About
Dan “Sully” Sullivan is the only poet to win 3 consecutive Grand Poetry Slam Championship titles at The Mental Graffiti Poetry Slam in Chicago. He studied poetry at Columbia College and went on to represent Chicago at the National Poetry Slam for 5 years. He is a member the poetry duo Death From Below as well as The Speak’Easy Ensemble directed by Poetry Slam founder Marc “So What!” Smith. Sully has been on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He has shared stages with likes of Ani Difranco, Smokie Robinson, Alicia Keys, Rev Run, KRS-One, Nikki Giovanni, & Patricia Smith. He has performed his own in-your-face, usually personal, sometimes desperate, mostly hilarious, brand of poetry all over the world from the South Side of Chicago to Munich, Germany.
Sully has also worked every facet of nightclub life in Chicago from busboy to barback, bartender to manager, security to promoter, DJ to customer. He worked for the greater part of the last decade at one of Chicago’s most prestigious hip hop clubs. Behind the bar he specializes in fancy-shmansy margaritas and nitty-gritty Irish whiskey.
Whether you need a poem in your ear or a drink in your mouth, Sully is your kind of guy. Check him out :
www.myspace.com.com/deathfrombelow
and for booking www.laymanlyric.com.
THE CURE FOR YOUR ALES
We’ve all had those nights. Not the kind where we total a car or wake up saying, “Where are my pants? And why am I in the women’s bathroom…at Wendy’s?” (Although, I’m sure plenty of us have had that experience on at least a couple of occasions – I’m looking at you Frankie Kickball.) I’m talking about the kind of night where we’ve said, “Well, if Pabst is good enough to win the blue ribbon, it’s good enough for me.” The next thing you know you are punching a police officer’s horse in the mouth in Millennium Park. Ok, maybe I’m still thinking of Frankie Kickball. Maybe you are a little more tame. Still, your stomach is a wreck and you know what comes next…
The morning after. When The sun shines through your window like God’s flashlight. When your alarm goes off forty-seven times over the course of 6 hours because you keep hitting the snooze. When you finally wake up because you hit your head on the edge of the futon. When your temples pulse on the corners of your face like night club sub woofers. When you’re so dehydrated you gasp for air like someone poured Irish sandpaper down your wind pipe. When your head spins like helicopter propellers and you can’t tell if you need to down a gallon of water or throw up a bucket of vodka. When you have to face the moments you can’t remember or don’t want to. The next morning. When you have to call into work. The next morning. When you turn to this blog.
The entries you find here are the cure to your hangover… but it’s not that simple. This blog is not just about your trip home from Margaritaville. It is a metaphor. It is the exploration of finding the remedy to what ails you. How do you deal with a bad breakup, getting laid off, your rent check bouncing, or the Jonas Brothers dying in a tragic Six Flags teenage mob stomping? How do you deal with the day after? It is looking back in retrospect, not to prevent it from happening again, but how to deal with it better the next time. This is a career poet/bartender’s take on the path to feeling better and moving on.