Home to street venders and musicians alike, Maxwell Street was one of Chicago's most vibrant gathering places. Michael Anania pays homage with a poem and a touch of the blues.

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Sterling Plumpp dubs the Velvet Lounge a "shrine to jazz," and explains how jazz fuels his sense of poetic craft.

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The Great Migration gave birth to a new brand of blues in Chicago, and Chess Records helped make it famous. Sterling Plumpp and Tyehimba Jess read their bluesy poetry.

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Union Stock Yard Gate is all that remains of the mile-wide livestock market that provided Carl Sandburg with his famous epithet for Chicago, “Hog Butcher for the World.”

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Featuring Bucky Halker, Wobblies, and Studs Terkel, this segment explores the dynamic poetry and songs reflecting Chicago’s industrial labor movements.

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The El, or the elevated train system, is one of Chicago’s most distinctive features, “the sound of the city.” Reginald Gibbons and members of the Speak Easy Ensemble share their El-inspired poetry.

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Harold Washington was elected as Chicago’s first African American mayor in 1983. Gwendolyn Brooks, Edward Hirsch, and Albert Goldbarth read an array of poems celebrating progress and the pleasures of reading.

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In 1912, Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine as a forum for modernist poetry. Featured are poems by George Dillon and John Frederick Nims, former editors of Poetry.

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Renovated in 1898 to create studios for musicians, artists, and writers, the Fine Arts Building was a hotbed of artistic activity, home to magazines such as the Dial and the Little Review, and the offices of Frank Lloyd Wright and Edgar Lee Masters.

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In the early 20th century, the Cliff Dwellers Club hosted poets at all stages of their careers, from the towering figures of Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats to young unknown Carl Sandburg.

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