In 1980 Marc Smith was just another poet yearning to express himself onstage. But when he tried to break into the Chicago poetry scene, he discovered he wasn’t welcome.
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Smith organized it as a three-part show: an open mike, feature performances by visiting poets, and finally a competition in which novices took on award-winning veterans. He selected judges from the audience at random, and in a bow to our beatnik ancestors, observers snapped their fingers to express displeasure with performers.
Since then slams (a term Smith says he coined in 1986 when asked by a Sun-Times writer for a title) have spread to at least 15 countries, and this week Chicago will host teams from 48 U.S. cities at the tenth annual National Poetry Slam. The prize for the winning four-person team is $5,000.
Smith responds, “Publicly performed poetry has been going on since the time of the Japanese and the Greeks. The key to the slam is that we made the effort to get the word out and build this into something the public is aware of. If you do the work, you deserve the recognition, and it’s no accident that it’s packed after 12 years.”
