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| Marc Kelly Smith, left, and Alison Hinderliter at the Newberry Library. |
Marc Kelly Smith has bronchitis. Yet the 76-year-old poet still drove three hours this morning from his home in Savanna, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, to the Newberry Library on the Near North Side, to deliver piles of paper that could be easily mistaken for garbage, even by their owner.
“I would have the tendency to throw it all out,” said Smith.
Flyers, clippings, letters, photos, doodles, VCR tapes, sheet music, address books, all decades old, in a banker’s box and a paper shopping bag.
“There’s some good stuff in here,” says Smith, to Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry’s manuscripts and archives librarian.
The box is labeled “SLAM MEMORABILIA,” reflecting Smith’s legacy to Chicago and the world: the Uptown Poetry Slam, started by him in 1986, then spread around the globe as poetry — the art form that Emily Dickinson sewed into little packets and silently tucked into a drawer — took center stage as performance art to be screamed, whispered, howled and wept in places such as the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.
As the ephemera rolled on a library cart, it moved from detritus intended to be stapled to a telephone pole then melt in the rain, into the stuff of history, carefully preserved by curators in white cotton gloves, to be — perhaps — joyously discovered someday by future scholars.
“I’m always glad to hear about people donating their papers,” said Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2024. “I think of these people as pirates burying treasure chests — in really easy-to-find places, with reliable maps. They don’t know who’s going to come along and what those future treasure seekers are going to discover and which objects they’ll find most valuable. Archives mean everything to someone in my line of work. Archives offer proof that the past is never past — it’s there to be rediscovered, redefined and retold. Some people think of these things as musty old boxes, but those people are wrong.”
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I kind of liked the typo that turned "conservation" into "conversation."
ReplyDeleteI kind of like that the box contains slam "memorbilia".
ReplyDeleteI’ve seen the poetry slam several times at the Green Mill. It’s a fun event.
ReplyDeleteWent to just one Poetry Slam at the Green Mill. One of the earliest ones, probably in 1990 or 1991. I remember a slide show and a poem called "The Death of Old Comiskey." Bob Chicoine's performance brought down the house. People were laughing, crying, cheering, yelling. It was later released as a video. Soon after, I moved to Cleveland. If we've ever had any poetry slams here, I'm not aware of them.
DeleteFlyers, shelves of filed and organized clippings, letters, photos, posters, framed photographs, VCR tapes, DVDs, CDs, sheet music, hundreds of books, all decades old. That's my whole house. Am I an archivist? No, just another terrible pack rat.
Yeah, my whole house is an archive of sorts, especially the bedrooms. One is a "Cub Room" and another is the "Trolley Room". Maybe a baseball heritage museum or a railway museum would be interested. The Newberry Library would probably pitch everything into a dumpster. Cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, who won several Pulitzers at the Tribune, once described an archive as being "a dump without the seagulls." That's mine.
My past will one day be past — it’ won't be rediscovered, redefined and retold, because I'm just an anonymous nobody who never did anything worth remembering or preserving.. What a friend called "objects of much affection" will eventually be tossed. That's the reality. Hope I'm not around to see it happen.
Smart to offload treasures while you're still the person making decisions. Otherwise, all those boxes buried in your basement will someday become buried in someone else's basement. Or, very likely, set out by the curb.
ReplyDeleteA smart solution, and probably the best one. Maybe the only one. Especially if, all those boxes stacked up in your bedrooms and in your basement have nobody else's basement to be dumped in. Because they're either estranged, deceased, or just far, far away. And they already have too many treasures of their own.
DeleteSome treasures are burdens in disguise.
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