I accidentally wandered into an open mike night yesterday. You can be sure that I wandered back out just as fast as my little feet could carry me, but not before witnessing the girl on the stage finishing her horrendous poem, and the audience bursting into applause.
Applause, thought I? Really, applause? Shouldn't there be some rotten fruit in there?
Which led me to realize that I have never heard good poetry at an open mike night. Which leads me to wonder if it is possible to hear good poetry at an open mike night. Perhaps I am, poetically speaking, a poisoned well. I've seen so many awful open mike nights that I half suspect that if Allen Ginsberg somehow magically wandered in and started reading selections from Howl, I'd be the one in the back thinking "The best minds of your generation. Destroyed by madness. Uh-huh. Color me skeptical that you've met even one of the best minds of your generation, Mr. Mop Head. You think that unibrow makes you look brooding? It makes you look like an add for Nair, 'kay?"
« Black market, black heart | Main | Annals of DC driving: Robert Novak edition » Radio free you23 Jul 2008 12:39 pm Comments (22)
1) You applaud even if its bad, maybe not as enthusiastically. It's like karaoke, it is a matter of courtesy - people are presenting something they really LOVE, and even if you don't share there tastes, you applaud their courage in presenting it. 2) We've done some reading nights in Second Life, and it has been fun. Clever haiku, brief classics, elegant lyrics, glaring impositions (that was me, I got away with reading ALL of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"), original compositions from smoothly erotic to brave, clumsy efforts. 
Perhaps the bar is just set really high on the medium. I personally find that merely mediocre poetry is excruciating to listen to--never mind the stuff that's truly bad--whereas boring music can at least be inoffensive background noise.
Ginsberg's the wrong example to be using if you want to create a hypothetical that demonstrates how a lifetime of bad coffeehouse poetry might have jaded you to the point where you couldn't respond appropriately to good poetry because, you know, "Howl" isn't good poetry, except in the minds of self-obsessed boomer literary critics who love it because it reminds them of the 60's and REVOLUTION, man, and they're still re-living the Summer of Love in English departments throughout the country. As far as people who get up and sing/recite/slam/whatever at open mic nights, polite applause is the appropriate response (unless they're really good and deserve enthusiastic applause). No matter how someone might suck, they deserve respect for putting themselves out there when they're not getting paid for it. Razzing them is just pointlessly mean-spirited.
I thought we weren't childishly dismissing things with no arguments anymore.
What Xeynon said. "Howl" is awful.
I'll third that - Howl is an awful poem. I'm not sure Ginsberg has made any good poetry, but I lack the expertise to say so assuredly. I think part of it is that poets who write good poetry are unlikely to present it at an open mike night, but that might be bias on my part. (I mean, can you imagine Eliot or Auden doing so? Rilke?)
I will say, in reference to courtesy applause, that it all depends on the character of the open mic. generally, yes, any performance gets perfunctory applause. Depending on how insular the poetry community is in a given town though, you pretty much know when folks hate your shit. Back when I was playing at being a performance poet, I got hugely different responses in Ann Arbor (meh), Chicago (hated it) and Cleveland (loved it) to the same piece. With poetry slams proper, there's a similar variance in how things get scored - some places tend towards giving everyone at least a decent score, but, in, say, Chicago (and this was about 6 years ago) if you sucked, you got a 1 out of 10.
First of all, I am a bourgeois troglodyte babbitt, 75% attached to the proposition that if it doesn't rhyme, it isn't poetry. But I have been to one sort of open mike night/afternoon. A friend in college had organized it, and dragooned her friends into first attending and then performing. Another buddy gave a reading from Ovid. I quickly wrote something literally on the back of an envelope. (I think I had just picked up my bills from a PO Box) It mostly rhymed, and mostly followed an 8/8/9 syllable format except for a couplet or two that didn't. It was about being drunk and being really, really focused on how great my cheeseburger was. A woman really, really liked the poem and asked for a copy of it. (She did not seem interested in me romantically or physically.) I shrugged and handed her the envelope. Turned out that she was a local high school poetry teacher and published poet.
I like Ginsburg. Try "Why is God love, Jack?"
Poetry read aloud at an open mike night counts as performance art, rather than literature. And frankly, performance art sucks.
Check out Iota on Wilson in Arlington. Decent music for an open mic. There are talented musicians that play there. (There's also some real crap, but it's easy to ignore). As for open mic poetry, I've never been, but I can't imagine liking it.
Ms. Megan
Please, I think that blog comment threads are the closest thing the internet has to open mic nights.
John: Except that I can skip past the comments that aren't worth reading. What are you going to do, bring a Tivo to open mike night?
First of all, I am a bourgeois troglodyte babbitt, 75% attached to the proposition that if it doesn't rhyme, it isn't poetry. So you're 75% attached to the proposition that more than half of what Milton, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Eliot and Shakespeare wrote isn't poetry? And conversely 75% attached to the proposition that anything that begins "There once was a man from Nantucket.." is? Wow.
"I've seen so many awful open mike nights that I half suspect that if Allen Ginsberg somehow magically wandered in and started reading selections from Howl, I'd be the one in the back thinking "The best minds of your generation. Destroyed by madness. Uh-huh. Color me skeptical that you've met even one of the best minds of your generation, Mr. Mop Head. You think that unibrow makes you look brooding? It makes you look like an add for Nair, 'kay?" " Why are you posting selections from your pre-teen diaries? That's just embarrassing.
It is a lot easier identifying things that generally suck than things that don't suck. I'd go so far as to say there really isn't a lot of value in telling a random reader how much some very general class of things sucks. That said, it may have some utility in your inner circle or as a good joke for a crowd who have watched a lot of bad open mike poetry.
She's on the BC vector, Puck, it's to be expected. http://bp2.blogger.com/_FBXGhy-QmVw/RdkWEiPJEqI/AAAAAAAAAiA/sLWYv3UEibc/s1600-h/card678.JPG ("What did I do this weekend" at Indexed under 5X7, in case of link woes). PS: I think Indexed generally doesn't suck, though perhaps isn't as grand as Freakonomics assesses it. I'd have a weak Hold valuation on it.
Reminds me of my late father's view: 'Sometimes we applaud because they were good. Other times we applaud because they stopped'.
Aaron, That is kind of funny. hi5. I need to remind myself that this is a blog and not some "Atlantic Daily" column by MM.
Good poems involve subtle interplay between meter and rhythm. When read aloud, they must be half-chanted, rather than performed, or this is impossible to hear. "Dramatic" renditions, which open mike nights encourage, serve usually to hide weaknesses in the poem. (Occasionally they hide strengths, as with actors and Shakespeare.) The poetry slammers are by no means the only offenders; Yeats and Eliot, in their recordings, are sometimes nearly as bad. Good poems are also rare, and have to be read several times to be appreciated. These qualities make it vanishingly unlikely to hear a good poem at an open mike night, or to notice it if you did.
|
Subscribe to this blog by Email  Recent Posts
Monthly Archives
Categories
 Should I call myself a feminist? Series III Tivo
|
Copyright © 2008 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Oh, I feel you, sister. Sorry to sound like Harold Bloom, but jeebus, that kind of poetry tends to be awful. I think "slam poetry" is just a euphemism for "bad poetry". And this is from someone who loves poetry and reads it several times a week.
But to each their own.
Posted by Freddie | July 23, 2008 12:48 PM