Friday, December 26, 2008

A Living Community

I'm noticing that in the conversations over at C. Dale Young's and Seth Abramson's and Barbara Reyes's blogs (among others) just about everybody is bypassing the issue I raised of open mics. I don't mean this comment to be snarky or suggest that the defenders of MFAs or museums aren't also defending valuable institutions. But really, you want to find a place where people get together and find poetry relevant, you want to find a place where it's not just about this or that type of poetry, you go to an open mic.

I realize that all open mics are going to differ. That's a good thing as far as I'm concerned, because a good open mic should reflect its locality. I'm going to take this post to reveal a few things about Mic Check, however, that might shed light on why I'm such a supporter of the open mic format.

There are two rules of Mic Check, voiced at the beginning of each show. One: Audience, respect the poets. That means being reasonably quiet during a reading or recital or performance, but reaction is encouraged. Clap, stamp, snap, give an amen, whatever. If you don't like a poem, write something and come back next week. Two: Poets, respect the audience. Over the course of the years, that message has come with a single addendum: No poems about sex with your zombie grandmother. This is partly tongue-in-cheek, a way of saying that even though you should know better than to berate the audience or say something so taboo as to warrant arrest for it, you will not be censored. It's also real - the grossest poem ever read at Mic Check was about a guy having sex with his grandmother's corpse. More importantly, it wasn't even good.

The type and quality of poems at Mic Check varies wildly from week to week, and even over the course of an evening. You'll hear poems that draw their rhythms from hip-hop, from Victorian poetry, from storytelling. Some of the poets study. Some come off the street. There's at least one guy who, when off his meds, talks like Christine Hume writes. That's not meant to denigrate either - it's damn impressive. I've heard performances that were less poetry than evangelism, less verse than essay on the value of Marx. I've heard poetry to which I responded viscerally and immediately. I've even heard poetry such that I went up to the poet and suggested journals to which it should be submitted.

We play games. Paper will get passed out to the crowd, and during a break between poets random members of the audience will have to write a haiku or limerick or quatrain. Sometimes the games will involve multiple people writing a single poem. This is a huge part of Mic Check, there from the beginning. It's not just about listening to the poetry, but participating in it. Bringing the community into the verse, which in turn helps to ensure the poets work with, not at, the community.

The final game each night is adlib. Anyone who wants to can come to the stage. The host or hosts get four to five words from the audience, and everybody improvs. Some will freestyle, some will create surreal stories, some will try to incorporate the words into dirty jokes. But everything wraps up with the line between audience and poets blurred, symbiotic.

That's a living community of poetry.

4 comments:

C. Dale said...

Sorry. Meant to respond at my blog but the Holidays intervened. I have been to a number of open mics, some better than others. I have never read at an open mic. I am, believe it or not, kind of shy. Even a regular reading is scary for me.

word verification: decalate

Nancy Devine said...

i haven't been to an open mic in quite a while. it seems that where i live, they've kind of dropped off the planet.
i've actually been thinking i should try to get something going here, maybe somehow involve my students.
let's hear more about Mic Check....where? who organized it? advertising? etc.

JeFF Stumpo said...

@ C. Dale: Fair enough about both holidays (I've been away, more or less, myself) and being shy. I used to wear gloves when I first started reading at open mics - my hands got so cold with nerves. Also, don't want to imply that I'm calling you out - a huge chunk of conversation just happened at your blog :-)

@Nancy: Mic Check takes place every Sunday night at Revolution Cafe in downtown Bryan, TX. Revolution Cafe is notable as being a little piece of Austin plunked down into BCS (Bryan-College Station...College Station is home to Texas A&M University). If you want to visit the place in town where straight, gay, bi, poly, black, white, latino, asian, don't-use-generic-groups-like-black-white-latino-asian-because-they're-overgeneric-asshole, christian, muslim, hindu, jewish, wiccan, atheist, agnostic, etc can show up and be accepted for who they are (barring a general dislike of conservative politics), Revs is it.

It was started in 2004 by Stephen Sargent, Leanetta "Shug" Avery, and Roger Reeves. Steve is finishing up his PhD at Texas A&M, Shug graduated with her BA a few years ago and moved to Dallas/Forth Worth, and Roger is now a Michener Fellow at UT. All three were very different types of poets, which was great for the early development of the scene. It's currently hosted by Christopher Call and Chris Diaz, a grad student and undergrad at A&M, respectively.

Advertising is all word of mouth. In the earliest days, that meant those of us at Javashock (the slam I started and hosted for five years - Javashock was the first regular spoken-word scene in town) plugging Mic Check. If you were interested in the slam, or if you got interested at the slam, now you had a place to go more than four times a year. It just spread organically from that. Steve had connections with slammers up in Forth Worth and Dallas and would bring them down to feature from time to time. Roger and I would sometimes bring in more academic poets (I'm also one of the guys who would do very Dada-esque readings just because). Shug had tendrils in the undergrad population.

There's a Facebook group for Mic Check now, which makes spreading word about special shows a bit easier. But there's generally been a sense that things can change week to week, and it's OK. Sometimes there's only two readers. Sometimes there's fifteen. Sometimes twenty people in the audience. Sometimes a hundred and fifty (I think the biggest crowd ever, for the slam that determined the team we send to the National Poetry Slam in 2007, was something like 180 people).

I'd gone on at length. Do you want any suggestions for starting something with your students? Schools will have different rules than we did, so not everything will look the same...

Nancy Devine said...

thanks jeff.
something with students, i think, would separate, to some degree, from the community at large. i'm really in the thinking stage on this...letting it just hang in my brain for a while.