Episode 6: Marc Kelly Smith

On Episode 6 Gene talks to Marc Kelly Smith, founder of the world-famous Uptown Poetry Slam. Smith talks about the event's humble beginnings at the now-defunct Get Me High Lounge in Wicker Park. At that time, poetry readings were sparsely attended. "If you had 10 people, you were successful," Smith recalls. But there was another problem: "They were all so very self-indulgent, snobbish, cliquish. Here's this passionate art form and everybody is presenting it very boring, like a professor in class." Inventing the event as he went along, Smith looked for poets "with a natural flair for performing," though, at the time, he says, "poets did not take performance seriously." Smith believes that pairing poetry with performance "created a higher art form." In the summer of 1986, Smith's event moved to its current home, the Green Mill, when the historic Uptown tavern was reopened by Dave Jemilo. There Smith transferred everything he had learned at the Get Me High and watched the poetry slam grow from five people showing up to "nights with 80 people in the audience." In time, the slam became not only a beloved Chicago institution but a worldwide phenomenon, playing to audiences of hundreds in Europe and Asia. Despite having always kept his "private life pretty private," Smith opens up to Gene, relating stories of his "extreme love-hate relationship with the stage" and struggles he’s had with stage fright. He also touches on his time growing up on Chicago's "blue-collar" Southeast Side, where he discovered his "knack for writing" -- despite not having attempted to read a book until the seventh grade. That book, recommended to him by a teacher, changed his life.