Praise Song for Poets Working Against Competition

and our open mics

When you arrive at the open mic, you’ve already won. There are no application fees, no vetting, no anonymous grey legion of application readers rating you on “voice” and “originality.” Nobody’s worrying about your potential. Nobody’s worrying about how you stack up against the guy who recited a memorized passage of Leaves of Grass ending with a questionable biographical sketch of Whitman. Nobody’s comparing you to the new writer “on deck” who will deliver her very first poem directly from a blue, spiral-bound notebook and has trouble reading her own handwriting. The audience cheers for everyone.

You perform. You get slaps on the back and gasps and snaps. Someone you met last week buys you a drink. The following week, someone reads an emulative poem that uses one of your lines as a prompt.

The lighting at the open mic is terrible, too many red and blue gels blurring the blackbox stage. Or, you’re outside at a weird time of the day. There is no mic. There is no audience. All the poets are sweating. Or, you’re at a loud bar. The three other poets in the lineup are the only ones listening. They literally lean in their ears because everyone else in the venue is laughing and flirting and drinking and the last things on their minds are your metaphors, the tenors and the vehicles.

When something nearly invisible and tangibly terrible starts spreading around the globe, death’s imprints all around you, the open mic keeps right on going, albeit virtually. You stay in your own home for that. You are your own doorwoman and barista and MC. You mourn the ritual of leaving your house every Monday night, every Thursday after work, but somehow, a bit of authentic open mic energy emanates through your screens.

People turn their cameras off, so you never know if they’re there or not, or they forget and fall asleep while still on-screen. They stare, they look away, you’ve never seen so much of each face. You’re put into awkward “break-out rooms” to tackle writing prompts or compose collaboratively. There’s a real-time feed of comments for each writer in the chat, the democratized gallery a gift of its virtual format. You commune with writers in London and Tampa, Dubai and Omaha, Steven’s Point and Patterson. Your eyes hurt. Everybody’s writing poems about the pandemic.

Without all that time spent driving or taking the bus and listening to open mics on uncomfortable stools and sticky benches in public, you have more time to write. The tradeoff is that you have to be more intentional about figuring out to whom you’re now accountable. Without the way it used to be, who is now your audience?

After three summers of isolation, people start getting impatient. The numbers are down, though it seems like every fourth person you know is sick at any given time. Things slowly “open back up,” but it’s not going to be the same. You’ve lost people: they’ve moved, they’ve died, they’re living with advanced dementia, they’ve been promoted, they’ve stopped writing, joined the military, sunk deeper into addiction and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You’ve changed, too, though: you’ve moved and you’re lonely, your writing has changed, you’re worried your old friends will find your new stuff pretentious or inaccessible, you’re nervous around the public in a new way you’re not used to. After all this time, you’ve come to enjoy never leaving your house for fun, and that scares you.

The old venue closed, permanently, temporarily, became a marketing agency instead of a coffee shop, became locked and empty rooms with a dusty stage that has simply become a platform, a loading dock, a memory. The paper event calendars pinned in bathroom stalls are from a dim 2020.

You forget what it means to walk into a room as a poet and know that you’re already whole. You forget that’s exactly what the open mic is: You’ve written the thing (or maybe you’re writing new haiku on a napkin during a cigarette break). But when they call your name, you’re there. You forget that arriving is all it takes.

Isn’t this what happens around the world? In Ukraine, in Yemen, in Toronto, in Milwaukee? Islands of poets daring to take the time and space in large and small ways. Clusters of poets, a garbage island. Floating, suspended, unrelenting. Poets washed up and recycling ourselves into found art, assemblage, an effervescent, unrecorded dance. Or, just this: you hand your open notebook to a friend with an invitation, “Let me know what you think.”

You can be brief. You can be long. You can step up and stand back on the ground before anyone knows it. You’ve always heard about legendary, defunct venues: Cafe Voltaire, The Avant Garde, like relatives who died before you were born. No poet, no poetry lasts forever.

The imperfection of the open mic is a gift because it means that your poem, too, need not be perfect. You can come as you are, with all your words and all your losses.

Publications and Upcoming Events

A small segment of my hybrid memoir appears in A Catalog of Small Machines, a new, free, digital anthology published collaboratively by two Wisconsin writing orgs, the Driftless Writing Center and the Arts + Literature Laboratory.

On August 31st at 6:30 pm, I will be reading poems about walking in cities with my friend Sue Blaustein in Sheboygan, Wisconsin at WordHaven BookHouse. (In-person)

Save the date: I will be reading eco-poems at Ripon College on Sunday, November 13th at 1:00 pm as the college’s writer-in-residence. More details to come in a future missive. (In-person)