No sound explanation can be offered for the shocking violence recently perpetrated in Chicago at the Green Mill’s Uptown Poetry Slam. Some would argue that violence has always been a part of the Green Mill’s history, a Prohibition hang out for Al Capone and Machine Gun Jack McCurn, and now a Mecca for an army of aggressive, competitive performers known as slammers. To encounter unhinged rabidity at an event known world wide as a haven for poetic undertakings seems almost beyond belief. That the reported violence escalated into a mayhem ending in the disfigurement of one of Chicago’s most prominent performance poets is sad and endemic of America’s relish for pugilistic entertainment forms even in the realm of poetry.

For those unfamiliar with the Bob Oafham Incident a brief account is in order:

Bob Oafham, one of the pioneers of performance poetry, began his versifying career decades before the beat generation ever bopped a bongo. Prior to WW II Oafham lead a brigade of young idealists into Chicago’s Bohemian quarters and commandeered its central citadel, the Dill Pickle Club, into a curious anarchistic haven for brightening literary luminaries. His positions fostered headlines proclaiming him a dangerous radical obsessed with exposing the city’s isolationists as fascist-leaning industrial Nazis. During the war he confused the same detractors by reciting patriotic sonnets to blue collar working women constructing submarines in secret plants on Chicago’s west side -- while, in an opposite effort, publishing anti-war pantoums in pacifist newsletters.

Placing himself in high-profile jeopardy during the McCarthy Era Oafham stood on a red oil drum outside the Tribune Tower chanting Limerick renditions of the 1st and 2nd Amendments while costumed as a tuxedoed Karl Marx. He was arrested and jailed three times for these public display.

The Chicago beat generation revered Bob as the unsung founder of their existential selves, and the flower children of the flatlands considered him to be their Timothy Leary.

With a history as rich as this, one would think that such a personality would forever be held in high esteem by all new schools of self-expression. Not so. In the eighties Oafham’s reputation, denigrated by establishment poetry circles, fell to the status of kook, oddball, and nuisance. He was barely tolerated at poetry readings and secretly black balled from most respectable literary events. The Green Mill being an open arena became an oasis for Oafham, one of the few places allowing his free speech. Weekly he gave voice to poems advocating peculiar and entertaining points of view concerning the state of the nation, the state of the state, the state of the world, and, especially, the state of contemporary poetry.

On the night of the Incident, Oafham unleashed a diatribe against an array of targets he had hitherto left untouched. Unfortunately, his attacks were construed as prejudicial personal vendettas aimed at certain individuals present in the audience. He accused the “white bread yuppies” of mindlessly swallowing the “cliché rhymed rants” of young middleclass and well-to-do ethnic minorities masquerading as militants. Oafhm proclaimed that these pale folk acted as if the accusatory venoms they were eagerly ingesting were tonics for the sloppy guilt-feelings they bore from having grown up in suburbia, sheltered and over-educated. He made great fun of a middle-aged man who was pandering to womanhood by graphically disclosing his brute sexual inadequacies. He railed against youngsters who sought to foster a fashionable non-conformity by spiking their lips and shaving their eyebrows. The audience hated him. They stomped and booed and demanded that he cease his blatherings, exit from the stage, and cower in the corner, ostracized and rebuked.

After witnessing the brutal treatment exercised by the audience, Marc Smith, the ever-placating host of the Green Mill Uptown Poetry Slam, made, what I feel was, a strategic error. When it came time for the third and final set, the slam competition, he chose Bob to be one of the judges. It was clearly a bad choice. The maelstrom resultant from his scores began almost at once.

The first contestant was a thin young woman with a pierced nose, scantily dressed, who was recounting her rape experience at the hands of her step uncle’s brother. Before she had finished uttering her eight line -- indeed at the first indication that this was, as Bob wrote on his score card for everyone to see, “yet another rape poem” -- he held up a score of minus 69 which received immediate boos prompting him to reduce her score to – 478. The shouts of disapproval were deafening. The young woman gave Bob the middle finger and scuffled back to her seat.

The next poet faired no better – a black woman with a lovely voice who soothingly spoke of how sexy it would be to have a man seduce her with his brain and not his penis, giving hot sizzling head to her intelligence. Again Bob didn’t wait for the poet to finish. He held up a negative 522 which incited the woman’s boyfriend to shout out: “Motherfucker, you need to get laid – by a pipe.” The woman returned to her seat laughing as a good sportswoman should obviously endowed with the understanding that the slam was never meant to be a precise judgment of quality … and the crowd, of course, booed even more ferociously.

However, the straw that collapsed the camel and put Bob’s physical being in high jeopardy was brought to the stage by a poet whose poem was berating the slam itself. This poem railed against the stock political affectations of the slam, the self-focused nature of the material, the three-minute rule, the me-me-me-ness, the slick performances, the pandering to easy ideas, the purple language, the politically correct thinking, the counterfeit emotions, and the over-all butchery of sense, sensibility, and form. The audience thought for sure that Asshole Bob would love this one. 

And indeed it seemed he did. This poet he allowed to finish without a peep. At its end, however, Bob vocally announced his refusal to score, as many young people are now refusing to vote for the bad choices offered by the American political system. Yes, Bob flat out refused to participate in any further scoring. It was his ultimate statement. No more scoring.

A spontaneous vehement chant arose from the audience “Score! Score!” which shortly transformed into “SCORE, YOU FUCKHEAD, SCORE!” which was followed by a shower on napkin wads and straws pulled from their expensive cocktails and delivered like missiles against his forehead.

Across the stage twenty feet from where Bob was receiving fire, Mr. Smith, host of the show, ducked as the first bottle flew like a hand grenade at Bob’s head. Smith immediately jumped to his feet and started to chastise the audience for its uncivilized behavior. While thus engaged, the alleged rape victim sprang to her feet and pushed Bob to the floor splaying him under the table with a knee to the groin. She then began biting his face with her sharp rat like teeth, spitting the torn pieces of flesh into a nearby ashtray. By the time Harold the bouncer reached Bob, the little lady had ripped fifteen nasty excavations out of Bob’s cheeks, nose, chin, and forehead decorating his moony face with an assortment of red craters. The audience jeered as Big Harold pulled the woman off Bob. Some shouting “Let her chew him to death!” Others showering bottle caps, straws, and glassware on Bob’s retreating figure.

In stoic silence Bob packed his belonging into a dilapidated satchel and lumbered out the side door.

I have been left befuddled by the incident, a mere witness and reporter. What has been created? Does the mob really know what’s best for the mob? Is “of the people and by people” a safe course? Why didn’t the rape victim have compassion for Bob? Why didn’t she try to find out who he was before she started chewing on him? Is this art or just a new form of Roman spectacle?

The incident has become a turning point in my journalistic career. Bob Oafham, now disfigured beyond his natural homeliness, continues to write and read poems across the city, as do hundreds of poets wishing to add their voices to the swill of self-expression. I, however, spend much of my day, everyday, sitting on a bench contemplating clouds watching the sun’s passage across the sky wishing to understand the music of the stars. This will be my last effort in reporting for quite some time.