On Feb 8, 2008, at 8:17 PM, andrew burke wrote:

> Hope it went well, Michael. How about a report?
>
> Andrew
  Andrew, thanks for asking! This is what just posted at my blog,  
followed by a few other thoughts for not-quite-so-public consumption:

<blog>
Honey, I'm Home!
Actually I got back yesterday but had my usual post-reading mental  
paralysis and did nothing meaningful all day. It took band practice  
this afternoon to get my brain rebooted—well, perhaps that remains to  
be seen.

The reading went well for me, or at least my two sets were well  
received and it was a decent venue, with more listeners than poets.  
The food was good. I had two glasses of decent wine. We got to bed at  
a nearly decent hour. And yet I was, as always, depressed. It doesn’t  
work that way for me with music, though there the hours are later and  
the crowds less attentive, there’s a lot more physical work, and the  
money’s (usually) no better: nada is nothing every which a way.

There was, with the exception of the no-show spoken word folks, the  
usual assortment of open mic poets, but of better than usual quality:  
competent rhyming homilies with only very occasional metrical lapses;  
confidently presented poetry-as-self-realization; more than one person  
who wrote free verse I’d like to read in order to see if it lives on  
the page as well as it did spoken; a rhyming geek-like-me whose verse  
seemed very interesting when I could get past the each-word-dropped- 
ito-silence presentation (He no doubt thinks I talk too fast. Krys (http://www.krysbaker.com 
) does.); a woman I’ve heard before who seems bemused to discover that  
assigned imitations of other poets have actually given her new things  
to say and ways to say them. And the MC was very good.

They were nearly all pretty good, but only the last two seemed to be  
thinking about making poems for their own sake—another reason I'd like  
to see the texts of some of the free verse poems is that I have a  
harder time recognizing the poet’s thought about free verse rather  
than the thought in free verse. If that makes no sense, maybe my brain  
isn't rebooted yet, but Now Culture (http://nowculture.com/index.htm)  
has a recent interview (http://nowculture.com/2007/collins.htm) with  
Billy Collins which may elucidate what I mean. I don’t see the  
deliberate strategies in his poetry, but when he speaks of them, I  
find myself nodding my head. I even like the poems better than I  
already did.

And maybe that’s why open mic readings nearly awlays leave me  
depressed and open mic music seldom does: most of the time, in music,  
I’m working on the same set of problems as the other players I’m  
working with. Hell, we don’t get on stage with each other (more than  
once) if we haven’t found a common set of techniques and approaches.  
For that matter, as I and others have noted (http://www.mikesnider.org/formalblog/2008/01/13.html 
)  before, musicians almost by necessity have a shared skill-set. Not  
poets.

I opened my first set with my sonnet “Open Mic.” You can hear it here  
( http://www.mikesnider.org/listenup/listenup_files/podcast_18.mp3 ).

</blog>



Here's the text for those who don't want to download media files:



Open Mic


First song's a blues--easy to fake for most--
Eight bars or twelve, sometimes a tricky key
But usually not, with Robert Johnson's ghost
Joining the bridges absent-mindedly.
That’s when we're lucky. Nights we're not the singers
Don't mention their guitars are tuned to A,
Or worse, E-flat, or hide their fumbling fingers
While trying to show the drummer how to play.
But even then we somehow manage, loud
And leaning on the bass until we're through
The thing and coax a bellow from the crowd--
Or not--and start again with someone new.
Our job is playing music we don’t know
On stage with strangers for a short-run show.


-----------------

Now for somewhat darker thoughts. It's very hard, living at the ass- 
end of Maryland, with nearly nothing for miles and miles but F-18s,  
soybeans, and a few lingering watermen, to find people serious about  
making poems and serious about thinking about making poems. That was a  
good bunch of open-mic poets, but the spoken word folks in Raleigh NC,  
much less any large city, would kick all our asses as performers--of  
course poetry's not all performance--and it's just depressing that  
Billy Collins(!) in an online interview has more interesting things to  
say about poetry than I hear in 6 months. It makes me tired.

Ah well -- that's what lists like this are for. To pretend there's  
some common poetic culture I can occasionally jack into.

I'll feel better tomorrow.