Marc Kelly Smith was born and raised on the Southeast Side of Chicago, near the South Chicago Steel Works, which employed both his grandfather and, briefly, his father. Smith attended (but didn’t finish) college, married, had three children, and worked construction to support his family. He wrote poetry on the side.
His life changed in 1987 when he began the “Poetry Slam,” which he is generally credited with both inventing and popularizing. Working out of the Green Mill Tavern on Chicago’s North Side, Smith saw the slam as a way to recapture poetry from the elite and return it to the people—where he believes it belongs, though, perhaps predictably, poetry slams have received a mixed reaction, especially from those “elites,” a controversy Smith directly engages in “The Good Samaritan,” one of three Marc Smith poems David Starkey and I included in our Smokestacks and Skyscrapers: An Anthology of Chicago Writing.
“Taking an angry poet home / On a rainy night after the Slam / Is not a driving experience / Recommended by the Chicago Motor Club,” the poem begins. “No, it’s more like / Paddling upstream in a wind storm / On a planet other than your own / In a dream that loops endlessly around / The relentlessly boring question of: / ‘What is, or what is not, real poetry?'” The poem ends with the angry poet yelling, in all caps: “‘HOW CAN YOU CONDONE THAT BULLSHIT! / THAT’S NOT POETRY'”
Smith still considers the What’s-Real-Poetry question relentless boring, but, paradoxically, he cares about good poetry a lot—whatever that is—and the combination of his blunt, rough-and-tumble, often ridicule-laden persona and his sensitivity to good poetry—again, whatever that is—has fueled the Uptown Poetry Slam, making it a fixture of Chicago’s cultural life for three decades and spreading slams across the world. Read more about the Uptown Poetry Slam and the slam poetry controversy HERE.
And you can also read more about it in Smith’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Slam Poetry, co-authored with Joe Kraynak, which boasts this comment from This American Life’s Ira Glass on the cover: “What Marc Smith invented when he created the slam was so deeply, intuitively perfect…And the book you’re holding in your hand is his tell-all.” One passage describes Smith’s approach to the Uptown Poetry Slam: “You’re the maestro and the conductor, and as such, your job is to orchestrate a show that plays like a concerto consisting of several movements…lifting and dropping the audience’s emotions, raising its consciousness, and eliciting its most lurid dreams.”
Besides the iconic Slam at the Green Mill, Smith has created a number of other poetry organizations and ensembles like Pong Unit One, Neutral Turf’s Chicago Poetry Festival, and the Poetic Theater Project. Smith is himself a dynamic performer of his own work which he has read across the country, including at the Smithsonian Institute and the Kennedy Center, and he has been featured on CNN, 60 Minutes, and NPR. In 1996 his poems were collected in Crowdpleaser. In Smokestacks and Skyscrapers we also included his “Sandburg to Smith, Smith to Sandburg,” his salute to his major influence Carl Sandburg, as well as his valedictory “My Father’s Coat.” “I’m wearing my father’s coat. / He has died. I didn’t like him, / But I wear the coat,” it begins. “There was more of everything he should have done,” it continues, and it ends: “I wear my father’s coat. / And it seems to me / That this is the way the most of us / Make each other’s acquaintance— / In coats we have taken / To be our own.”
♦ Go to a list of Chicago Writers on this site.
♦ Hear Marc Smith read his poem “American Eagles.”
Clarence Page: America’s “Anxious Class”
Trump’s most recent flap—in a campaign seemingly based on one flap after another—is his ever so slow refusal—which still doesn’t seem a really clear refusal—to denounce the support of David Duke, the KKK, and white supremacist followers. The crux of Page’s essay is the relationship between class anxiety and racism.
Even though written in the mid-90’s the essay seems even more relevant now, 20 years later, especially here: “Today it is easy to see more clearly than ever that behind middle-class anger, whether it is directed against blacks or taxes, is a greater problem afflicting the group Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called the ‘anxious class.’ They are the vast numbers of Americans who see and feel a growing divide between rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, the secure and the insecure in post-industrial America. They have been feeling increasingly nervous about the trend, which appears to be irreversible, and about the weak responses both major parties were making to it…This middle-class anxiety explains why party loyalty shrunk to record lows by the mid-1990s and the urge to find alternatives soared.” The last sentence explains not only Trump but the surprising success of Bernie Sanders, so that this election cycle features “radicals” on both the right and left as prominently as it ever has in American electoral history.
Maybe.
Clarence Page’s essay probes the intersection of race and class, and comes down, mistakenly I believe—even as powerful as the essay remains—on the side of class. It ends: “As long as race remains an American dilemma, as Gunnar Myrdal famously declared it to be in the early 1940s, it will play a salient role in American politics. Americans of all races need to learn who their real enemies are. It is not the members of other races. It is those who use race as a smokescreen to hide the nation’s deeper agonies over class and a dream of upward mobility that for too many members of all races appears to be rapidly slipping away.” But race isn’t just a smokescreen because race and class still remain so tightly joined. White supremacists, so often in the lower classes themselves, want blacks, other people of color or whatever orientation threatens their view of themselves, to remain firmly in a class apart—and preferably below. But, as I cautiously suggest above, things could be changing in ways that weaken race and class’ tight bond and finally confirm Page’s assertion that class, not race, is the real issue.
Page remains one of the country’s most distinguished journalists. He is the Washington-based senior correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and spent many years working in print and TV journalism in Chicago becoming, in 1984, the first black on the Tribune’s editorial board. He is an essayist and panelist for PBS’s News Hour and a frequent guest on The MacLaughlin Group and other TV news programs. His writing appears in many newspapers and magazines including The Wall Street Journal, Washington Monthly, the Chicago Reader, New York Newsday, and The New Republic. Besides an Illinois UPI Award, an E. S. Beck Award for overseas reporting, and the 1987 McGuire Award for his columns on Constitutional rights, Page won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize as part of a Tribune task force on voter fraud, and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
♦ Go to a list of Black Writers on this site, to the Teaching Diversity main page, and to Black Writing from Chicago.