There are many historical precursors to poetry slam that helpfully contextualize its influence and impact. But even in the 20th century, in Chicago, the birthplace of slam—the scoring, the judges chosen from the audience, the three rounds, the cash prize—there was already an ongoing series of competitions sponsored by a man named Al Simmons, who created the World Poetry Association in the early 1980s. The WPA put on “poetry boxing matches” which took place in actual boxing rings, with timed rounds and the like. These Chicago bouts would eventually travel to New Mexico and be held at the Taos Poetry Circus, under the mantle of the Heavyweight Poetry Championships. Famous winners of the competition included everyone from Ntozake Shange to Quincy Troupe (who won it twice), alongside any number of poets who blurred the boundary between stage and page and, what’s more, showed great skill as improvisers (there’s a round in the Heavyweight Championships that requires this) that is worthy of admiration all on its own.
Which brings us to the period when poetry slam as we know it now was born: 1984–86, the years during which a construction worker and avant-garde experimentalist named Marc Smith would get together on Monday nights with a group of friends, colleagues, and strangers at the Get Me High Lounge on Chicago’s West Side, for a performance competition that inaugurated—but in some ways bears little resemblance to—what is now known across the world as poetry slam. Those nights at the Get Me High, for one, featured costumes and music and props, all of which are now explicitly banned for the most part in organized slam competitions across the country. There is little mention in the early annals of slam of anything like time penalties, for instance, which are now a crucial component of every level of slam, and regularly make the difference between who does and does not take home a win in an individual bout, even at the highest levels of competition.
The Get Me High Lounge was the first space that allowed Smith, a white, working-class writer in his late 30s, to consistently book whatever sort of performance work he wanted, including vaudeville, comedy, and more traditional poetry readings. Eventually he happened upon a format that seemed to resonate deeply with the crowd, which was a kind of mock poetry battle, where poets would have their work judged by strangers in the audience, first by jeering and applause, and then by scores. This early format stuck.