I live downtown in a mid-size East coast city. Within a radius of two blocks of my house are five museums, six churches, a library, a soup kitchen, and three homeless shelters. Demographically speaking, we inner-city dwellers are the “risk-oblivious”…artists and homosexuals mostly, who gentrify a difficult area. Mixed in, of course, with the homeless and disenfranchised, who need to be near centralized social service agencies.
On Saturday, I wandered over to the library for the monthly Open Mic Poetry Event, hosted by poet Crystal Senter Brown. A diverse mix of academic types, weary mothers with strollers, intense teens, and street people filled rows of seats set up in the magnificent marble rotunda. The featured poet was a Black Muslim woman, originally from Brooklyn, whose poems dealt with abuse, drugs, prison, death, and the hard-wrung joys of motherhood. But many others got up and recited, too.
A gay man tried not to break down as he recited a poem about the death of his partner. A woman in the Navy pleaded for the return of soldiers from Iraq. A Puerto Rican mamacita described the North End of Springfield as an island, full of the same sights and sounds as the island of her birth. A teenaged boy longed for “the girl with the perfect hair.” A teenaged girl longed for a boy who didn’t “see the real person inside.” A burly man with a ludicrously squeaky voice wimpered when he forgot his lines. The audience waited patiently, murmuring encouragement, until he recovered and finished a hilarious Billy Joel parody. A somber man related the death of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother, and her child, from the effects of drugs and AIDS. “If you see a Negro girl who needs help, don’t pass her by,” he begged.
An open mic poetry reading is a strange and wonderful event. Think about it. A poet pours out his deepest thoughts and feelings, which he may never have told even to the person who inspired them….and then get up and recites his words to a roomful of strangers. And this roomful of random people–many of whom only stopped because it was warm and there were going to be refreshments afterward–this roomful of ordinary people, full of ordinary biases and prejudices, unexamined opinions and kneejerk reactions, listens politely, murmurs encouragement, claps enthusiastically, equally, for the blue-haired old lady, the punk with the ring in his nose, the youth with the dreadlocks, the woman with the headscarf. For a moment, this roomful of random people glimpses the love of one gay man for another, the despair of the pregnant Negro girl, the joy of the Latina for her native culture. Glimpses, understands, and celebrates.
Poetry…the great civilizer.
