There’s this thing called Marc Smith’s Chicago Poetry Slam down at the Green Mill bar on Broadway and Lawrence every Sunday night. I bet those of you in the bigger cities have something similar, although it’s undoubtedly called something else, ’cause there’s only one Chicago, and naturally yours wouldn’t be as good as the Chicago one, because ours is the Original and Best, at least according to Marc Smith, the guy who runs the thing. I used to go down there, with an ex-girlfriend, fairly often, sometimes every week, and at first it was really neat and interesting. People from every walk of life would just get up there and read their poems, and the poems were about almost every subject under the sun, and the audience was usually polite and appreciative, and I thought Wow This Is Really Great, and it was sort of like a big secret club we all belonged to.
Each night before people started reading their poetry, Marc Smith would get up in front of the audience and sort of go over the ground rules, such as they were, like how you were supposed to yell “Belmont!” if a poem was terribly, terribly bad (but no one had any idea why Belmont), and how the judges were supposed to score the poems during the contest part of the show when poets competed for up to five American dollars, and how no score could ever go lower than the lowest score ever recorded, which was minus infinity, and so on and so forth. Finally he’d always explain the rule about the feminist hiss (which was to be expected if you were a male poet and ever said anything politically incorrect up there), and he’d kind of finish off his rap by quoting a line from one of the Angry Woman poems that someone had read up there at some time in the past, “Testicles Like Bugs On a Windshield”, and he’d perform this sort of a pelvic wince as he said it. Pretty patronizing schtick, I thought, in a “We humor them because we want to get laid” kind of way, but the Angry Women in the audience always got a big kick out of it.
As we went to more and more of these things, it became apparent that there were a lot of other rules operating at the Poetry Slam besides the ones Marc laid out each night. For instance, poetry that smacked of any sort of book-larnin’ at all was strictly taboo, as were poems that rhymed, or poems that had any discernible structure (okay I exaggerate: there was this one Angry Woman poem called “Black Lace Teddy” in which Our Heroine leaves the pig-dog alone and frustrated which had a wonderful, imaginative structure, and was one of my favorites). Also against the rules was any poem that in any way, shape, or form espoused any conservative cause or expressed any conservative viewpoint, or, for that matter, pretty much any straight white male viewpoint. Feminist poetry, gay poetry, African-American poetry, Angry Woman’s poetry (seemingly about 1/2 of all poetry read), anti-Gulf War poetry – these were the types of poetry that were “in” at the Chicago Poetry Slam. Most against the rules of all, however, was the use, by a male, of any Vulgar Word that described any part of the female anatomy. Say one once and the hisses started. Say one twice and they’d hiss and boo the poet off the stage, no matter what the merits of the poem in progress.
Each night after Marc’s rap the show was pretty much the same: Marc would open it up with a poem, then it would be open mike time (also when the “virgin virgin” poets would get up there, people who had never read in public before, and some of them would literally be shaking – I admired them), then there’d be some featured poets, sometimes from out of town, and then there’d be the contest part of the show, where the poets competed for the grand prize of $5 and maybe a chance to move on to the next round of whatever contest Marc was running at the time. The girlfriend and I usually arrived early so as to get a good table up front, and since up front is where Marc usually picked his judges from, and since the girlfriend was pretty cute (in my estimation, anyhow), Marc would sometimes pick her for a judge. I didn’t usually agree with how she judged most of the poems, as I personally favored ones with some sort of artistic merit (in my estimation, anyhow), and she would always just judge on how the poem affected her emotionally. But then I’d think, after all, she IS the one doing the judging, and in the end, isn’t the conveyance of emotion what poetry is all about? Sometimes the audience didn’t agree with her either, and they’d boo if they thought her score was too low, or too high, and who knows what they were thinking. One thing I did agree with was that she never gave anyone’s poem minus infinity, like one of those Angry Women had, and she always managed to find some amount of positive points to give everyone’s poem. Hey, they deserved it, for having the guts to be up there.
So, anyhow, one night, Marc had brought in this out of town poet for the feature part of the show, and this guy looked like he was a homeless person straight off the streets, scruffy whiskers, ripped dirty clothes, wild hair, wild eyes, and all. His poems were all written on what looked like napkins and mismatched sheets of scrap paper, and the beat up manila folder he was carrying them in was all disheveled and a giant mess and I couldn’t see how this guy was going to find anything in there, but he did.
He started reading a poem about going to a small town carnival, and the thing was rambling along, and not particularly great, but I’d heard worse, and he got to the part where they were all watching the sleazy side show strip act like always used to be at carnivals for our fathers and uncles, and said some words like, “She had it, and we wanted it!”, which I thought was the perfect a description of the leering, drooling atmosphere at one of those things. There were immediately a few hisses from the back of the Green Mill audience. Then he said a few of the Vulgar Words that describe female body parts, and there were more hisses and a few boos. But he kept right on going and said a whole ton of Vulgar Words, and repeated “She had it, and we wanted it!” describing this side-show stripper, and then the mob behind us at the Green Mill was literally howling at this guy, hissing, shouting Belmont!, booing, pounding their tables and the floor and the bar. I’d never heard the audience so vicious, like a pack of rabid dogs, and this even included some of the other poets who were waiting their turn or who had already read.
I was shocked and frankly embarrassed to be a part of that audience. Finally the poet stopped, extended his middle finger to the audience, and yelled out, “F**K you! It was REAL, I was there, and I wrote it, so F**K you! You (and I don’t remember what word he used here) wouldn’t know anything REAL if it bit you! F**K all of you!”, and all included me. Then he grabbed his junk and stomped off the stage and left the Green Mill in a huff, presumably never to return.
After we went home I thought a lot about this incident, for several days. It kind of pissed me off. All the self-styled liberal open-minded fellow humans and fellow poets of the Green Mill audience had scored this guy’s poem, and by extension the guy himself, a score of lower than minus infinity in the rudest, cruelest way possible. They couldn’t just wait for the end of his poem and be done with it. It was okay for the Angry Women to get up there every week and deal in the symbols of Testicle Like Bugs on the Windshield and the Black Lace Teddy thing, and they all cheered for that, but Katie bar the door for this guy and his Vulgar Word symbols. It didn’t feel at all like a nice fun little secret club anymore. And I’d gotten included in the group against which he directed his departing tirade because I was part of that audience.
Thought about it and thought about it. The “She had it, and we wanted it!” poem, and its effect on the audience, had indeed made a poetical emotional impact on me. From that standpoint I guess it was a success. For all the good things I ever probably saw there, this is what I remember.
It was the last time we visited Marc Smith’s Chicago Poetry Slam.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date written: 06/22/1994