I think I first heard about poetry slams from Patricia Smith when she was a columnist at the Boston Globe. I went with Kristina to hear her slam some poetry at Cambridge Adult Ed once. It was fun.
Patricia Smith had too much imagination to be a Globe columnist, but I still remember one of her stories that, if it wasn’t real in the usual sense was real on a level that has meaning for me. She has developed her poetry side since then and has won the awards she deserves.
Today my husband pointed me to an article on another poetry slam guru, Jack McCarthy.
Bryan Marquard writes in an obit in the Globe, “At some 200 lines, Jack McCarthy’s first published poem appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe in October 1976. Filling a page, ‘South Boston Sunday’ describes a family stroll through the neighborhood of his youth …
“He thought the poem would launch his writing career, but that didn’t happen until another October, in 1993, when Mr. McCarthy took his youngest daughter to a poetry slam at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge. He got up to read and the positive response brought an epiphany: The poet’s voice and the audience’s ears were inseparable.
“ ‘For me, the live audience is really the only audience I ever think about,’ he said by phone when he knew his death was near. “When I put something down on paper and publish it, my highest hope is that someone somewhere will pick it up and read it to a third party. My sense of audience does not stop with the person who reads the poem. I hope the poem goes on to another life.’ …
“ ‘The only ambition he seems to have is to tell the truth as best he can in poems,’ the poet Thomas Lux once wrote of Mr. McCarthy.”
Stephen Dobyns, a respected poet and one of my favorite mystery writers, called him “one of the wonders of contemporary poetry. He writes — and often performs — dazzling narratives full of wit and humor, sadness and hard thinking. He should be cloned.”
Read more about McCarthy here, about Patricia Smith here, about poetry slams here.
Photograph: Peter Vicinanza/file 2007/Boston Globe
Mr. McCarthy became well known after he in the 1998 documentary “SlamNation.”
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