed four shows.
She just decided she wanted out of the theater racket and, you know, joined a band or something, you know, so join the circus. The new, the new. The new show is probably going to be directed by Marika Mashburn, who's a phenomenal actor and dramaturg. And his, you know, was, was a big deal with the house theater, you know, and I always loved what the house did. So, you know, what I wanted to do is make sure these poems actually kind of, you know, for the longest time, I would write my poems into my pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wanted them to be the same thing. I mean, because people would say to me, are you a poet who makes art? Are you an artist who writes poetry? And I thought it's all part of the same thing. I don't distinguish, you know, that was one thing from the other important part.
[00:32:39] Speaker C: Of it in their early years, too, is that we were taking poetry into territory that you weren't supposed to do.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: It had never been exactly like you.
[00:32:49] Speaker C: Mentioned, Mark, Natalie, you know, the tap dancer that was at the show, you know, dance in poetry, visual art in poetry.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, look at Patti Smith. I mean. Right. Patti Smith.
[00:33:02] Speaker C: And exactly. Those were people that we, you know, were connected to in those early years.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: I bought the collection called Babylon when I was 19 years old. I didn't really yet know Patti Smith is a singer. And then about two weeks later, you know, it's a Patti Smith band record. And I got that. Yeah. And I don't know.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Babylon, is that her poetry or.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: It's a collection of poetry. It's her first collection. You know, it was intimately connected to her also as a songwriter. But none of the. None of the poems in Babylon were songs. They were something else.
[00:33:39] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, what comes to mind is that those early years, we were outsiders back then and not connected to academia, and we were eager to go anyplace. It was creativity with anything we could do.
But we were outside, and most of us. But the deep, like we said earlier, the deep understanding of poetry and the reading of it and the appreciation of it, that was major for all of us. The Whitechapel club, that was the Chicago poetry ensemble. I don't know if we've talked about them. We have not yet. We should. We would do different little skits every Sunday in those. That first year at the Green Mill.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: Rob Van Tile.
[00:34:29] Speaker C: Rob Van Tile. Yeah. He's still around. Gene Howard. Karen Nystrom.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: John Sheehan.
[00:34:35] Speaker C: John Sheehan. I met. I think I met John Sheehan when I was at that first reading that you did when we first met.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: Yeah. John Sheehan was a phenomenally fine man. He's just former.
[00:34:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Former catholic priest.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it was former catholic priest and an outsider, too. Yeah.
[00:34:58] Speaker C: He was kicked out of the. Out of the seminary. He was kicked out of the Catholic being a church because he married a black woman in Texas. He's from Texas, yeah.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: And he was very virulently anti racist and very active in civil rights. I mean, it was just, he was such a great example, you know. And in the slam in those early years, we were very lucky to have him because this guy was not only a marvelous poet, he was a terrific moral exemplar for younger people, you know. I mean, there were a few people like that that just kind of. It just kind of took my hand you know, there was this kid from Ireland.
His name was Colin, and he wrote.
[00:35:46] Speaker C: Oh, wow. Yeah.
[00:35:47] Speaker A: Remember him? He wrote beautiful poems. I don't know whatever became of them, but, you know, there were so many things I heard in that room that fundamentally changed me.
And the one thing I ask of art is for it to do just that. Right?
[00:36:07] Speaker C: Right.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Change me, make me challenge what I think or what I think I know. Help me grow, help me, you know?
And at its best, real art does that.
[00:36:22] Speaker B: It must feel great to sit next to each other after all these years.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: After I was done reading on Sunday, I stapled all the poems together, and I gave them to mark because none of them would have been possible without him.
He started this thing that allowed people like me to enter the world and be able to hold my head up and say, I am a poethen, you know, and I'm serious about this.
[00:36:51] Speaker C: And it wouldn't have gone on if you hadn't held me up after, you know, I got.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: Yeah, we do.
[00:36:57] Speaker C: Going down the drain. I was. I was heading down the drain, and you pulled me up.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: There's such a fellowship about the early years of the green mill, you know, I mean, when I think of, you know, Cindy Szalach and Sheila. Sheila, you know, the restless will go and the faithful will stay.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: 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 of 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.
