Uptown Poetry Slam founder faces the wilderness, live onstage

Marc Kelly Smith

     Shutting up is an art form that I struggle to master. A challenge for many of us older guys, from whom nobody wants to hear anything. We've had our say.
     Several times during the only Bears games I watched this season, the last two, the camera focused in on the "GSH" on the left arms of players' jerseys, and I had to stifle the impulse to explain to my wife, "George Stanley Halas, founder of the Bears."
     Which would have inevitably led to my sharing one of my favorite bits of sports trivia: In the 1920s, when Halas took over the team and moved it from Decatur to Chicago, the practice was to name a city's pro football team after its existing baseball team. Which is how you got New York Giants in both sports. But Halas, noting that players are bigger in football than in baseball, said they're too tough to be Cubs; they're Bears. The name stuck.
     Or so the story goes.
     I didn't say any of that. She enjoyed the game and said we might consider watching this football next year, an outcome not unrelated to my efforts to maintain a manly silence.
     Halas died in in 1983. Most key formative figures in Chicago sports — William Wrigley, Charles Comiskey, Bill Wirtz — are long gone.
     But one Chicago sports pioneer still walks among us. Marc Kelly Smith founded the Uptown Poetry Slam, first at the Get Me High Lounge, then 40 years ago this July, at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. And if you're thinking, "Poetry is not sports," then you haven't been to the Green Mill and witnessed the slam on the third Sunday of every month.
     As someone who has watched Michael Jordan dunk a basketball, shared an outfield with Minnie Minoso at a charity softball game and watched a Cubs game from inside the scoreboard at Wrigley Field, I can assure you that the poetry slam is as peak a Chicago competitive experience as they come. Poetry is like rugby — not that popular, but plenty tough.
     Smith is appearing in a one-man show this weekend at Chicago's 50-seat Kimball Arts Center, and I phoned to ask him why, at 76, he is still talking. Why bother?
     "That's a good question," Smith said. "When the COVID pandemic hit, I thought, 'Well, OK, the run at the Green Mill, 35 years, that's a pretty good run.' Time to back off the career."
     He'd bought a house in Savanna, Illinois, "a river rat town on the Mississippi," 2½ hours west of Chicago, as a fixer-upper project.
     "I've always been a city guy," Smith said. "But I drove through the area. It was just so cheap. I came back one day and got a house to restore."
     With events drying up post-COVID, he gave up his Chicago apartment and moved there full time. The plan was to write a novel, watch the river flow and the years pass. But he succumbed to that trap snaring so many aging writers: complaining about their shrinking worlds.

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