I Went to a Poetry Open Mic and this is What I Observed
Published in
5 min readMay 22, 2017
- Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Art: Free verse, or as many poets call it screw you iambic pentameter, is what most of the open micer poets employ. They talk of rhythms and flow and scoff at the idea of rhyme. Who needs meter when you have the enter key. This is not to say one should not employ free verse but when it is not handled with skill it becomes tedious. You cannot pass bad prose off as poetry when ‘it is not poetry it is prose run mad’. Even when rhyme is employed you can’t just rhyme pain and again every single time. Vers libre was not meant for jumbling up big fancy words in an attempt at sounding profound. We see you hiding your bad poetry behind free verse! What has free verse ever done to you, you monsters!
- How do I Love Me, Let Me Count the Ways: Let me show you how much I know and understand the world and the inner workings of the human mind by talking about myself. Nothing says deep like look at this sad thing that happened to me and how I need to be loved / respected / admired etc. All this would be palpable, even pleasing, if the language being used was brilliantly woven. But more often than not what we get is an onslaught of lazy metaphors and the clunky use of language. If you feel the process is cathartic then by all means go ahead, but one cannot expect everyone to participate in you picking the scab over your old wounds ‘looking for an angry fix’.
- Look on my Works all Ye Un-woke and Despair: The poet is always representative of a gender / class / race even when it seems contrived, one is just supposed to accept the mouthpiece. There is a man who will recite a poem about being a woman in first person! Perhaps the poet should know we’ve had enough of men speaking for women. As a poet one can take a step back, examine the issue and proceed to address it while fighting the urge of self-referencing. They can try to drop the personal pronouns. It seems everyone is writing about feminism or gender issues or race or religion in the hope of seeming ‘edgy’ in a manner that reeks of disingenuousness. Add to this is incoherent ranting, braying and gesticulating, which after a point begins to obscure these crucial matters and becomes akin to having to listen to a jackhammer. This all makes one wonder if they are doing it because they really care about the issues or are they just after the likes and shares. I don’t know, maybe Bukowski while nursing his drink, thinking of the drudgery of work, longed for his poems to go viral. Perhaps that’s what the Bluebird in his Heart wanted to sing about.
- They Rave, Recite and Madden around the Land: Hear ye, hear ye, there are Poetasters among us! They look like us, talk and walk like us, and many cannot recognise them but be warned they are right here. You will see them when they get on stage yelling, raving and ranting to make up for their lack of skill. They display maudlin behaviour and crumble when they start to recount a memory. You will feel badgered into agreeing or sympathising with the poetaster. The staccato nature of their performance becomes cloying when every second person goes up on stage, employs the same techniques of the person before them, and you feel you are watching the same poet on loop. The gesturing the posturing, the homilies spewing forth first loud and fast, then slow, taken over by acceleration, then quiet, again raised voices, silence and then a hackneyed last line for that coveted mic-drop moment. A cacophonous onslaught of slogans by non-conformists among other non-conformists to the insufferable beat of snapping fingers.
- The Bragging Poet is a Paltry Thing: It would seem that the open micers have held a meeting and decided to do away with soulful imagery and well-crafted metaphors. They seem to care less for nuance of feeling and more for that photograph with them on stage a mic in hand. ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility’ but who gives a shit, Wordsworth, when everyone is sharing your mediocre excuse for a poem. So many want to go up on stage and do poetry because they believe it makes them sound deep. They care less about creating and doing justice to an experience or mood and more about an incongruous analogy that will get them applause. It seems their concern is more with laudation than the art. A crowd-pleasing line here, an exhortation against injustice there and they automatically have bragging rights — ‘look everyone, I’m an artist speaking on XYZ issue!’
- I saw the Best Minds of my Generation Destroyed by Mediocrity: If you have friends who have performed in an open mic all I can say is ‘FLY YOU FOOLS!’ The most saccharine conversations takes place between these would-be bards as they fawn over each other at the end of a show. Everyone gathers around to pat each other on the back. Constructive Criticism has never been privy to an open mic, in fact he died a slow agonising death after someone deigned to introduce him to yet another girl who had written the most insipid poem about missing her ex lover’s scent. You cannot say anything about a poem because then you’re apparently attacking the sentiment and not the poem in itself. Criticism will not undermine a poet’s experience it can only point out if a sentiment is not expressed sincerely.
- Shanti, Shanti, Shanti: These opinions are my own. Feel free verse to rail against this indignity, but know this -‘you think it cruel but consider it a rule, no creature smarts so little as a fool.’
