If you saw Chicagoland’s modern spoken word scene go full circle from brewing in the bars and cafes of measuredly boho Hyde Park, liberally boho Wicker Park, noir boho Bronzeville, yuppie boho Lakeview, and the Loop’s boho frontiers, you got to the Def Poetry Jam Showcase April 7 at the Gold Coast’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The showcase’s host, Guild Complex’s artistic manager Mario Smith, a veteran of Central Wicker Park’s erstwhile Literary Explosion afrocentric bookstore’s musty crawl space off Damen and Milwaukee avenues, maintained that Def Poetry Jam began in 1999 when he and fellow Chicagoland poets took New York City by storm with their performances at the Wordstock festival in Brooklyn. Based on the senior talent playing to an audience that, unlike a Def Comedy Jam crowd—which primarily refrained from standing ovations and other madly spontaneous displays of adulation until performance of a particular verse was completed and genteelly bobbed to the DJ Sadaar’s jazz and soul house— the event might even have roots traceable to the Bronzeville Renaissance the late Gwendolyn Brooks as part of.
Returning from self-imposed exile in England and Ghana to hometown Chicagoland for good, Sam Greenlee read spiritual verse that encompassed African princesses and promised to turn the status quo even more topsy turvy than when he wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door half a century ago. Kent Foreman, who attended Langston Hughes’ last poetry workshop, satirically broached the Judeo-Christian ethic, serenaded Chicago with post-modern Sandburg abandon in part by describing the Loop crossroads of State and Madison as “that glittering clit,” and dissenting the domineering high-maintenance significant other in this romance in haiku.
Representing for the afro-latinos to the accompaniment of acoustic guitar, Teresa Vasquez waxed in ingles on a range of very personal subjects that encompassed undying love withstanding the worst brutality kicked straight Castillian about the Greek god of wine, woman, and song Dionysus
meeting a Yoruba goddess. Brenda Matthews’s performance with her son Cortez of her signature piece about hard narcotics thwarting liberation “Rocks And Blows” possessed a counterpointing mic-controlling quality. Her other piece about a mother struggling to preserve her gift of a son from hood trash elements as also an overwhelming crowd pleasure.
Besides material comprising such imagery as moving mountains to liberation, New York City’s Kayo exuded a Shakespearean Brooklynese recalling Paul Robeson that was a little ragga chanting around the edges. Hebrew-American Kevin Corval was heavily concerned with how neo-colonial capitalism was its own undoing, especially as demonstrated by the rash of gun violence at virtually lily-white suburban public schools since Columbine, Colo.
The more musical performances in the program included Avery R. Young’s explosively peripatetic verse to muted jazz horn and human acoustics-laced satire by Marvin Tate and D Settlement on declining white male privilege and metaphorical eulogy on endangered African-Amerian manhood via a murder trial. Backed up by his jazz funk band Zaaje and soul crooner, Malik Yusef the Wordsmyth’s mic-controlling free verse championed the dregs of the hood, bluesily upbraided a former girlfriend who dumped him for far less of a catch, and somberly contemplated the world going to Hell in a thimble. As Smith noted, no who has an excuse any longer to stay at home with all the local talent that kept the MCA audience on the edge of its seats from
beginning to end.
