2nd Wednesday Open Mic, March 11

Schenectady’s monthly open mic at C.R.E.A.T.E. Space, 137 State St., doing poetry in the time of COVID-19, there were still 6 of his here, no need for a sign-up sheet, we all knew each other — & then part way through there was a surprise, but more on that later.

The host here each 2nd Wednesday is poet Jackie Craven who started us off with a poem by West Coast poet Suzanne Lummis, “How I Didn’t Get Myself to a Nunnery.”

Alan Catlin was the first to read & began with a poem by Bunkong Tuon (aka BK) who had been scheduled as the featured poet but had to cancel, “Thoughts When I Found Out I Was Going to Have a Daughter” (which you can find at the Misfit Magazine website). Then on to poems from his work-in-progress of poems based on the work of American photographer Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971), “House of Horrors: Coney Island,” & “Untitled #10” (from Arbus’ series of photos taken in asylums), then a poem written yesterday about a neighbor dying “Across the Street…” Alan has a new book just out from Dos Madres Press Asylum Garden: after Van Gogh, he read the title poem & a series of poems titled “Aspects of Vincent.”

Judith Prest began with a selection of poems from After (Finishing Line Press, 2019), including the title poem, “Unsafe,” “Recovery Poem 1,” & “Witness.” Then a newer poem written in November “Prayer for St. Janis” (based on Ernesto Cardenal’s poem “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe”).

Scott Morehouse usually (always?) leaves us laughing ’til we gasp with his outrageously humorous tales, tonight was no exception with the story of a widow, her friend, & a custody trial over a monkey, set in 1925, “Society’s Darling” made all the better by Scott’s theatrical rendition.

Susan Jewell talked about a panel discussion by scientists on poetry at the recent AWP convention, & read Jim Johnstone’s piece on virus “Identity as a Reproducible Method.”  (For anyone interested in the conjunction of poetry & science, check out the CapSci Facebook page or their website www.capsciny.org. Susan is a persistent writer of ekphrastic poetry & read a couple tonight, “Abandoned Ware” (about the end of an affair), & one titled “How Did the Birds Not Shit on Me.”

While Susan was reading 3 young women wandered in, a bit uncertain & shy. One, Tamoya (spelling?) said she had been looking for a poetry open mic in Schenectady. With encouragement from us more seasoned readers she read an untitled piece written this morning, a moving letter to her mother discussing her childhood & their troubled relationship — a surprising gift to us all.

I was up next with a couple new poems, “First Date” (based on a poem a lady gave me on our first date), “The Helicopters of Peace” (from my recent retreat on Cape Ann), & an older piece, “Epidemic,” on earlier epidemics, the bird flu & the swine flu.

Our host Jackie Craven finished off the night by telling us about a series of successes she’s had recently in getting her poems published. She read a series of “sister poems,” the first with birds, then one based on the Pleaides, based on a Nancy Drew novel with the same title “The Mystery at the Moss Covered Mansion,” then ended with “Cyborg Sister.”

As it turned out this was the last poetry event I attended before the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic began to shut everything down. By that weekend most entertainment venues had closed down, & I decided to cancel the Third Thursday Poetry Night I host at the Social Justice Center. As the days have progressed bars & restaurants, movie theater & gyms have closed & “social distancing” has become not a description of pathological behavior but an accepted, protective behavior.

Writing is something that is done alone, in private, like, well you get it. But poetry open mics have become a way for us solitary poets to get our work out there in our community, to try out our work & perhaps take it back home to revise or re-work it & try it out again, or to promote our poems when they are published in a zine or as a chapbook or collection, & to hear the work of others, to learn from them what to do (or not do), to respond to, to emulate (or copy, or imitate, or steal). What began in private becomes transformed into public statement, into community, into friendships, or into the conflicts that create change.

I will have to see how this Blog will change in the time of COVID-19 until we begin meeting again in bars, coffee houses & other community spaces. But the important thing is for all of us to keep writing, to stay connected by social media, telephone, messaging, email, one-on-one encounters, to send your best work out there to the many online & print venues that exist. & to create new ways of sharing our work via the magic of electronic media — we’re all made out of electrons anyways.

Now go write that poem you’ve been wanting to for as long as you can remember. Peace.