poems and images from a Chicago street minstrel

Marvin Tate has the makings of a legend. He's picked out a crooked path between hard-won lesson and spiritual revelation. He has an academic background in writing, acting, singing and musical theater, but his mythic, nicknamed-riddled brand of storytelling began as largely unrehearsed, spontaneous recitations to family members and kids at school. The youngest of six (including a fraternal twin), Marvin quoted Gwendolyn Brookes at 11, improvised lines, repeating protean fables whispered to him by the ghosts who fill his textural world. His balancing act between possession and exorcism has spanned decades -- once known as "Chinaman," a poet cracking jokes and fabricating tales in the gangway and on the playground, considered by most a madman, a preacher.

Marvin wandered from his native Chicago to New York. The years spent there brought cerebral inspiration and influenced his spirit with enthusiasm for the perverse and the holy. He returned in 1986 to pursue his writing ambitions and has become well-known around the city for his public readings. Right now he's at work on an upcoming performance collaboration with Amiri Baraka. He's been a featured poet on National Public Radio as Aaron Freeman's guest and on Ira Glass' This American Life. And he produced and hosted a weekly cable TV program, "Talk-a Rioty," as well as writing a book, Schoolyard of Broken Dreams (Tiachucha Press). Marriage, parenting and music now take up most of Marvin's time, but in one way or another his passion for family, his affinity for children and the child-like, and his quasi-religious, devotional approach to music and writing have always been intertwined. He currently works with preschool kids; before that he taught writing at a Chicago charter high school. An always growing (and almost always for sale) collection of snow globes roll from Marvin's basement workshop. Depicting scenes of flight, fright, embrace and stasis, these homespun jars are glimpses into the aesthetic obsessions of this complicated man.

And then of course there's D-Settlement. Marvin Tate's D-Settlement: The once-stuttering class clown genius become a studly wandering priest with a pocketful of recollections, observations and fictional characters to act out his visions. With this band Marvin has found a tangible outlet for the prose and poetry trapped in his private notebooks. Haunted yet radiant, Marvin Tate's D-Settlement brings together a stylistically disparate group of performers who find their truest voices on stage, an ensemble well-suited to dramatizing his paradoxical embrace and rejection of the world outside his twilit theater. They paint life in immobilizing truths of joy and pain, challenging the conscious and subconscious, hovering between today's avante garde and yesterday's vaudevillian theatre -- eleven to thirteen musician's musicians with souls set to take you higher. It's not to be missed.

Marvin Tate's D-Settlement plays the last Wednesday of every month at HotHouse (31 E. Balbo) and has a CD on the way this spring. Follow the below links to read Marvin's poems.

-- Jodi Behrens