Official Poetry Slam History and Beliefs

In 1985 a construction worker and poet named Marc Kelly Smith (slampapi) started a poetry reading series at Chicago’s infamous Get Me High Lounge, a jazz joint cubby hole on the city’s near west side. He was looking for a way to breathe new life into the deadly dull poetry open mikes of the day. The series' emphasis was on performance and laid the groundwork for a style of poetry and performance that would eventually spread across the world.


In 1986 Smith approached Dave Jemilo, the owner of the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge (a Chicago jazz club and former haunt of Al Capone) with a plan to host a weekly poetry cabaret on the club's slow Sunday nights. Jemilo welcomed him, and on July 25 of that year the Uptown Poetry Slam was born. Smith drew on baseball and bridge terminology for the name, and instituted the show’s basic structure: an open mike, followed by guest performers. and culminating in a mock poetry competition. The Green Mill has since evolved into a Mecca for performance poets across the world, and the Uptown Poetry Slam continues roars on packing the house up to the rafters. It’s reputed to be the longest running show in Chicago closing in on a quarter century of weekly performances.


“Slam poetry is the brainchild of Marc Smith (So What!) and the blue collar intellectual eccentrics who crammed into the Get Me High Lounge on Monday nights from November 1984 to September 1986 for a wide-open poetry experience. Finger-poppin’ hipster Butchie (James Dukaris) owned the place and allowed anything to happen, and it usually did. The experimenters in this new style of poetry presentation gyrated, rotated, spewed, and stepped their words along the bar top, dancing between the bottles, bellowing out the backdoor, standing on the street or on their stools, turning the west side of Chicago into a rainforest of dripping whispers or a blast furnace of fiery elongated syllables, phrases, snatches of scripts, and verse that electrified the night."
- Joe Kraynak co-author of the Take the Mic and Stage a Slam published by Sourcebooks