Tim’s Invitational Open(?) Mic, December 28

Tim Verhaegen sent around invitations to attend this open mic, one of a number he has hosted on Zoom on a periodic, but not regular basis. But it caused me to think, “if it’s by invitation how can it be an ‘open mic’?” Be that as it may, it was a half dozen of some of my own favorite local poets. &, as Tim does, we went around twice, but not quite in the same order.

Bob Sharkey said he had been going through his poetry pile & found this piece, maybe from a Bernadette Mayer workshop, where he turned newspaper headlines into couplets that he titled “Why Isabella Isn’t Afraid of Being Scary.” His 2nd poem was again from that pile “20 Things You Don’t Know About Me” all true, he said, & some I did know about him.

Cheryl Rice began with a poem looking back to the genetics of Polish & Irish that was titled “Broken” about her mother. For the next time around she read a poem from this Summer, “3 Deer on the Road” a meditation on them, & on our presence in their habitat. 

My first poem, inspired by a Blog by Carolee Bennett (more from her below), was the first in what is growing into a series, “Words in the Time of COVID-19: Saxophone,” &, in what is obliquely related, my 2nd round poem was titled “My Last Poem.”

Our host, Tim Verhaegen, read from a novel he has been working on about a gay man in his 20s, this excerpt a flash-back set in 1968 as an 8 year old scanning the pages of True Magazine in the bathroom & stumbling upon the Marlboro Man in an ad & a mystifying, to an 8 year-old, classified ad. His second piece was a revised version of what he apparently read at his last “open mic” (which I missed), a portrait of an 83 year-old Virginia whose 87 year-old husband left her because "he wanted to suck dick” -- if you know Tim you know how funny this was.

For a long time Carolee Bennett didn’t come to in-person open mics, but she has shown up on Zoom; today she read a poem meditating on Time, Aging & Truth titled “The Gingerbread Man” instigated by her sons growing up & larger. I’d already read her 2nd poem on her Blog, Good Universe Next Door, but it was a treat to hear it in her own voice, “Failing to Write a Solstice Poem You insert Youself into the Conjunction of Jupiter & Saturn”  

Avery Stempel began with “On the other side of being Overwhelmed” “when … that sigh of relief …” which I think we all understood very well. His new pre-occupation is raising & selling mushrooms & also writing a “comic book on the mushroom thing,” & read the introduction to "Dao Te Mogu" (The Way of the (medicinal) Mushroom).

No matter what you might call such a gathering of poets reading their work — open mic, workshop, invitational, etc. — it was varied, entertaining, even enlightening (with a small “e), we even laughed.

Happy New Year!