Mike Schramm

"When things are so bad, and the consequences of having these people in office are so severe, you don't really have the choice of not being involved," says native Chicagoan Stephen Elliott, author of "Happy Baby." "That's our government, and we're responsible for it. You have to be like, 'Can I live with that? Or is it incumbent upon me to do something about it?'"

In Elliott's case, the something he did was organize literary readings around the country to raise money for progressive candidates. Tonight, at No Exit Cafe, he's collecting money for Tammy Duckworth, a combat veteran who lost both legs in Iraq and is making a run against Henry Hyde. At a suggested donation of $10, the room fills up pretty comfortably. Elliott begins by pointing out that all the authors have brought books to trade for donations, and thanks the crowd for their support.

Chicago poets Dan Beachy-Quick and Simone Muench read first. Beachy-Quick's piece asks the small crowd to "witness The Cosmos in fetters" as the Red Line rumbles outside behind him, and Muench reads a piece about "orange-girls," seventeenth-century street urchins who sold oranges--and sometimes themselves. Neither is particularly political, although Muench does joke that a professor once told her "no Republicans read poetry anyway."

Elliott reads next, from "Looking Forward to It," a book about his adventures on the 2004 campaign trail. He gets a few good laughs about Kerry's "profession of love" for John Edwards in one of the first debates ("I love John Edwards" becomes "I love you, man"), but the biggest laughs come from his last passage, a warning to a vegan he meets who wants to have kids: "Vegan babies die quick. Children need milk." When you're on the campaign trail that long, he says, you tend to go a little crazy.

Peter Orner reads from his book, "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo," and reminds the crowd that though Illinois' Congressional race is "complicated, we need to get Henry Hyde out of there." Chicagoan Audrey Niffenegger reads a touching, unpublished piece she "finished this afternoon" about burying her cat, and Aleksandar Hemon finishes the night with a work-in-progress about a trio of travelers in 1980s Zaire, getting high and listening to "Stairway to Heaven." "We were dropped down from heaven," Hemon reads his character's dialogue in a thick Bosnian accent, "and we want to go back up, but there's no rope." After the reading, Elliott hands out books, and the white envelopes fill with donations.

(2006-07-25)

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