Against the Open Mic

Today I’ve giv­en up attempt­ing to read at poet­ry open mics. I attend­ed the quar­ter­ly open mic held at the Cleve­land Pub­lic Library and thought it was going to be great, no famil­iar faces, lots of first timers — hes­i­tant, unpol­ished, earnest. Thus, I tweet­ed.

At the @cleveland_pl for a #poet­ry #open­mic. I rec­og­nize no one. This is good.

— Adam Har­vey (@AdamInCLE) Novem­ber 3, 2012

Why good? Because the Cleve­land poet­ry scene is filled with old men writ­ing shit poet­ry. Old men writ­ing shit poet­ry and telling each oth­er it reads like ros­es. The only thing more annoy­ing than an ego­tis­ti­cal poet is an ego­tis­ti­cal poet who writes crap. In Cleve­land, this has been going on for so many years — with poet heads are so far up their poet navels — that these guys feel enti­tled to a mea­sure of adu­la­tion and a pass on their poor behav­ior. It’s nigh inces­tu­ous, but, more char­i­ta­bly, prob­a­bly just direc­tion­al selec­tion. It’s off-putting to ground­ed writ­ers, and dis­taste­ful to neo­phytes.

What hap­pened today is that one of these guys waltzed in to the open mic after miss­ing all of the oth­er read­ers and then spent 5 min­utes rum­mag­ing through a ream of unor­ga­nized poems for the 3 sheets of his own poem. Then the friend who accom­pa­nied him read a cou­ple of nice poems. After­ward, no one else seemed keen to read except for me, but the open mic was brought to a awk­ward­ly abrupt end by an audi­ence mem­ber instead of the librar­i­an who has been run­ning it. Ompha­lo-Cra­nial­ly-Invert­ed Poet then pro­ceed­ed to tell the rest of the read­ers that the CPL has a whole shelf devot­ed to his poet­ry, and that he has over 50 vol­umes. He end­ed with “If you like my poet­ry, check them out! If you don’t…” and shrugged.

I decid­ed to write a few basic guide­lines for poets who choose to read at open mics. They are designed for pri­madon­nas, but pri­madon­nas won’t read them.

1. Come pre­pared. Do not bring your entire body of work unless it is orga­nized and each poem is eas­i­ly acces­si­ble. Rum­mag­ing through fold­ers and binders and half-rot­ted box tops for unla­beled sheets of poet­ry wastes every­one’s time.
2. Come on time. Do not roll in to the venue late, as if you own the place, there­by miss­ing all of the poets who have gone before you.
3. Lis­ten to the oth­er poets. Do not spend your non-read­ing moments choos­ing a poem or prepar­ing to read your poem.
4. Do not monop­o­lize. This is not your poet­ry read­ing. It belongs to every­one. Two poems of reg­u­lar length are accept­able. Three if short­er. Do not read your epic, no one has time for that shit.
5. Do not brag. It’s an open mic. If you’re hot, peo­ple will already know you’re hot, so you don’t need to bring it up. If your poems are good they will speak for them­selves.
6. Do not pro­mote. Unless you’re a fea­tured read­er, an open mic is not the place for you to shill your­self. Say­ing “If you want some of my poems, see me after the read­ing.” is accept­able. Try­ing to sell your poems like they are a time-share is not.
7. Appre­ci­ate the oth­er poets. Clap for every read­er. If some­one says it is their first time read­ing in pub­lic, clap for them before they even read.

Hm. Sev­en is a good num­ber. I’ll stop.