- Courtesy Louder Than a Bomb
The team finals of this year’s Louder Than a Bomb poetry slam competition were held Saturday evening in the Arie Crown Theater of McCormick Place. I hadn’t been inside the Arie Crown in close to 20 years, when I saw a ballet there. If then it was a fancy theatrical showcase, today it’s on the wrong side of the Metra tracks. The building’s vast and charmless, the carpet worn and patched, and screaming teenagers suit it perfectly. Almost every one of the 2,500 main-floor seats was taken, and the crowd made the kind of noise teens make in gyms at basketball games. The slammers and jammers they cheered on were competing in the heady task of raging against racism, sexism, and xenophobia. At least four poems addressed lynching, and another bluntly remembered a childhood of sexual abuse. The judges were generous to everybody who performed, but the highest marks went to the fiercest language and most incantatory cadences. A poet who wasn’t feeling angry and defiant had no place on the Arie Crown stage, and the defiance needed to come across loud and clear. Clear was less important than loud.
A couple days earlier I went to the movies and watched Merchants of Doubt, which is a documentary about the powerful human need to think as our friends and neighbors think. The most interesting figure in the movie is probably Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina who adopted a number of positions unpopular in his neck of the woods and in 2010 was waxed by a Tea Party opponent in the primary.
