DAY 1 – 9/17/10: We arrive at Alvin Lau’s apartment in the early evening and soon after depart for Real Talk Live, a recurring open mic at the Vox Ferus (Fierce Voice) house, home of Emily Rose, Laura Yes Yes, J. W. Baz, Eboni Hogan and Roger Bonair-Agard, who are all moving out at the end of September. This is, therefore, the last Real Talk Live at this location, so it’s a pretty good place for our first stop on the tour. The featured guests are Crista Franklin, who impressed me both with her poetry and the fact that she mentioned David Cronenberg in between poems, and the Gringo Choir, a traveling troupe of poets made up of Maxwell Kessler, Carrie Rudzinski, Steve Sabrizie and Carlos Williams. Alice gets on the open mic list last-minute and receives a warm reception. Laura and Eboni are out of town tonight, but we stay for a while and party with the other residents and guests before heading back to Alvin’s for some much needed sleep.

DAY 2 – 9/18/10: A bit fatigued from travel and such, we keep it low-key today, just exploring the neighborhood before retiring to Alvin’s to watch a movie (Munich). Sorry to bore you.

DAY 3 – 9/19/10: We make our pilgrimage to the Mecca of Slam, the place where it all began, Chicago’s legendary Green Mill jazz club. Alice is set to do a spotlight feature before Cin Salach next week (9/26), but we both decide to sign up for the Slam tonight, along with Carrie and Max from the Gringo Choir, Houston Hughes from Lafayette, Arkansas, and Chicago’s own Gregory Pickett, among others. Marc “So What?” Smith, the man who created the Poetry Slam, does an exemplary job of hosting the open mic, then proceeds to fill the feature slot with a pretty amazing one-man show around the central theme of tattooing. The old man’s still got it, f’sho. Then the Slam begins and I, of course, pull the suicide spot. I do “House,” which gets me a few hisses right off the bat, but then the audience seems to settle in and enjoy it once they realize it’s not actually sexist and I do alright, getting pretty big laughs in the right spots. Alice does “A Love Letter to Annabel Chong” later in the first round and, though she doesn’t make the second round, several people seek her out to express their love of the poem throughout the night. I barely manage to make the second round and get the suicide spot again (!), then fuck it up by doing “The Last Days of Living Free,” which must be too weird for this crowd; I barely manage to finish before they snap me offstage (for those who don’t already know, snapping is the first stage of showing disapproval, followed by stomping and then booing; hissing is for sexism). Gregory Pickett goes on to win the Slam, just barely edging out Max Kessler, whose third-round piece, “Pests,” is my favorite poem of the night. Seriously, check this out:

DAY 4 – 9/20/10: Tonight we’re set to feature at Mental Graffiti, at their new location in the Butterfly Social Club, right next door to their former spot at the Funky Buddha Lounge. The Butterfly is a cool place, too, with DVD projection of Waking Life on the wall behind the bar throughout the night. Instead of sharing the feature set, we decide last minute that I will just slam and Alice will rock the feature set solo, which works out well. Her set is very good, but she tells me later she’s decided to work on her banter in between poems, opting to actually have planned jokes and introductions to some poems as well as just improvising and having a conversation with the audience; this new approach will serve her very well in the coming days and weeks. Tim Stafford is an excellent host, as many of you know; throughout the Slam, he and Baz have an extended fake rivalry going, with Baz writing personal messages such as “Tongue-jab my shitbox, Tim” on the scorecards. I do “New Batch” in the first round and get a great response, with big laughs in all the right spots and pretty damn good scores, but only the top two go into the second round, those being Billy Tuggle (one of my all-time favorite people in Slam) and Adrienne Nadeau, a recent Chicago transplant who ends up winning with some funny, poignant and empowering work, including one with rhymes that don’t suck (an unfortunate rarity in non-Hip-Hop poetry shows).

DAY 5 – 9/21/10: Today we decide to take a walk through Lincoln Park and stumble upon the free zoo, about which we both have mixed feelings, as with all zoos. It’s depressing to think about the monotonous and confined lives the animals must lead, but I guess having them in places like this saves many of them from extinction, and the Lincoln Park Zoo in particular apparently does a lot for conservation, including breeding endangered animals and releasing the offspring into the wild. Anyway, on a purely selfish level, it’s cool to see the wide variety of animals housed there, especially the primate house, where there are a lot of fascinating monkeys and apes, including one who flexed his boner at us at one point. Later, we go to Wordplay, the Young Chicago Authors workshop/open mic, facilitated by Robbie Q. Telfer, and find out from one of the young authors that the Lincoln Park Zoo has recently caught a lot of heat about their elephant population, which has died off due to some sort of neglect. This is just word of mouth to us, of course, but it is true that we saw no elephants there. Robbie Q. is the funniest workshop leader I’ve ever seen, at one point telling a young woman who is reluctant to read her work, “Ok, why don’t you just go back out on the street and get some heroin, then?” We read two poems each in the open mic and the young authors, many of whom are still in high school, are very welcoming and receptive; they’re good writers, too. Here’s a memorable quote, from a poem by Tim Seivers, read by Robbie during the workshop: “In this life, we invent ourselves frame by frame; the cartoonist is just a sad rumor.”

DAY 6 – 9/22/10: Tonight we go to In One Ear, a very popular open mic hosted by Billy Tuggle and Pete Wolff at Heartland Cafe, a really cool place that has not only a big room with a stage for the open mic, but also a bar and, next to that, an organic co-op! The open mic is extremely well-attended; we even run into Adrienne Nadeau again, along with her friend Daytone, who does a very strange poem about his butt. There is a wide variety at this show, including a few stand-up comics (one of whom is hilarious and plays harmonica in between jokes, one of whom just sucks), a sort of gypsy music duo of guitar and accordion that has the whole place pounding on their tables and dancing in their seats, a pair of young women who play a cover of Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” and of course, lots of poetry. Pete buys one of Alice’s books to add to his library of work from every traveling poet who comes through the Heartland; we consider it a great honor to be part of this.

DAY 7 – 9/23/10: The Art Institute of Chicago is free from five to eight pm on Thursdays, so we have three hours to peruse as much as we can; we decide to start with modern art and impressionism. Of course, before that we stood under the famous chrome bean and looked at the skyline. Our favorite piece of art we saw at the Institute was called Human Dust, by Agnes Denes, which consisted of two photographs of cremated human remains coupled with text describing this particular human’s life in detached, statistical terms such as “He had four friends throughout his life. He was loved by 17 people and liked by 310,” etc. My head also nearly exploded when I saw a woman taking a photograph of a photograph of people looking at paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago. So meta. Here are some of our other favorite pieces and photos from the day:

After the Institute, we go across town back to the Vox Ferus house, where we will be staying for the remainder of our time in Chicago. We stay up late, having a really deep conversation with Laura Yes Yes, who is like some sort of drunken therapist. Really a great person, and very real, like everyone in this house.

DAY 8 – 9/24/10: Having a day off from doing shows, we go to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World at a musty old theater with terrible seats for four dollars each. A good time.

DAY 9 – 9/25/10: Another day off, so we go to see Black Don’t Crack, an excellent spoken word show featuring our housemates Roger Bonair-Agard, Eboni Hogan and Mahogany Browne, who is staying at the house for a few days before returning to New York, as well as Avery R. Young, who we saw at Real Talk Live our first night in town. A really great show with a lively crowd, including Dasha Kelly from Madison, Wisconsin, who comes back to the house to party with us after the show. Baz has just gotten back in town from doing his one-man show, No One Can Fix You, and Roger is leaving in the morning; it seems like wonderful people are always coming and going here.

DAY 10 – 9/26/10: The big night has arrived: Alice has a spotlight feature before the legendary Cin Salach, a Chicago poet who competed in the first-ever National Poetry Slam as a member of the Green Mill team. We arrive a bit late for the open mic, but manage to catch a few great performances, including Robbie Q. and Mahogany Browne, who reprises my favorite of her poems from the Black Don’t Crack show, “Grolar and Pizzly: An American Tale,” a hilarious story about the love children of a polar and a grizzly bear, two animals who aren’t supposed to mate. Alice goes on after the open mic with a very good short feature and finds that she has won some fans at the Green Mill, a group of friends who saw her last week and loved her work. I leave the Slam early to get to the Darkroom, where Phillip Morris is having his CD release party for his stellar new album, The Truth Campaign. Alice stays for the slam, which Mahogany wins with Emily Rose in second place (Vox Ferus represent!) and joins me later, just in time to see the end of the Bottom Feeders and Associates set, in which I do a little rapping with Spy MC, Sean Anonymous and Samiam; we go on after the opener, a belly dancer named Gypsy Rose. After us is Number 2 and White Jesus, followed by Scarlet Monk and her orchestra, whose set is just unbelievable, with cello, drums and saxophone accompanied by Scarlet’s beautiful vocals and a dancer named Allie who does insane bodily contortions and stares the audience down with unflinching bravado. Here’s a clip of Scarlet Monk that gives you some idea of her awesomeness, but really doesn’t do justice to seeing her live:

Agents of Change, a very energetic ska/punk influenced live band Hip-Hop group, follows Scarlet, and then Mr. Morris himself takes the stage for a brilliant set that is unfortunately too short at about half an hour (the club had to close). If you’ve never heard Phillip’s work, you owe it to yourself to check him out; he is without a doubt one of the best rappers alive. Here’s a sample:

DAY 11 – 9/27/10: Another day off, so we decide to have dinner and a few drinks with Alvin Lau, the first of our wonderful hosts in Chicago. We feel spoiled by all the love we’ve felt from him and our new hosts at Vox Ferus. Chicago rules!

DAY 12 – 9/28/10: We say goodbye to our friends at the Vox Ferus house and head off to the Palatine Poetry Slam, our last show in the Chicago area. Palatine is a very young crowd made up of high school and beginning college students; they are consistently the youngest team at Nationals each year, and the crowd at their Slam is fantastic. We feel extremely welcomed at this show, which is helpful because it is our longest feature set yet. We divide the hour we’ve been given fairly evenly between us and it goes very well; Alice’s new banter is top-notch, with jokes about our “rape-mobile” van and the GPS we’ve nicknamed HAL (after the evil super-computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey) before introducing me with a list of credentials such as my past National Poetry Slam team experience and “he gives great handjobs.” We also premiere our two new group pieces, “Movie Geeks” and “Campaign,” both of which go really well. Between Wordplay and the Palatine Slam, we find that we really enjoy performing for young crowds, and they seem to enjoy us as well. Stay tuned – we’re off to Detroit to meet up with songstress Lauren Begent and poet Seth Walker next, and then New York!