From garbage into the stuff of history, a trove is donated to the Newberry from Illinois poet

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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