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Marc Kelly Smith (born 1949) is an American poet and founder of the poetry slam movement, for which he received the nickname Slam Papi  Smith was born in 1949 and grew up on the southeast side of Chicago. He attended/graduated Charles P. Caldwell Elementary School and James H. Bowen High School. Smith spent most of his young life as a construction worker, but has written poetry since he was 19. He considers himself a socialist. Smith started at an open mic night at the Get Me High lounge in November 1984 called the Monday Night Poetry Reading. Even as poets scoffed at artists "performing" their work, rather than genteelly "reading" it, the event grew in popularity. Smith saw his approach as an "up yours" to establishment poets he considered snooty and effete, because at their events, "no one was listening. "Pull the Next One Up," one of the poems that slam poet Marc Smith included in Crowd pleaser (1996), is preceded by a prose introduction that describes a performance he gave at a "high-class country club on Chicago's North Shore" Smith, who founded the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, had been invited to this country club in order to bring some "off beat street culture" to Chicago's elite (ibid). It is clear from Smith's introduction that he perceives this audience to be unflappable and perhaps a little too well bred for the slam. He describes the audience as "seated sedately at their gourmet dinner tables--starched, stern, and ready to be bored" .

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