Why I Will Never Participate In an Open Mic Poetry Night Ever Again

I woke up this morning thinking about this incident for no particular reason. It's one of those things that happens to you in life which never makes sense, but you figure, well, maybe when I'm older or more experienced or just more mellow I'll understand what went down...so you shelve it in the back of your brain to dwell upon later.

But it bubbled to the surface of my frequently overheated brain, and I thought I'd air it out here and see if maybe after all this time someone could shed some light on it. Here goes.

I started writing poetry in 9th grade. I don't know why, but my freshman year was an incredibly wonderful time for me. For one thing, I went to a high school out of my district, BHS, to play in the school orchestra (my "assigned" high school didn't have one). In my county, you see, I was bused an hour away to a middle school to even out its number of white kids even though there were several good schools 15 minutes away from me. In my middle school, I was a minority, and it would've continued onto High School, but I'd already been so beaten up, harassed, and generally made miserable for those two years that my parents pushed for and got a transfer to the HS 15 minutes up the road known to have a much better academic program. And an orchestra. I wanted to continue my studies of the violin and major in music in Uni, and I need to play. A lot.

I wasn't the only one desperate to get out of our county-designated school. Many, many families actually rented a house or an apartment or even just one room so they could be on the lease in the busing zone so they wouldn't have to go to LHS. Or they flat-out moved. Or just plain lied, setting up a PO box in the school district where they wanted to go. Yeah, LHS was THAT bad. My sister went there and was so traumatised by it that she begged my parents to send her to private, radical, fundamentalist Christian school just to get away from it all.

So I got a fresh start at BHS. VERY few people knew me, and though it was lonely at first, I saw it as an opportunity to start anew. I went by a different name, lost a lot of weight, dressed differently, dyed my hair, and generally let out all the creativity and intelligence I'd had to hold back in middle school for fear of getting mocked even more than I already was. I joined the drama club and the literary magazine, stopped being afraid to speak up in class, pretty much did what I wanted without caring what anyone else thought.

And I discovered that people were receptive to it. Teachers complimented my poems, my stories, my left-field ideas. Nobody knew who I was or where I'd come from, and that was wonderful. Within 4 months I had a circle of friends. By 5 months I had my first boyfriend. At 6 months I had another boyfriend, a senior, and a date to the senior prom. Life was finally falling into play.

And through all this, I wrote. I filled notebooks with ideas, songs, notions, sketches, truths, bon motts, everything. Some things I submitted to the literary magazine, some things I sent off for publication, some I just shared with a few friends. But it was all coming together, and I felt alive and wonderful and buoyed by my own intelligence and creativity.

I felt wholly confident, and for a fat girl, that wasn't too shabby.

So when I entered University, I saw it the same way in terms of starting over. High school started off on a high note but ended on a horribly sour one, and I needed a re-set. My poems had been published in a few small places, but I really wanted more affirmation.

So one night I noticed a sign for an Open Mic Poetry Reading--All Welcome! on the wall outside of the Performing Arts hall on my way to my violin lesson and thought, Well, why not? My violin teacher was married to the head of the English department, and she said I could absolutely bring some poems to read. She drove me up to the pub where it was being held after my lesson, bought me a ginger ale, and we sat and talked until it was time for the event to start.

Her husband, btw, is one of the best professors I ever encountered on my travels. I'm still in contact with him via email.

In order to participate, you had to sign your name on a list, write the number of poems you were going to read (no more than 3), your phone number (I don't know why), and where you were from. I did this all without complaint, and listened to several wonderful works read by students, professors, locals, and anyone who was brave enough to take the mic. Some were real stinkers, but who was I to judge? I was only 18 years old.

Finally I stood up to read my three poems. One was called "3 a.m.: A Reflection" and was a few lines about how everything seems possible in the wee small hours of the morning. I forget what the other one was, but the third told about a man who challenged God and lost, and as punishment, he was taken into Heaven when he didn't deserve to go and placed in a darkened cave with a single candle that grew brighter every day for eternity until he burned away, piece by piece. I thought it was an interesting notion, but it was a rather long poem (two pages of free verse), and I was glad when I was done reading it. Shortly after that, the event ended, and one of the other readers came up to me and said how much liked my stuff which made me very happy.

We all went home, and as I was preparing for bed around 10 am that night, the phone rang. I picked it up excitedly because no one ever called me.

"Is this Yorkie?" said a loud male voice.

"Yes, it is."

"Good. I was at the poetry reading tonight and heard what you read."

"Oh! Okay...?"

There was a pause, then the voice got really angry. "I just wanted to tell you that what you did was really out of line, and you shouldn't even have come, if that's what you were going to do."

I gasped, and my stomach turned cold. "What?? What'd I do?"

"It was a POETRY reading, you idiot. And you read PROSE. You obviously can't tell the difference."

My throat was completely dry, and I felt like crying. "Oookay. Erm...who is this? Can I have your name?"

"Ummm...I'd rather not give it."

"Okay. If you won't even give your name, then your opinion means nothing to me. I didn't read prose, it was poetry. And I'm hanging up now. Goodbye." *SLAM*

I sat on my bed and shook for about two hours until I fell asleep. I looked at my poems and wondered if maybe I'd confused free verse with prose, maybe I'd made a massive mistake in reading something, maybe he'd actually been right. The next day, I saw my violin teacher and tearfully told her about it. Even though we didn't really get along, she said, "That's ridiculous. You didn't read prose. It was free verse. Even my husband said it was. That guy's an idiot...just ignore him." Which I tried to do, but for about 4 months after that, I listened to every voice that passed me, trying to see if I could find who it was that had been so horrible. The voice on the phone had been very distinctive, and it was burned into my memory. I've always been good with that sort of thing.

It wasn't until Spring that I discovered the source. My University was pretty small, and the departments were rather tightly-knit. Once I dropped my music major and went into English Education, I discovered a new world of self-proclaimed geniuses and poets who insisted they were "undiscovered" and that the world just wasn't ready for them yet. And the rest of us sucked. You know the type, the "I'm soooo black in my soul. My poetry is black. My thoughts are black. Listen to the darkness I spill forth onto my parchment, behold my words. I AM THE EMBODIMENT OF ALL THAT IS ANGSTY AND DARK!" or as my friend Kelly quoted from one of her own poetry classes, "Inky black pools of inky black blackness".

There was a gentleman about three years ahead of me in the program who considered himself the most intelligent, most literary, most gifted writer to come through onto this mortal plane ever and spent most of his time holed up in his favourite proff's office [in his own mind] wittily discussing Joyce and Eliot and Pound. He was supremely arrogant, so superior in his thinking that he often argued with proffs as they taught their classes. And for some reason completely unbeknown to me, the fluffy, empty-headed girls just flocked to him like he was a font of literary blessings. He would quote a bit of Shelley or Keats to them, they'd turn red and giggle, and he'd sneer.

Yeah, I'm sure you've met one of these guys before. You just want to punch them in their scowling faces. And here's the thing: he was unbelievably ugly. I'm not just saying that because he was a major-league, profession dickhead. He genuinely was so homely that when I first saw him, I thought he'd been in a horrible disfiguring accident of some sort (he hadn't). He had downward-slanting piggy little eyes, a long upturned nose, large teeth so bucked that his heavy lips couldn't even close over them (so when he breathed, his mouth hung open), and absolutely no chin. On top of that he wore small, intellectual's glasses, a goatee, and rarely washed his hair. When he walked, his toes pointed inward, and he leaned forward like a lumbering beast with a stone in one hoof. He always wore a faded oxford shirt with khaki pants that were frayed along the hems because of his scruffling trudge and beat-up DockSiders.

There was nothing attractive about him whatsoever, and I'm certain he compensated by trying to appear overly intelligent. I happened to sit down to dinner with a class mate of mine where he was sitting snuffling up his food like an aardvark, and when he looked up and saw me, his eyes narrowed to the point of almost disappearing, and a scowl took over his entire face. I greeted him cheerily, having just come from a paid violin gig, and when he let a "hi" drop out of his mouth foaming with malevolence, I knew I KNEW in an instant he was the choad that had rung me months back and said those wretched things. And at the same moment, he knew *I* knew, and I decided to make his life miserable.

I smiled politely, asked him how he was.

"Fide," he said (his nose was nearly always clogged whenever I saw him and heard him speak).

"That's good. It's great weather, isn't it? So rare for this time of year."

Blank nod.

"I bet you miss winter, though. Are you into skiing? Are you one of those crazies who goes night skiing up in West Virginia? You look like you might..!"

"Nuh."

"Oh, I see you got the pork chops! I always find they're rather tough, but yours look wonderful and tender. That's lucky, isn't it? I think the food's gotten worse in the time I've been here. I don't know how they do it, quite honestly! I guess they just figure we cover everything with ketchup and don't really think about taste because maybe we're too drunk all the time, but I tell you...a good pork chop is quite a treasure. I don't eat too much pork myself because I rarely enjoy it, but I guess this time we got lucky--"

But by this point he'd already stood up, took his tray, and left the table, throwing a disgusted look over his shoulder at me. My friend sitting next to me said, "Wonder what that's all about?" and I said, "Guess some people just don't like conversation when they're inhaling their food."

I can guarantee I would recognise him immediately if I saw him on the street, if not for his ugliness, then for his arrogant demeanor. I can forgive a truly miserable person for acting like a fuckwich on a platter, but the result is that I have never again attended a poetry reading, an open mic night, a poetry slam, or anything of that ilk since. I realise it's been over 20 years, but I knew that if I were to attempt one again, I might run into his type, maybe worse, and quite frankly, my fragile ego couldn't handle it.

The only time I can see myself reading something at one of those events is when I've published my own stuff, and someone begs me to read a section from my own book. Then I call the shots and can give a hearty "piss off" to any jesters or sour dicks that happen to wander along and criticise the outpourings of my mind.

And that's power.