3-2-1 Response Open Mic Poetry at Busboys and Poets

I’ve been to open mic music events, but not to open mic poetry before (although there was one experience where a “musician” took it upon himself to writhe on stage for a good ten minutes without doing anything particularly musical). I thought that the event would be good to give me an idea of what kind of poetry is out there or garners interest in the area where I live.

The three things I learned were that one should never read to a crowd from an iPhone or other mobile device - it just looks distracting, experiencing poetry read to a crowd is a different beast than analyzing a poem in a classroom because of the interaction, and overemphasis of cadence and rhyme does not save a poem. I found that the poems which had a really strong voice behind them were the most enjoyable to see performed. As an example, a guy named Kirby who had been writing for several years performed a piece called Love Zombie, which was in the voice of a heartbroken zombie. It seems gimmicky (and probably is a little), but it was really entertaining, and it had the conflict, the resolution, and everything we talked about in class. The poem was clearly worked extensively.

A couple of things which I think need to be further clarified include an explanation about why there were so many comedians performing open mic poetry. There seemed to be quite a few (4 of the 9 “poets” were trying out comedy material). Is that common? A girl named Pamela performed a piece called “William Leaping Into the Sky” about a lost love. The only connection to leaping into the sky was at the very end when she talked about him skydiving. I would be interested to know exactly what she was trying to convey (but I didn’t ask her about it).

There was an underlying theme of world peace and global warming discussion, particularly amongst some of the regulars. Kirby, who performed Love Zombie, also did a boy and his dog-ish piece about a post-global-warming world. Do you think (class) that open mic poetry events are a good way of keeping in tune with what’s important to the poetry audience? It’s interesting that nobody had anything to say about the economy, but maybe that’s just Northern Virginia?