Born on the southeast side of Chicago in 1950, Marc Kelly Smith is the founder of the Poetry Slam. He spent most of his young life as a construction worker, but had written poetry since he was 19. Fed up with a publishing industry that would not print the poems of little known poets such as he, Smith found another method for nurturing the poetry scene by hosting the first poetry slam at the Get Me High Lounge in Bucktown, Chicago in 1985. Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ... Slam poetry is a form of performance poetry that occurs within a competitive poetry event, called a slam, at which poets perform their own poems (or, in rare cases, those of others) that are judged on a numeric scale by randomly picked members of the audience. ... Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ...
Filmography
SlamNation - 1998
Bibliography
Crowdpleaser, 1996, Publisher Jeff Helgeson
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Slam Poetry, 2004, Penguin/Alpha Press (co-written with Joe Kraynak)
Marc Penka was a volatile mixture of romantic poet, philosophically inclined scholar and rock-and-roll rebel.
Marc's and my approaches to poetry, and to just about everything else in life, couldn't have been more different, but there was always much that we agreed about (the greatness of A.R. Ammons, for instance), and we both, I think, had a rash faith in the redemptive power of a thoroughly new poem.
Marc and Jeff seemed interested but a year later I had grown distant from such concerns, and Marc and Jeff were spiraling down.
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