Every Sunday night for the past twenty years, a loyal band of performers and listeners has congregated at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, 4802 N. Broadway Ave., to channel their inner-Ginsberg at the Uptown Poetry Slam. Poetry amateurs and aficionados are summoned to the stage to share their verse in a live competition. “This is ‘church’ for me,” said J.W. Baz, a Slam regular since his twenty-first birthday two years ago. “I feel like I’ve missed something if I don’t come. There is a community bond here-among like-minded intellectuals.”

Founded by so-called poetic prophet Marc Smith in July 1986, the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill was the first competition of its kind. By turning poetry performance into a show, slam offers a forum for poets to deliver new works to an eclectic and engaged audience. Since its Chicago inception, the slam movement has enjoyed worldwide popularity, flourishing in cities like New York, San Francisco, Prague and Amsterdam. Smith, a construction worker-turned full-time performer, emcees every Sunday, framing the poetry with his wry antics.

“You are in for a show ladies and gentlemen,” Smith yells to the howling crowd. “For only six bucks … we should have charged more.”

“The worldwide outgrowth of slam is often taken for granted, the idea of having an audience for poetry,” Smith said. “The audiences were hesitant at first. They didn’t know how to react to the pieces. They needed to be given permission.”

The 99-year-old Green Mill, the oldest jazz club in the nation and former hangout of prohibition-era gangster Al Capone, has provided a lively atmosphere for the weekly slams for nearly twenty years. Marked by its neon art deco marquee, the dimly lit former speakeasy conjures up the spirit of the beat movement though few contemporary patrons wear black berets or turtlenecks. Even the graffiti on the bathroom stalls has been edited, with literary hipsters supplying more active verbs and descriptive adjectives.

Katherine Zwick, Communication ’01, discovered the Uptown Poetry Slam during her senior year after receiving encouragement from classmates. “I thought my rant style was a monologue, but others regarded it as a slam,” said Zwick, who is now a music booking agent and paralegal. “I performed and made the National Poetry Slam team. Now I’m considered a retired slammer.”

Even artistic expression comes with a few regulations. The Uptown Poetry Slam follows the five-minute rule and two-poem maximum for each performer. If a piece exceeds the time limit, the audience is authorized to boo, hiss, groan or snap the poet off stage. The responsibility of contest judging is delegated to three randomly selected audience members who merit slam artists scores between negative infinity and 10 points. In a two-round slam, the two highest scoring poets move on to a second bout. Previous totals are erased and each competitor performs a different piece. The winner receives a prize of $10.

“Slam challenges you to be at the top of your game. There is no wiggle room,” said Jaclyn Friedman, an avid slammer from Boston and first-time Chicago winner. When she is not commanding the microphone, Friedman serves as the program director for the Center for New Words, a non-profit women’s organization.

“I would describe my slam style as ‘feminist,” said Friedman. “I have always loved performing. Anything can happen.”

Since slam poetry is designed to be heard and not read, the pieces rely on strong audience response.

“The audience is an important component in a slam. If they don’t click with the poet or piece, even negatively with snapping or hissing, it doesn’t work,” said Ian Morris, associate editor of TriQuarterly literary magazine. “I encourage everyone to attend a slam at least twice, because the quality of the experience can really vary.”

There is no typical evening at the Uptown Poetry Slam. Last Sunday, the styles of the work ranged from jilted romance confessionals to the satirical “Pain of the bald man.” Poets discussed family, religion, race and gender, praised by the gasps and applause of their peers.

“There are a lot of lines from that poem I want to remember,” said Katherine Sander, a Weinberg senior.

The event featured a farewell to departing slammer/school teacher Dan Ferry.

“I’m one of thousands of people who wouldn’t have found a voice without Marc Smith,” Ferry said to the audience. “You can’t have a community of speakers without a community of listeners.”

It’s been more than one thousand Sundays since the Uptown Poetry Slam started, but the Green Mill crowds still curl into the lounge’s velvet booths to sip a glass of wine and savor a stanza of verse. It’s intimate, sometimes therapeutic, and for only six bucks, they should have charged more.

Reach Lindsay Meck at [email protected].