Slampappy Marc Smith was in his element at the weekly Uptown Poetry Slam last Sunday night at the Green Mill. All blazing eyes and fervor, he wrangled the standing-room-only crowd all the way back to “slime corner”–what Green Mill regulars call the place near the front door, where a wall-mounted TV competes with the live performance, flashing and droning while the poets spill their guts in three-minute segments. As far as Smith’s concerned, television is the monster that inspired him to create the slam, and his dread of it is one of the things that separates him from some of his disciples–a gulf that a few years back had him walking away from the national organization he created, Poetry Slam Inc. “A lot of the younger people in the movement were looking at me like the old guy who’s an obstacle,” he says. “I said OK, if you can take it over, turn it into a thriving nonprofit institution, fine.” He announced a three-year sabbatical in ’99; by the fall of 2001 he was back. Without him, he says, things had gotten so bad that this year’s 14th annual National Poetry Slam–running August 6 through 9 at various Chicago venues and bigger than ever–wouldn’t be happening otherwise.
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Smith launched the earliest version of the slam at Bucktown’s Get Me High Lounge in 1985 and ran various local and national events out of his own pocket for a dozen years. Poetry Slam Inc. didn’t become an official nonprofit organization until 1999, and even now, he says, it’s “insanely underfunded,” unable to afford even one full-time staff member. The annual budget, which everyone seems a little vague about, is around $100,000, including PSI’s major event, the national slam, which usually costs that much to put on. The only time the national event has generated a significant surplus–$20,000–was in ’99, the last time it was held in Chicago.
Hobbled by its late start and dicey finances, the reluctant Chicago host team was surprised by a flood of applications. When 56 team slots filled in one day this spring, the organizers scrambled for more venues and still had to turn some teams away. (Next year’s slam is slated for Saint Louis, and there’s talk of regional preliminaries to keep it manageable.) The 2003 slam is so big that, for the first time, individual and team finals need to be held separately. On Wednesday and Thursday, 63 four-person teams and 21 individual poets will compete in initial bouts at five Wicker Park venues. (See the sidebar in Section Two Performance listings for details.) Then ten individual finalists will face off Friday night at Metro, and four team finalists will meet Saturday night at Navy Pier’s Skyline Stage.
