Television and film star Alec Baldwin, recently having returned from filming a role in “Mission Impossible 5,” the latest in the franchise that has earned more than $2 billion worldwide, was talking on the phone from Manhattan about his upcoming trip to Chicago, where he will be co-hosting March 1 events to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Louder Than A Bomb youth poetry festival and help raise funds for its umbrella organization, Young Chicago Authors, and its efforts to empower and inspire children nationwide.
“Rather than just write a check, I was also determined to attend the event. I never look at these opportunities and say, ‘Hey, you’re lucky to have me,'” Baldwin said. “I am interested in being there for the experience of it all. This is not about me.”
He’s right. It is not about him.
It is about, among many others, the 20 teenagers gathered one morning last week in Room 327 at Team Englewood Community Academy on the South Side and listening to teacher Missy Hughes explain the meaning of such words as “alliteration” and “imagery.”
The class is lively, attentive. On the walls are photos of writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes and Patricia Smith. At one point Missy Hughes plays the song “The Corner” by Chicago rapper Common, featuring Kanye West and The Last Poets.
Now I roll in a “Olds” with windows that don’t roll
Down the roads where cars get broken and stole
These are the stories told by Stony and Cottage Grove
The world is cold, the block is hot as a stove
On the corners
“Now, what imagery do we hear?” says Hughes, and young arms shoot up, hands waving.
This is part of the YCA/LTAB-created curriculum called Literary Arts, being test-piloted in 12 local high schools, some taught by Chicago Public Schools teachers and some by “teaching artists” who are YCA/LTAB alums. This is a large step on the road to national expansion.
Hughes, who has been a CPS teacher for 15 years, the last eight in Englewood, was the first to teach the course. She teaches four such classes each day. “I think people would be surprised at the depth of academic analysis that can occur with a hip-hop song,” she says. “It showcases that when we give our youth subject matters they can relate to or engage with, their willingness to take academic risks and show brilliance is limitless.”
She also is the coach of the school’s poetry team that will be participating in this year’s LTAB. The thrilling/dynamic centerpiece of YCA, LTAB began modestly in 1991, with 60 students from four area high school teams competing onstage in spoken-word events. This year there will be 140 area schools and over 1,300 young people participating. It begins Saturday and runs tinues for six weeks in various spots before the team finals March 25 at the largest venue in the event’s history, the Arie Crown Theater in McCormick Place, with its 4,000-plus seats (youngchicagoauthors.org).
To see any LTAB event is to understand not only its visceral appeal but its deeper impact. You’ll find common themes in the stories of young people, no matter what school or neighborhood. You’ll watch a kid from Deerfield not just hear but appreciate the words of a kid from Lawndale, and vice versa. And there is palpable hope in that.
Last year’s Englewood team presented a poem titled “Hide Your Schools, Hide Your Homes, Hide Your Children, ‘Cause He’s Wrecking it All,” (aka “Mr. Wreck-It Rahm”), which won the Chuck D Lyrical Terrorist Award at the competition and became something of an Internet sensation (http://bit.ly/1t1Xaqc). Here’s a bit of it:
Hammer in one hand, paint brush in the other
Rahm Emanuel is single-handedly destroying our city
Mr. Wreck-It Rahm
look what Chicago is becoming
bending the rules to fit in the lie of building a new Chicago
building new streets
when his own plan got some potholes
“It is exciting for me to be a part of this,” Hughes says. “There has been such a negative connotation to poetry, and that’s simply because it has not been taught correctly. Here they are not just learning poetry, but how it can relate to their lives. People want to write these kids stories for them. … ‘Oh, Englewood is this or that.’ But what they are doing here is not just about poetry. It is about them being able to write, to say, ‘This is my story. This is my life.'”
These are the sorts of lives that YCA wants most to impact. The hook may be LTAB, but the real impact can come spreading the less flashy YCA work, programs and instruction that take place not on stages a few weeks a year but daily in classrooms. Already there are outposts in Tulsa, Okla.; Boston; Omaha, Neb.; and other cities, with plans to launch soon in Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, Tenn., and other places expressing interest.
Kevin Coval is the artistic director of YCA and co-founder of LTAB.
He is a very busy young man. In addition to overseeing the LTAB competitions and meeting with donors and potential donors, he is shepherding the world premiere of a play he has written in collaboration with playwright Idris Goodman. “This Is Modern Art (based on true event)” is set to open Feb. 25 and run through March 14 at Steppenwolf Theatre as part of its Steppenwolf for Young Adults series.
Already the author of a number of poetry collections (“Schtick,” “L-vis Lives!” “Everyday People” and “Slingshots”), Coval is the editor (along with Quraysh Lansana and Nate Marshall) of the new book “The Backbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop,” published by local Haymarket Books and scheduled for an early April release.
He will also be a big part of the March 1 celebration/fundraiser, which takes the form of three separate events: an 11 a.m. brunch/film screening at Soho House Chicago, 113 N. Green St.; a 6 p.m. gathering at the Black Ensemble Theater, 4450 N. Clark St., for pre-show cocktails and hors d’oeuvre on the theater’s stage; followed by a 7:30 p.m. performance titled “Re-Imagining Chicago,” with spoken-word poetry and music performed by YCA youth program participants and alumni. (For tickets to one, any or all of the events, see youngchicagoauthors.org or call 773-486-4331).
Baldwin and his co-hosts, actress Alfre Woodard and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (the hip-hop composer and co-founder of the band A Tribe Called Quest), will be at all these events.
“It’s a full day, yes,” Baldwin said. “But I have had a lot of luck in Chicago. I was named an honoree at a Goodman/DePaul Awards for Excellence in the Arts (in 2007), and I was reluctant to go. It turned out to be one of the nicest evenings of my life.”
Baldwin got hooked on YCA/LTAB the way many people across the country have been hooked: He saw the film “Louder Than A Bomb.”
“I could not believe the passion of these kids,” he said.
Produced and directed by local filmmakers Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel (louderthanabombfilm.com), it focused on four teams as they prepared for and competed in the 2008 event. The movie won prizes at film festivals and received raves from dozens of movie critics. The late Roger Ebert ranked it among the 10 best documentaries of 2011.
The next year, Rebecca Hunter, formerly the executive producer at Redmoon Theater, was recruited by the YCA board to become its executive director. “The film focused all eyes on Chicago,” Hunter said. “There was a national picture emerging. And we are constantly being approached by other cities. Many people were interested primarily in (LTAB), but that just begins the conversation about the impact our programs can have day to day beyond the stage.”
And so, enter Sean Michael Kaplan, who had been director of development and media relations for Redmoon. He came aboard in 2013 as national director/special operations, charged with creating a plan for expansion and with raising money and finding new revenue streams.
He has and is having great success.
Janice Feinberg and her brother Joseph operate the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, named in honor of their parents. They are admirably philanthropic, the Feinberg Pavilion and Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital being public examples.
“We have been focused for some time on Englewood,” Janice said. Their philanthropic efforts in that beleaguered neighborhood include Children’s Home + Aid, CommunityHealth and Imagine Englewood if. She has made many visits to the neighborhood and has earmarked her $100,000 donation to YCA/LTAB specifically for it.
“It is a neighborhood that needs help of every kind, but people need to understand that this is not a war zone,” she says. “It is a place where people just want to live life. I try to get all my friends down there to see. There are too many preconceived notions.”
As for the work gift of YCA/LTAB, she says, “It is all about confidence-building and providing an outlet for the children to express themselves. I am not a great fan of poetry or hip-hop, but watching these young people perform, as I have, is so powerful and courageous and tremendously inspiring.”
In addition to benefactors, the organization has been seeking business expertise.
And so, enter Richard Melman, the founder of the Lettuce Entertain You restaurant empire, who was once in partnership with Coval’s father, Danny: “I’m not any kind of big poetry fan. But I have known Kevin since he was born and have watched him all these year and have been very impressed. The people I am fond of are those who are artistic and passionate. That goes for a chef and for Kevin. But they are usually 10 percent business and 90 percent artistic, and that won’t work for a business model. In order to be successful, those percentages have to get closer. When you start to expand, there are always obstacles, but I will be only a phone call away.”
Enter, also, Andrew Alexander, the CEO and executive producer of The Second City, which, in addition to running its clubs around the country, is ever expanding its teaching operations, now with an enrollment of some 13,000. He also knows Coval’s father and for years worked closely with Coval’s aunt, the late, great Joyce Sloan. He says: “I believe in what Kevin is trying to do, that there is great value for our society in it, with helping these young people find their voices. There are similarities with what we have done, but there is a need for he and his colleagues to build a solid business foundation.”
The poet Roberts Graves once observed, “There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money either.” And so there are certain ironies shadowing YCA/LTAB as it seeks the dough to do its good deeds.
But Baldwin, who is in the process of writing a memoir — “Here’s a movie that was an oasis for me, here is one that was a prison,” he says about his book, titled “Nevertheless” and scheduled for a fall 2016 publication — is part of the same journey as some of the seniors in Missy Hughes’ room, kids in the process of exploring in words their own lives.
One of those seniors is Tamera Ervin: “I think the class is helping me both physically and mentally. Mentally, because when we read poems by famous writers, I am able to analyze what the author of the poem is trying to express or get across to the reader. Physically, because I get my inspiration from other writers. Writing is my passion. I write poetry, short stories, and I have even written my first young adult novella. I have always appreciated poetry and what it does for me. And Miss Hughes is amazing, so positive and so openhearted. When we talk about poetry, she pushes the class to really think critically about whatever it is we are talking about.”
Another is Ovanni Clouson: “I have always been a shy person, but once I started taking this class, I started talking more and would be the first to get up and read a poem I had written. I had been doing poetry all of my life. Being in the class helps me make my writing even better by opening my eyes to new things, new types of styles of poetry. … Miss Hughes is an inspiration to everyone. Without her, my poetry would be meaningless. I can go on and on about how much I appreciate having her in my life. She’s more than a teacher to me, she’s like family.”
And there’s David Holmes too: “Since I am a poet, this class is going to help my writing style, and anything to do with poetry is wonderful.”
Twitter @rickkogan
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
