Page 54 of Are You Happy Now?

The opening poet in the first round turns out to be a young-ish woman in a wheelchair who swerves her vehicle around the tables on the way to the front. Wool Cap lowers the mic, and she recites a poem that describes in piercing detail the car crash that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Lincoln finds the poem quite powerful, though he doesn’t see anything very poetic about it—he can imagine the passage as several well-crafted paragraphs in a personal essay. The audience applauds politely.

The action gets rolling with the next contestant, a wiry guy with a ratty gray ponytail who looks as if he could be left over from the Funk Hole’s past existence. Shouting and punching the air, he declaims a poem about the night his army unit ravaged an Iraqi village, and he and another soldier unloaded their weapons on a crude, mud-brick house that they suspected of harboring insurgents. The audience whoops and hollers along with him—whoops even at the end, as the poet describes a lone, human cry emerging from the mayhem.

The vet gives way to a potbellied ex-con drug-dealer who poetically rails about the brutal injustices served by the cops who raided his apartment. He yields to a lumpy woman promoting the liberation of children (“Run, boys and girls! Run down that hall! Shout, boys and girls! Shout through the walls!”). The audience is fevered and noisy, and the pitchers of beer are flowing.

Between poets, Buford confides, “I have a bit of an advantage here because my poems are so short. I can probably recite five in three minutes, if there aren’t too many interruptions.”

He’s seventh in the first round. When Wool Cap finally calls his name, Buford gives Lincoln a sporty nod and hops up to the mic. One of the kids in back shouts out, “Go for it!” and an anticipatory silence falls over the revved-up audience. Buford starts with “The Remote,” his poem about the channel changer. He recites with the professorial manner Lincoln has come to know well—open, searching, somewhat cerebral. At first, the crowd seems befuddled. It remains deadly silent, save for the end of the poem, when a lone shout of “Yeah!” comes from the vicinity of Buford’s students.

The poet then moves to “North Wells Between Grand and Illinois,” and the heckling starts. First there’s an outbreak of hissing, then a cry of “Get it going!” answered from the other side of the room by “Get the hook!” Hooting laughter competes with Buford’s words (“The tile shop flaunts its shiny square baubles/all corners and edges, a Tuscan intrusion...”). Gripping the mic like a rock singer, Buford forges on, reciting from memory. When “Throw Rug” opens to outright booing, Buford’s students rally to his defense. “Let him speak!” “Shuddup!” Soon, the scene erupts into an aural melee—stomping, whistling, cries and shouts, and laughter fill the decrepit room. A man a few feet behind Lincoln uses his hand and mouth like a trumpet, blowing farting noises in the direction of Buford. Even the two bartenders, an almost matching set of young women dressed in black, stop pouring drinks to enjoy the scene. Still, Buford soldiers on, looking out on the sea of chaos with no visible hint of recognition.

When his three minutes expire, everyone in the room stands and cheers, the tables of DePaul students waving and screaming, trying to drown out the derision. Lincoln glances across the room and sees that Marissa Morgan is on her feet, too, applauding and laughing. A skirmish breaks out in back near the students, and the sound of bottles breaking and chairs scraping the floor interrupts the commotion, but the violence is quickly tamped down, and Wool Cap retakes the mic and settles the crowd.

“Whew!” whispers Buford as he sits again beside Lincoln and the noise dies.

“Way to hang in there,” Lincoln says.

“What a show!” the poet exclaims, his face lit and vibrant.

Lincoln thinks: No wonder he’s undaunted. The poor sap is clueless.

Of course, Buford doesn’t survive the first round. When Wool Cap reads out the four poets who will advance, Buford utters a soft, “Aww.”

“Well, you gave it a good shot,” Lincoln says.

Buford rallies immediately. “This was great! Very exciting! A good omen!”

“You think?” Lincoln can’t hide his skepticism.

“History is full of artists whose works are shouted down,” Buford points out, as if it were Lincoln himself who was clueless. “The audience rioted at the first performance of The Rite of Spring.”

“Yes,” says Lincoln cautiously. “Of course, that was the avant-garde. The author was way ahead?

??”

“It’s all art,” Buford says, intercepting the potential insult. “Who’s to say what’s avant-garde and what’s retrograde? Everything moves in big circles, anyway. Besides, what’s important here is the attention. This could be great for sales. You might want to increase the print run.”

“Ahh.”

There’s a break before the start of the second round. When Buford says he wants to go thank his loyal students, Lincoln uses the occasion to take his leave. “You don’t want to see how it ends?” asks Buford. “My money’s on the ex-con.”

“You can let me know.”

Buford grabs Lincoln’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he says. “It really meant a lot for me to have my editor here.”

Lincoln tells him he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The next day at work, Lincoln checks in periodically at BigShouldersBooks.com to make sure Marissa Morgan hasn’t immortalized the fiasco. Nothing for most of the day. Then, late in the afternoon, she drops in a long, varied post—news of a bookstore closing, author readings, a brief Q&A with a woman from Naperville who’s publishing a vegetarian cookbook. Scanning the text, Lincoln’s eyes catch on the last item:

Action at the Funk Hole

Poetry slams are supposed to be energized affairs, but the Funk Hole’s event Monday night took it to an extreme as the crowd reacted so violently to a DePaul professor’s poetry that a fistfight broke out between supporters and detractors. The short, quiet, rather domestic poems by psychology professor Antonio Buford stirred a disdain among some listeners rarely witnessed before by this observer, though a vocal group of DePaul students heartily supported their professor. Afterward, Professor Buford seemed unfazed by the reaction. He described his poetry as “Emily Dickinsonish,” and he said Pistakee Press is bringing out an edition of his work later this spring. “My editor is John Lincoln, the best literary editor in Chicago,” the professor told me. “He gets it.” No one was hurt in the altercation. Iraqi War vet Edward X. DeLeo was eventually declared the slam’s winner.

Lincoln stares numbly at his computer screen. The report will live in perpetuity in cyberspace, he and Buford locked forever in a literary embrace. What if Jeff Kessler at Malcolm House decides to check up on Lincoln with a quick Google search? What if Duddleston sees the item? After years of nurture and careful investment, his beloved publishing house has been made a laughingstock.

Lincoln’s depression eases slightly after he spends half an hour testing various phrases on Google and finds that only the most targeted search (“John Lincoln + Antonio Buford”) lifts the item onto the first page of results. Is he safe hiding in Google’s algorithm?

On Thursday morning at ten, the editorial committee gathers in the conference room for its weekly meeting. Duddleston is late arriving. Lincoln sits beside Warren Sternberg and across the table from Hazel Lanier, who has brought a manila folder thick with proposals about children’s books. Just as Duddleston enters carrying Amy’s manuscript under one arm, Hazel looks brightly at Lincoln and says, “I read about your poet in Marissa Morgan’s blog!”

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