Chicago Poetry Brothel mixes verse, burlesque dancers and fortune tellers

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

The poetry slam emerged from Chicago because of a fierce, stand-up style that reflects the soul of the city.

The Chicago Poetry Brothel is best considered sitting down.

Held every six weeks amid the soft maroon sofas and silk tapestries of the Foundation Room at the House of Blues, the brothel features 10 Chicago poets reading original works. They call themselves poetry “whores” and perform under aliases such as August Rose, Pearl Du Mal and Durham Pure. Two are male.

The brothel features burlesque dancers, fortune tellers, Victorian piano player Jeffrey Levin and Lula Houp-Garou, a fairy dancer who performs with a Hula-Hoop. A DJ plays digitized recordings of wax cylinder music circa 1860-1930.

The brothel next reopens Saturday, with the Cleveland-based vaudeville band Pinch n’ Squeal making a special appearance with accordion, saw and spoons.

Acclaimed Chicago poet Susan Yount, a k a “Black-Eyed Susan,” is the house madame. Her real-life husband, Michael Pichowsky, is the “Good Doctor” who takes money at the door. He also sells $5 brothel tokens, just as it would have gone down in a Victorian brothel. Guests pick a whore and pay him or her with the token. Since the whore is being paid, he or she will read anything that is requested.

During a conversation in a House of Blues parlor room, Yount, 36, is wearing a black corset, ruffle laced skirt and white brothel underwear. Pichowsky, 40, is decked out in a Victorian frock coat, ascot tie, wool pinstripe pants and black top hat.

They look like something out of a Coen Brothers movie.

By day Pichowsky is a quantitative analyst for a hedge fund. A scientist by trade, he makes mathematical models for high-speed futures trading.

Yount is an office manager at the Associated Press. “I start my brothel conversation with ‘Do you want your poetry light, or would you like it rough?’ she explains. “It’s definitely a more intimate form of poetry. Like the slam, there is a performance feature to the brothel. We do a poetry tease in which we read one poem for free. Everyone gets to experience the whore’s poem so they can decide who they want.”

The poetry brothel is dressed up by the emerging “Steampunk” scene in Chicago.

Steampunk is an art-fashion-music-literature movement that embraces a world where steam power is still the norm. People even rebuild their computers with polished brass, and in 2006 the artist collective Kinetic Steam Works hauled a working steam engine to the Burning Man Festival.

While leaning on his brown walking cane, Pichowsky says, “If Jules Verne’s novels were real, this is what everyone would look like.”

“Brothel Poetry” is not a journey to the center of sexual mirth.

It is not erotic.

“It is our poetry that we write every day,” Yount says. “We’re serious poets. Several of our poets teach. Kathleen Rooney (brothel name: Vivian Nightwood) is a professor at DePaul University.

“I am inspired by the poetry brothel. I did research on the Everleigh Club and I’ve started a series of poems on the historical side of the brothels and the everyday life of people in the Victorian age in Chicago.”

The Everleigh Club, a high-end Chicago brothel that ran from 1900 to 1911, was the subject of Karen Abbott’s acclaimed 2007 book Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America’s Soul.

“We’re trying to get Karen Abbott to do a show with us,” Yount says.

The Chicago Poetry Brothel debuted to a full house of nearly 100 people in September. A New York Poetry Brothel inspired the Chicago troupe, and New York poets came to Chicago to help Yount and Pichowsky launch the project. There also are poetry brothels in Barcelona, Spain, and Leicester, England.

“It started as a joke,” says Pichowsky, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y. “In 2007 a bunch of comedians from Brighton, England, did a show called ‘The Poetry Brothel’ [for the Brighton Fringe Festival]. The BBC liked it, picked it up and became a hit. They had a lot more burlesque. New York became more serious and much more dark and romantic.”

Yount says, “In Chicago we focus more on Victorian era brothels like the Everleigh Club. New York does different periods and sometimes go up to the 1920s and ’30s.”

“The Los Angeles group was like that too,” says Pichowsky. “They did later material and had a lot of flappers. Barcelona is more avant-garde, up to the 1940s. We focus on Victorian because Chicago is more of a Victorian town.”

Yount fell into the mix because she had just won the Poetry Center of Chicago Juried Reading Award.

“It’s a way to talk about your poetry one-on-one with people,” she explains. “You get personal feedback. It’s fabulous. I’m interested in costume and Steampunk. Michael and I want to redo our house in Steampunk. I don’t get nervous when I read in the brothel. I get nervous when I’m reading in stuffy academia. If they’re being critical in the brothel, they’re only being critical of ‘Madame Black-Eyed Susan’. It’s very free.”

Unlike a Victorian brothel.