“A poem is an action of the mind captured on a page.” — Anne Carson
In spite of how important I consider poetry to be, it was only in recent years that I started attending open mic nights and reading my work before a crowd. This was, and still is, quite scary! You have to stand up in front of a room of mostly strangers and try and convey something you’ve probably angsted over for hours in the space of a few minutes. So many things can go wrong.
To state the obvious, poetry is inherently personal, and having others read your work under any circumstances can feel exposing.1 How much worse is it, then, to not only have to try and convey the “shape” of a written object using your voice, but also to see an audience’s reaction happen in real time? I sort of can’t think of anything worse for a writer.
On top of that, I really don’t think that the kind of poetry I write is very well suited to open mic nights. I have been referred to more than once as a “page poet” — an informal term you hear thrown around in the open mic scene which seems to denote someone whose work — to put a charitable spin on it — is best read in silence, in the privacy of one’s own home. I often feel, when reading out loud in front of an audience, that that I’m not really doing justice to my work, or that my work isn’t really made for those kinds of spaces.
In spite of all this, I try and go to at least one open mic night a month, and think it’s an incredibly valuable forum for sharing one’s work. Below are some thoughts on why.
Reading your poems out loud gives you immediate audience feedback
This seems like the most obvious benefit: when reading before an audience, you’re very plugged in to what that audience is experiencing. In a sense, you have a direct line to what the people in the crowd are feeling.
This is great! You are getting realtime feedback on your work, from a (hopefully) varied and sympathetic group of people. You can see which parts of the poem land and which don’t. You can see what needs further clarification, even if it seemed clear to you as you were working on the draft. In the best case, you’ll leave the event with a sense of what you can do well and what needs more work. You’ll learn something about who you are as a poet.
Some people find that when they read out loud that they don’t really have a sense of what is going on with the audience.2 Leaving aside the question of why this might be (or what it might mean), I think the exercise is helpful even if you do feel this way: firstly, performance is like anything else — it takes practice. The first few times you perform will likely be an exercise in relaxing and becoming comfortable with the audience. Only once you are comfortable will you be able to start to tap in to what the crowd is feeling. And even then, it might take you quite some time to get good at it.
Secondly, even though you might not have a good sense of how the audience is responding to your poetry, it’s undeniable that the act of standing up in front of others and reading your work out loud changes the meaning of the work. Even if you might not have a good sense of what the audience is feeling, you’ll build a new relationship to the work yourself — simply by hearing it in quite a different context. You’ll learn how to hear your work as a listener, rather than as a writer.
Performance is a good skill to have, even for “page poets”
Even for those poets whose work is perhaps best enjoyed when written down, I think performance is a good skill to learn.3
Firstly, performance teaches distance: when you’re up on stage in front of an audience, you have a certain distance from what you’re reading and also from yourself; if you don’t let go of your ego, at least a little, then you’ll be crippled by performance anxiety. This can be freeing: an opportunity to get away from your usual patterns or habits. The best performers are able to separate their “real” personalities from the personas they don on stage; this gives them a tremendous opportunity to explore, discover and be creative.
Related to distance is the idea of anonymity: when you’re up on stage, not only are you anonymous to the crowd, but the crowd is effectively a group of anonymous individuals to you. This is true even if you’re a well-known performer: there will always be people in the crowd who aren’t familiar with your work. This can be useful for a poet because it’s an opportunity to have your work judged outside of the usual frames of reference (literary magazines, for instance). Anonymity means that open mic nights are, at heart, a democratic space.
Lastly, if you can become a good performer of your work, you can take it to a wider audience. There are lots of people out there who don’t engage with written poetry, for a variety of reasons — perhaps they never had good teachers or they don’t have access to a good library.4 Poetry is a pretty niche art form which can make it hard to get your work noticed by others. If you can perform it well on stage, you might open up new audiences for your stuff. You could get people involved who otherwise wouldn’t typically engage with poetry.5
You might learn something about poetry as an art form
I think it’s likely that humans were making poetry long before we developed written language; some of the oldest written texts available to us are poems.
We tend to think of art forms as quite tied to a given medium — cinema with films, music with sound etc. — but as Ariana Reines has pointed out, poetry is an unusual art form because it exists halfway between writing and speaking.6 It’s sort of an art form that lives across two different mediums; it’s not fixed to a single medium. Many poets lean into one side of that divide more than the other — I can think of several times when I’ve been mesmerised by watching a poet perform live, only to later feel a slight sense of disappointment when reading their work on the page.7
When you engage with speaking you’re tapping into one of the two mediums that a poem inhabits. You’re engaging with some aspect that is core to what poetry is. I think this is an opportunity that nobody should pass up!
Although reading out loud can feel intimidating and you might think that your work doesn’t “fit” into the traditional open mic night, I’d encourage you to give it a go. There is lots to be learned from the experience and doing it won’t make your poetry any worse.
It’s my experience that people often turn to writing — and poetry in particular — because they have something important and often private to communicate to the world. Much is said about whether art can (or should) be therapeutic or even cathartic, but that doesn’t change the fact that many people in the poetry scene are obviously there because they want to say something personal and oftentimes tender.
Actually, this is often my experience when reading out loud.
Being a good performer is also just a useful skill to have for many other areas in life, not only when it comes to an open mic night.
These are just a few random ideas off the top of my head: there are probably tens of reasons why someone might not have “discovered” poetry.
And you might make friends: open mic nights in my experience are usually an intimate crowd of poetry nerds, so it’s a great place to connect with people who share similar interests to you.
I couldn’t find the Reines quote when I went looking for it, but could dig it out on request. I’m also sure she’s not the only person who’s made this point.
And likewise the opposite: there are poets whose poems make great use of the page but who I don’t consider to be great readers of their poems.