Reminder: Slam Poetry Turns 25 This Saturday

As we reported in this post, slam poetry will celebrate its 25th anniversary at Chicago's Metro this Saturday. Robb Q. Telfer wrote an in-depth feature on slam, covering primarily the founder of the form Marc Smith, for Time Out Chicago.

From the article:

A brief disclosure: Smith is the director of my performance ensemble, my mentor and a good friend. If it weren’t for the poetry slam, I would be a failed stand-up comedian. If it weren’t for the poetry slam, I would not be an artist at all. Thousands of young-ish people would not be interested in poetry; we had 650 youth participants at the Louder than a Bomb youth poetry festival this year, which would not exist without the slam and Marc Smith. I can say this with certainty.

“[Smith] created and popularized a framework for poetry that changed how we experience it forever,” says Dennis Kim, a lead organizer of Brave New Voices, the international youth poetry slam. “Not only that, he was willing to share that framework with, literally, everyone. Even a kid like me. Rich, poor, white, black and brown mingled where art and sport collided.”

Many people define the poetry slam as an Olympic-style competition where poets are ranked on a scale of one to ten by randomly selected judges from the audience. However, Smith isn’t happy with the competition representing the slam.

“What attracted audiences to the Get Me High, and later the Green Mill, was performance poetry formatted into shows that were highly entertaining and interactive,” says Smith, 61, a South Side native who has worked as a construction worker and sharecropper. “To this day, the competition segment of the Green Mill slam takes a back seat to the featured performers. The root definitions of the poetry slam are: (a) the remarriage of the art of performing and the art of writing poetry and (b) an interactive performance poetry show.”

And later, considering the current state and future of slam:

On Saturday 30, Smith will celebrate his giant poetry baby’s birthday at Metro. I asked him if he’s interested in saving slam’s reputation as it continues to morph and grow from its original concept. He isn’t.

“The slam is but one of a million human activities, and by comparison not a very essential one outside its own little corner of the universe, but it started with me and has resulted in much good service to the human condition,” he says. “That’s an accomplishment I can take with me to the grave.”

Thankfully, the old man and the slam movement aren’t dead yet.

Amen. Get out and support the poets!