{"id":791484,"date":"2026-05-12T16:51:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T16:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/791484\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T16:51:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T16:51:14","slug":"from-garbage-into-the-stuff-of-history-an-illinois-poet-donates-a-trove-to-the-newberry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/791484\/","title":{"rendered":"From garbage into the stuff of history, an Illinois poet donates a trove to the Newberry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Kelly Smith<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would have the tendency to throw it all out,\u201d said Smith.<\/p>\n

Fliers, clippings, letters, photos, doodles, VCR tapes, sheet music, address books, all decades old, in a banker\u2019s box and a paper shopping bag.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s some good stuff in here,\u201d says Smith, to Alison Hinderliter, the Newberry\u2019s manuscripts and archives librarian. <\/p>\n

The box is labeled \u201cSLAM MEMORABILIA,\u201d reflecting Smith\u2019s legacy to Chicago and the world: the Uptown Poetry Slam, started by him in 1986, then spread around the globe as poetry \u2014 the art form that Emily Dickinson sewed into little packets and silently tucked into a drawer \u2014 took center stage as performance art to be screamed, whispered, howled and wept in places such as the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 perhaps \u2014 joyously discovered someday by future scholars.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always glad to hear about people donating their papers,\u201d said Jonathan Eig, whose \u201cKing: A Life\u201d won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2024. \u201cI think of these people as pirates burying treasure chests \u2014 in really easy-to-find places, with reliable maps. They don\u2019t know who\u2019s going to come along and what those future treasure seekers are going to discover and which objects they\u2019ll find most valuable. Archives mean everything to someone in my line of work. Archives offer proof that the past is never past \u2014 it\u2019s there to be rediscovered, redefined and retold. Some people think of these things as musty old boxes, but those people are wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get an average of 100 donations a year,\u201d Hinderliter said. \u201cSome are just one small photograph, an envelope or a folder. Some are huge, terabytes of material, or boxes and boxes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who donates to the Newberry, a private research library founded in 1887?<\/p>\n

\u201cThey tend to be people donating their family papers,\u201d said Hinderliter. \u201cAlso organizations and clubs \u2014 the Cliff Dwellers, the Arts Club.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have hundreds of Bibles,\u201d said Hinderliter, who spends too much time explaining to would-be donors they aren\u2019t looking for front pages from the Kennedy assassination.<\/p>\n

\u201cNewspaper are kind of a nightmare,\u201d she said. \u201cEverybody kept those.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Newberry has about five million pages of manuscripts \u2014 some 15,000 linear feet, or two and a half miles. Processing them keeps Hinderliter and four staffers busy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe go through every collection, checking for possible conversation issues \u2014 mold, mildew, pest infestation,\u201d she said. \u201cWe organize and create online finding aids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s collection \u2014 all worked out in a donation agreement \u2014 will be the subject of a video, and a special event this July to mark the Slam\u2019s 40th anniversary. Smith has already brought about 30 boxes.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has kept a lot of stuff,\u201d said Hinderliter. \u201cWhat 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\u2019s administrative stuff \u2014 planning to go to Europe, to get a grant.\u201d<\/p>\n

What prompted Smith to donate his archives?<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of my obligation to these younger generations to get that out there,\u201d he said. \u201cTo make people understand that this didn\u2019t 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\u2019t know how the art form originated]. They\u2019re from the Slam world and don\u2019t even know. Not their fault, we didn\u2019t broadcast it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Newberry is thrilled to have his original material.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is going to be so much of this archive that is not documented anywhere,\u201d said Hinderliter. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marc Kelly Smith has bronchitis. Yet the 76-year-old poet still drove three hours this morning from his home…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":791485,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-791484","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116562643488294949","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}