Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the slam, everybody. This is the original slam. There are now slams all over the world when I'm the guy that started this show. My name's Mark Smith.
This has been a great open mic. We got a, we got a few more going.
Almost.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: I almost forgot my grandson.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Come on up here. This is my grandson, Gideon, who's been coming here week after week.
Take over. All right. We'll do all right.
What I want I don't get and what I get I don't want my delight and what I do get it gives me hope that one day I'll get what I want and if I don't get what I want, then maybe I should change what I want to what I get so that I will be happy with what I do get because I'll get what I want.
[00:01:49] Speaker C: Welcome to through the mill, the podcast on poetry slams. My name is Mark Elveld. I'm the editor of the spoken word revolution book series, and I am here with Mark Kelly Smith, really the host and the subject of this podcast. Mark Smith is the founder of the poetry slam, the curator of the poetry slam, the performance poet, slam poet. The longest running show in Chicago, poetry slam, all at the Green Mill Jazz lounge.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Not a perspective. I was the guy named. The name came from me.
Lynn Vodish was going to a reporter for the, I think, sun Times.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: Chicago Sun Times, yeah.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: She was going to do an article on the show I was starting. She'd done some articles on the first show I did at the get me High Lounge, the Monday night poetry reading series.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: What year was that?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: 19 85, 86. She called and she wanted to know the name of the show. And I was watching the Cubs play, playing a game, and I was thinking about when Ernie Banks, I wished for Ernie Banks to hit a grand slam home run. And he did. And at that time, what we were doing at the get me high was, you know, you either applauded, you were either into it and applauded a lot for it, or if it wasn't any good, you were allowed to heckle and get them off the stage. So that slam had a double meaning to it. You know, Slam could mean really good, or slam would mean slam the door on you. And so I'm sitting there, okay, Lynn, let's see. And I knew it's going to be at the Green mill, which is in the uptown neighborhood. So I said, uptown poetry slam. And that's, that's how the name, that was the, as much thought that was.
[00:03:51] Speaker C: Put into the name, and that's the name poetry slam.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah, poetry slam. It's good to have a name that's like, what, you know, that makes people think. Poetry slam. What the hell is that? You know? And so I think that that was, you know, just my luck of guessing, making a, a guess at a name that turned out to be a good one. And you got people. And it does express what happens at the show. Not only the show, at the get behind, but at the show at the green mill was very tough at the beginning.
[00:04:27] Speaker C: So that's the origin of the name. A reporter called. You were watching Chicago cubs baseball with Ernie Banks, and you combine the form of poetry and sports together in one swoop.
We're saying it a lot without telling the audience, really, what poetry slam is. And that's a big, big conversation. But you're just back.
So you're an icon. You're a Chicago icon. Everybody knows who Mark Smith is.
You're just back. I want to kind of back into this by talking about recent travels and why now, why we're doing this. So you're just back from Portugal, you're just back from Brazil, and you're just back from Tours, France, all within like a three month swing, which is not unusual for you. You are in an international thing at this point. So if you could tell us a little bit about those scenes, how they interpret poetry slam, and then we'll back into it. Back to 1985, maybe.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. Yeah. So the slam has spread all over the world. You know, those are three places you mentioned, but there's 500,000 other places that you could find slam. And I guess when we talk about it, what it is, it's performance poetry. What I did, that was different. I said, you just don't get up on the stage and mumble out some words. You have to compete with all the other entertainment that's out there, with comedians, with theater, with singers and everything. If you're a poet, you need to be on stage and performing. You need to know the art of performing. Most poetry readings back in 1985 when I started, were just very boring situations where people would just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, no art to whether to being on stage. And that's what I did different, and it caught on and it went across the world. So what you're getting to with these recent trips I made over the years, I'm not big for, you know, this is a little uncomfortable for me to be talking about, you know, myself so much lately, the last few years, going to different spots around the world, the young people coming into the slam, which is a great thing about the slam, that it's not just an old generation like the beats redoing the beatnik thing over, it's new people ended all the time. And these younger people are always asking me, well, oh, Mister Smith, don't take this, don't take this wrong, but, you know, we go online and we don't find that much information about you. They want to know what the origin is and they want to know what the root is better. Because the slam has been so open, it has manifested itself in many different ways. Some of them that I don't, you know, I don't agree with, some of them are just ego centered.
These young people now that are, you know, that I meet overseas, they know that it isn't about a competition, it isn't just about becoming a star. They know there's a deeper intent into it. They just sense it. But then they go online, you don't find anything about it.
[00:07:40] Speaker C: So what was staying that young? So you told me a story about Brazil and underneath the bridges and the performance.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Beautiful, beautiful place. And I should have done a little thinking about. So I got the names right, but Roberta in Brazil is the person that, she has a beautiful documentary out about the slam in Brazil. The poetry readings in Brazil are out on the streets. Right? Right. They're just out, you know, get 100, 200, 300 people on the streets. When I was there, they couldn't, they were afraid it was going to be raining. So they're under the train station, outside, under stations, young people with their grandma there, their mom in there, all kinds of different people. And just usually they don't. They had a mic there because they felt sorry for the old man that I'm going to be the better having a microphone out there. But usually they don't work with a microphone. They're just out there on the street putting out. And they were happy when I kind of went off the mic when I did my little thing like them, because that's how we started.
We weren't there.
[00:08:54] Speaker C: We don't have to talk about this necessarily, but it's a nice illusion. In Chicago, there's a rich tradition, Haymarket square. And there was a time period in which if you had something to say, there was a spot for you, there was a riser. Most of it was kind of politic, but you could stand up and they would have real audiences. And that's kind of a vacuum, live experiences like that. One of the initiatives through slam, and I hope you keep going through, like, Portugal and Italy. And I want to ask about Italy, where they throw the roses on the stage.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: That's Germany.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: Germany, okay. But I mean, part of your mission, because you say slam. And our great friend Emily Calvo is here. Who through the mill is the title of this podcast, but I believe that's one of her titles for an anthology that she's been working on for poetry Slam since 1992, I think something like that. But when you say slam, I know what you mean. You know what you mean? And Emily knows what you mean. And large sections of our audience who are going to listen because it's. You know what you mean. It has so many different things to it. The performance, the writing. Your biggest thing out of all this, because you're different than most slammers. You're the most talented guy in the room, mark, and you know that. But you have such an appreciation for the organizers in ways that lots of artists don't understand. And when you talk about Portugal and Brazil and tours and the work that Emily used to do with the national poetry slams and all that, it's really. It's a thing.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's, you know, I think what you're getting at is that whenever I talk, talk to people that I tell them that there's three definitions of poetry. The first definition is poetry slam. Definitions of poetry slam. Poetry slam is the remarriage of the art of performing with the art of writing. They're two different crafts or two different art forms. And you, when you put them together, you have a higher art form than just poetry on the page or just people speaking out loud. There's. It's just a. It's a higher. There's more choices for the artist to make. When you add performance in, you know, very simply, you know, the volume at which you speak, you know, changes. You know, the changes. You can say the same word, you know, I do with the kids. It's fine. I go, okay, tell me, tell me the differences in this performance. I love you. I love you. I love you.
The way you speak words, not only is speaking them, but your body, your eyes, your face, your gestures, everything that changes the communication that comes across to an audience. And probably back before the 20th century, you know, all the poets did this. They didn't do, but in, somewhere in the 20th century, it became at least the majority of the poets, especially in the establishment, in the academic world.
When I started out, they said, oh, it's a disgrace to be performing. You're a poet, you're not an actor. That's such bullshit.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Do you want to name names. We could do that.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: No, we're not going to name names. The second definition is a show, a poetry show. The other thing, when I started out, I realized was that these poetry readings they were presenting, there was no art to them, you know? Okay, who's next? Okay, a poetry slam definition is a performance poetry show that has all kinds of elements. Ritual, you know, it's got a beginning, middle, and end. It's got a peak. That's very important. That's one of the reasons why things started, took off and went around the world.
[00:12:53] Speaker C: Can I tell you one of my favorite rituals? And then you get 0.3. Okay, if I don't break your.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: What's your favorite ritual?
[00:12:59] Speaker C: You used to, and maybe you still do. You used to stand at the front door when people would come in and you would greet people and say, welcome to the show. You even gave hugs to strangers. And more importantly, when you saw a table of the same people sitting at the table week after week, you would go up to the table and move people to make them sit with something. Somebody knew. On more than one occasion, I saw you do that.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: You know, it was all. And it was. That was intention. It was all by design. Because here you have this art form. Poetry to me and to many people is a very intimate art form. You're gonna present this intimate art form to a bunch of people. Those people need to be comfortable with each other and kind of know each other so they can. They can let down the guard that we all put on. The masks that we put on when we go into any kind of performance, we all put the kind of a shield up. You know, the poetry slam is not a pet. If you're in the audience, it's not a passive audience. Not at all.
Boy, you know that. It reminds me that when I did that introduction, I'm so bad with names that I'd be. I'd be every week I'd say, hello, hi, how are you? What's your name? And I would never remember the names. So after a while, people came. Everybody was coming in and saying, they're, I'm Max and Alice. Every person was Max. And Alice was kind of a joke.
[00:14:29] Speaker C: But then you made characters in the audience. Oh, yeah, the dick of the princes. The Prince of Dicks was the character, right? Alan Neff was the character these became.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: And I was outrageous.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: Jesus, you were outrageous. And they loved it.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Boy, some of. A lot of people hated it too. But anyways, the third definition is something that, you know, that this is what kind of helped things spread around the country because it's an easy thing to explain to a newspaper audience or television audience when it got covered by tv is a competition. The competition part was just a dramatic technique, a way of holding the audience attention was never meant to decide who was the best poet. It was a theatrical device that would. Would hold the audience's attention. When we first tried, it didn't start. You know, it wasn't at the get me high. It didn't start at the first few weeks at the Green Mill. We just tried it because I was working with the Chicago poetry ensemble and we had the show planned out, a three hour show, but we went a little too fast and we had another half hour to go. So on the spur of the moment, let's do a competition. And what happened. Here's the green Mill bar. That's pretty rowdy. It's a competition. Everybody got quiet and they're focused on who's going to win.
And I thought, well, this is a good thing because we want that focus on the stage. So the third definition is competitive performance poetry. That's the three basic definitions. But also what happened over the years is that a community of like minded people, both intellectually and emotionally and spiritually like minded people, came together and there are lifetime friendships that have formed from people that didn't know each other. It's very hard to be at the show because it's so interactive and so wide open that you can't just come there and leave without being affected by somebody. And people would hear somebody do some poem on there. It didn't necessarily have to be the greatest poem, but it was something that struck them. And, of course, they go up afterwards to this person and say, you know, hey, I felt that way, too, or that was great.
And this person that was on stage may have been a total loner that just didn't talk to people. All of a sudden, now, this person that was so alone in his life, or she was so alone in their life, all of a sudden they formed a community. And those, those generations of people interacting and staying together and becoming friends and doing things together, there's been many different generations of them. And, you know, it doesn't.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: But you're also talking about yourself a bit in that you're an outsider artist. All the accolades, all the shows, everything.
You still consider yourself to be on the outside looking in a little bit, don't you? You identify with that person at the back of the green Mill who wants to get on stage and get to say who they are for a minute.
[00:17:50] Speaker B: No, you're exactly right. That's what I've done, is because I am that person that can sit and be by himself in a crowd and all for some reason, when I'm doing the show, all of a sudden I become very animated, very extroverted. But I am working to bring out from people who would not speak up to bring them out on the stage. Because you're right, it's me.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: Let's go that direction. We've talked about Europe and the success. We've got the three definitions of slam.
Where are you from in Chicago? And what's your own academic performance background that kind of drove you to do this? I mean, I know, but I. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: So, yeah, I came from the southeast side of Chicago.
You know, blue collar neighborhood, you know, a little rough, but we didn't have guns. Thanks God.
I wasn't a very good student. I didn't know how to read. I couldn't read till I was like six, 6th grade. In fact, there's a story I tell about it. A teacher that the assistant principal misses. Panis.
I think she was my 8th, 7th grade teacher or something.
Ooh, she was rough. She was a tough one. She made me read John Steinbeck's book, the Pearl.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah. I'd never. I'd never read a book from beginning to end because I was very slow reader. You know, I could read the little exercises and stuff, but.
So here I read this book. And the motif in the book, the story, if, you know, people probably know, is about an island family that finds a valuable pearl. The book is about how that changes their life.
And the motif through the book was songs. There were songs. Everything was a song. The song of the island, the song of the family, the song of this. Everything was a sensitive look at the world around him through songs. When it got to the song of the family, it was like, you know, I'm tearing up reading the book. What the hell's going on?
It made me understand the power of literature to get inside of your soul and to help you express those things that you weren't able to or even allowed to express that sense of side of yourself to the world that you were in. You know, it just didn't happen. So then I started, you know, I started to read like anybody who. You know, most people know this, but I didn't, you know, it's like a muscle. You gotta keep doing it more and more. And then you.
I never thought I'd be able to read a whole book.
[00:20:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah. It amazes me when I look at all the books I've read, I said, how did I do that? I never thought I could do that.
But I get into high school and I started to read more. Read a lot of Mark Twain. Cause he was really funny. I thought he was great.
Here's a great story. So I have a teacher. There was a student teacher.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: And this is Bogan High School.
[00:21:09] Speaker B: Bowen High School.
[00:21:10] Speaker C: Bowen High School.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: Bowen High School. And I did my assignment, and she accused me of plagiarism.
And you went? No.
Then whenever I did exercises for her, I just do these. I wouldn't just answer the question, the fill in the blank or thing. I would do these elaborate things just to say, hey, babe. I forget her name.
Then I had a friend, Barbara arms, and she was older than me. She went to college, and we would write letters, write corresponding letters. Then my first girlfriend, Maria Elena Rosa. Hi there, Maria.
I wrote. Wrote these love letters to her and put them in. I never gave them to her because I was too shy to talk to her. And Marty Spears got him out of my dick. Hi, Marty. Got him out of my desk and gave them to her. And she came down the hall with these. Did you write these? Yes, I did. I'm sorry. Those are my writing experiences in high school.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: So after high school, we headed to Western University.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Somehow I got in.
[00:22:26] Speaker C: You're now reading books, right?
[00:22:27] Speaker B: I'm reading now. I'm not super.
Not a lot.
[00:22:33] Speaker C: Can I ask real quick, before the western, is it all kind of in the vein of Steinbeck? Because that's a particular brand of literature, which is the working people's and the blue collar and uplifting liberatory, in very colloquial kind of language.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I got in Steinbeck more in my college days.
It was Mark Twain. I read a lot of Mark Twain got into poetry because it was shorter, you know, because I was a very slow, very slow reader. I can't even remember who I read poems I read in high school days.
[00:23:11] Speaker C: But were you exposed to Carl Sandberg in high school?
[00:23:14] Speaker B: No, no, I don't think so.
The reading part, the reading got strong in college was, you know, I never thought I'd be. The only reason I came with I want to go to college is because my best friend growing up, Don Devitt, he went to bed Billamard College in Louisville, and I get letters back from him about. Well, yeah, we go out and drink beer and he goes, all these girls, and we play touch football and everything. Well, I think I should go to college. And fortunately for me, it was a time where they were letting everybody into college. And I was, I think I might have been in the upper quarter of my class, but I wanted to go to college to be an architect. That was my goal. So I went to Western Illinois university because a friend of my dad's who was in construction, he recommended it to my dad. And, you know, basically I wanted to go to the University of Kentucky so I could be near my, my best friend. But they didn't accept me. And so my mother and father found Western Illinois university, and that's how it went. It was not so much my decision as it was their decision.
[00:24:38] Speaker C: Yeah, but you've told me bits, so there's a love story in there that's important. But you had a professor, I think.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: That you guys studied the Iliad, not the Iliad.
Was English 101 the required course? That was Jim Clark. Where are you at, Jim Clark, wherever you are.
He noticed, he took note of my acuity for writing. He encouraged me to write stuff. And I start, that's when I started writing poetry. He was influential, but I also used him to go drinking with all the time.
[00:25:17] Speaker C: So wait, a literature teacher at the university that takes a student drinking and writes poems? Yeah, yeah, that's the word. Cliche. Isn't there somewhere?
[00:25:27] Speaker B: I actually wrote a little book that he tried to get to some publisher in DC that never went through, so.
[00:25:34] Speaker C: And then you met somebody, right? And then did the poems become, woo. Love poems or.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: No, I met Sandy, my first wife, and she liked poetry, so I thought, okay, I'm gonna like poetry too.
I followed her around to, I had quit school and just come back to school. I had quit school and went off on a trip down to Kentucky, lived down there with my best friend for a while and was off the tracks. And I came back to school.
I had met her before I quit school, and I came back and she had left school and come back at the same time. And I met her the first day I was back at school, realized that I love this person. I followed around to all her classes. She was an English major, so I signed up for all the English, English classes.
[00:26:26] Speaker C: So what year would this be? Around.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: 1969 or so somewhere.
[00:26:33] Speaker C: And Vietnam's in the backdrop.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that was, that was in the Times.
So I started, that's when I started writing, taking it serious to be a poet.
[00:26:50] Speaker C: So, listeners, we started internationally in 2024 in Brazil and Portugal and Tours, France. We got a little background on what a poetry slam is, the three definitions by our subject. Mark Kelly Smith, the founder of poetry slam. And then we dove into his life from the southeast side of Chicago. And so we're currently, he is wooing his first wife, Sandy, at Western University. The backdrop of America is Vietnam. Mark has read Steinbeck, had some good teachers, some good presence, understands his own love for poetry, and then he attempts, or successfully attempts to woo his first wife. What happens after? So you don't graduate from college, but what happens next?
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, you got me talking about stuff that I never talk about. I know, and it's not comfortable, really, but, yeah, so Sandy and I was 20 years old. She graduated and had all good grades. I didn't do so well. I quit school. I just thought it was, you know, a lot of us back in the hippie days when this is boy bullshit.
I quit school, and we moved down to South Carolina during the civil rights movement.
Basically, Sandy wanted to get a job, was going to be a teacher. And we got an offer from King Street, South Carolina, for teachers. And what was happening, although we didn't know it at the time, was that the white racists down in South Carolina, they taken all the teachers out of the black schools, so they needed people.
Nobody from the south was teaching black schools, and they recruited teachers from the north to come down and teach in the black schools.
And that's how Sandy got her job down there. We moved down there, and, wow, was that a backward time.
[00:29:01] Speaker C: The southern writer Pat Conroy wrote a book about that. He wrote lords of discipline, but he wrote one about going to an island with all blacks to teach.
[00:29:12] Speaker B: So she went down to teach, and I was going to go down and sit on the veranda and become the Yankee William Faulkner.
[00:29:23] Speaker C: Makes sense.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: I actually won a contest down there at the Poultry Society of South Carolina, and I didn't think anything of it. I got $25.
I became a. I started sharecropping with the farmer who owned the little log cabin that we lived in. Sharecropping tobacco, one of the toughest work there is. And a lot of bad things happened down there. It was my coming of age thing. It was like a lot of bad stuff happened down there. And we moved back to the north, and I decided, I'm not going to be hippy dippy writer.
I'm going to settle down and raise a family.
[00:30:08] Speaker C: Now, as successful as you are in the poetry world, maybe our listeners don't know that you are a frustrated playwright as well. Were you writing plays back then, when you were down there?
[00:30:18] Speaker B: No, I was writing all kinds of stuff. You know, I would try all the different forms. But we came back to Chicago, and then I settled down and I went to work in construction. I still was writing all the time.
Hundreds and thousands of bad poems. I learned how to write poetry by writing bad poems. Bad poem after bad poem.
[00:30:41] Speaker C: What's one of your earlier poems that's still in your set that you wrote out?
[00:30:45] Speaker B: You know, what came to mind when you said was a poem, benthos, which I did get published by a little rag. I never do it on the stage. Maybe I should dig that up and do it on the stage.
Nothing I was writing back then it was ever put on the stage. Okay.
When I found the stage, I started writing for the stage. But the early poems that I did when I was, you know.
[00:31:10] Speaker C: So what year? So are you in Berwyn at this point? And is Adam born your first son yet or.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: No, Adam was born when I lived in Hazelcrest, Illinois. We moved back to. When we moved back, we moved into a little apartment in Hazelcrest, Illinois. And, yeah, I had my little. I had my desk set up, you know, for writing, you know, after I got, you know, met Sandy, my whole thing was to be a writer. And I would send out the little magazines, acquire hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips, but I just kept, you know, get the poem back. Send it out again, get it back, you know, none of those poems. I don't even know if I still have them.
[00:31:52] Speaker C: Is our great friend Stan, the radio man part of these days, then when you're in the apartment or Stan.
[00:31:59] Speaker B: Hey, Stan.
[00:32:00] Speaker C: Hi, Stan. So then what's kind of the next. So it's early night. I mean, like, you start performing. 84, 83. What's the Oak park story that you knew?
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm writing years and years of writing poems and sending them out to little magazines. And then finally I quit my job as a. In construction.
[00:32:28] Speaker C: And you were a boss in construction?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: I had a pretty good job, yeah.
And I said, I want to be a writer, you know, and I'm going to. Sandy went back to school teaching first English as a second language. And I wanted to find out what was going on in the poetry world. So I started going to these poetry readings. Holy mackerel. Boring.
No passion, no audience. You know, a professor and his students, and they were so uppity, too. I mean, they were. You know, they were. There was an elitist feel to it all, and they weren't that good. You know, it was. You know, there's. Why do you. Why are you so smug? You're not communicating. The thing that struck me is that they weren't really communicating. They were saying, they're highfalutin stuff, and nobody, you know, everybody's pretending to get it and they didn't get it, you know. But I'm a shy guy and I'm afraid, you know. But finally, I go to the left bank bookstore in Oak Park. I got up there and I read a poem.
[00:33:44] Speaker C: What was the poem?
[00:33:45] Speaker B: The poem was, my father is fated, about gambling. About gambling on the construction site. And one person applauded. Ralph Cintron. Hey, Ralph, how are you?
That was something, because nobody was applauding for anything. It was just a bunch of poets reading to a bunch of poets and nobody, you know, and that encouragement of the one guy, he stood up, you know, was like, stood up?
[00:34:11] Speaker C: What year would that be?
[00:34:12] Speaker B: That was 83.
[00:34:14] Speaker C: Would you? If I would. Can we be so bold to say slam poetry was invented that night at the left bank?
[00:34:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: The father has faded.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: What?
[00:34:37] Speaker A: He was cracked out now under the.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Alternates, the deacons roll the no come.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: Lines, smacking the cubes against the green cloth. Rude betting that there ain't no salvation.
