The iconic UptownPoetry Slam is practically etched in stone on the Green Mill calendar. But April’s edition featured a particularly special performance: Chicago’s new poet laureate, Mayda Del Valle, a South Side native, was slated to appear on the bill.
Inside the same bar where Al Capone’s legend looms large, audience members buzzed about the poet laureate’s expected appearance.
If you’re a poetry enthusiast and live in Chicago, you’ve almost assuredly been to the Slam: It’s a place where writers cut their teeth, find community, brave an audience for the first time, or even get married. Nestled in the back corner behind a still functioning juke box sat David Rubin, who met and married his wife in the 90’s at the Slam.
“I’m really looking forward to this, I haven’t seen this new poet laureate yet,” said Rubin. He hushed as Slam founder and emcee Marc Smith took the stage to invite up Del Valle.
“She got her chops at the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe, but we won’t hold that against her,” Smith joked about her getting her start in New York. “ Like so many of the performance poets, they have done so much over these last 15, 20 years. They’re just sought after because they not only know the art of writing great poetry, they know the art of performing it in front of an audience. And that’s what the Slam is all about. Performance and poetry.”
Del Valle took the stage, said it had only been four months since was named to the laureate post and launched into her verses. “ I’m gonna read some poems about being from Chicago,” she said, before reading the first of eight works.
The first poem spoke to the experience of Puerto Rican immigration, with the repetition of every line beginning with, “We came.” The crowd cheered as she ended and then introduced her next poem about language with the classic slam-style rhythmic expression. The poem expressed coming back home:
Her next two poems were about her father, the first him being a South Side White Sox fan, and the next about becoming his caretaker due to Alzheimer’s:
Del Valle, a singer/songwriter, peppered her soulful Spanish singing between the verses of the poem about her father. “ His health really started to decline in November . . . and I was sitting in the living room with him one day and I was just kind of watching him sleep in his recliner and I just kind of started hearing a song,” she told the crowd.
The poems traversed a range of themes: falling in love, the lake and landscape, her family, all with a deep tie to Chicago and place.
After the Slam ended she explained to a reporter why she chose the poems she did. “ I wanted to keep it real Chicago,” she said. “I wanted to keep it very current to what it is that I’m thinking and feeling and writing about currently.”
After her performance, fans at the Slam snapped up a $2 zine she made to showcase the haikus she’s been writing daily for April’s National Poetry Month. Of course, the zines all sold out. Walking out the door, she said: “I only made 25 of them; I wish I had made 50!”