Marc Kelly Smith has bronchitis. Yet the 76-year-old poet still drove three hours this morning from his home on in Savanna, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, to the Newberry Library on the Near North Side, to deliver piles of paper that could be easily mistaken for garbage, even by their owner.
“I would have the tendency to throw it all out,” said Smith.
Fliers, clippings, letters, photos, doodles, VCR tapes, sheet music, address books, all decades old, in a banker’s box and a paper shopping bag.
“There’s some good stuff in here,” says Smith, to Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry’s manuscripts and archives librarian.
The box is labeled “SLAM MEMORABILIA,” reflecting Smith’s legacy to Chicago and the world: the Uptown Poetry Slam, started by him in 1986, then spread around the globe as poetry — the art form that Emily Dickinson sewed into little packets and silently tucked into a drawer — took center stage as performance art to be screamed, whispered, howled and wept in places such as the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.
As the ephemera rolled on a library cart, it moved from detritus intended to be stapled to a telephone pole then melt in the rain, into the stuff of history, carefully preserved by curators in white cotton gloves to be — perhaps — joyously discovered someday by future scholars.
“I’m always glad to hear about people donating their papers,” said Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2024. “I think of these people as pirates burying treasure chests — in really easy-to-find places, with reliable maps. They don’t know who’s going to come along and what those future treasure seekers are going to discover and which objects they’ll find most valuable. Archives mean everything to someone in my line of work. Archives offer proof that the past is never past — it’s there to be rediscovered, redefined and retold. Some people think of these things as musty old boxes, but those people are wrong.”
“We get an average of 100 donations a year,” Hinderliter said. “Some are just one small photograph, an envelope or a folder. Some are huge, terabytes of material, or boxes and boxes.”
Who donates to the Newberry, a private research library founded in 1887?
“They tend to be people donating their family papers,” said Hinderliter. “Also organizations and clubs — the Cliff Dwellers, the Arts Club.”
What does the Newberry not want? Physical objects, like the soup tureen that someone offered, supposedly buried to be saved from the Great Chicago Fire. Or family Bibles.
“We have hundreds of Bibles,” said Hinderliter, who spends too much time explaining to would-be donors they aren’t looking for front pages from the Kennedy assassination.
“Newspaper are kind of a nightmare,” she said. “Everybody kept those.”
The Newberry has about five million pages of manuscripts — some 15,000 linear feet, or two and a half miles. Processing them keeps Hinderliter and four staffers busy.
“We go through every collection, checking for possible conversation issues — mold, mildew, pest infestation,” she said. “We organize and create online finding aids.”
Smith’s collection — all worked out in a donation agreement — will be the subject of a video, and a special event this July to mark the Slam’s 40th anniversary. Smith has already brought about 30 boxes.
“He has kept a lot of stuff,” said Hinderliter. “What you might expect. Some photographs. A lot of fliers, and a lot of clippings, announcing where and when people are performing. Reviews and feature articles. Then there’s administrative stuff — planning to go to Europe, to get a grant.”
What prompted Smith to donate his archives?
“It’s kind of my obligation to these younger generations to get that out there,” he said. “To make people understand that this didn’t happen by chance. There was lots of intention, and it was here in Chicago, the roots and history of it is not as preserved in the minds out there as it should be. In America there are dozens of Slam organizations [who don’t know how the art form originated]. They’re from the Slam world and don’t even know. Not their fault, we didn’t broadcast it.”
The Newberry is thrilled to have his original material.
“There is going to be so much of this archive that is not documented anywhere,” said Hinderliter. “It’s an ephemeral art form, so we capture what we can. This is like gold, primary source material for anyone studying either a particular poet, a poetic movement, something about local history and Chicago, the intersection of arts, because it’s poetry and music, sometimes even dance and theater. This aggregation of primary source materials is really important, especially 50, 75, 100 years from now, when people are wondering how all of this came about.”