A Thought about an Open Mic Reading

Posted on June 27, 2003 in Anxiety Encounters Writing

I’m probably not going to be a terrific performance artist. Last night, I think I delivered my poems flatly.

Among the pieces I declaimed was a piece stating my feelings about Iraq. Not many lines: most of my verse starts out long and ends up as only a few lines when I’ve finished with it.

This kid, a publicity chair for a local writing club, gets up and declaims a piece about the “right way to do a political poem”. I felt that it was well delivered with a good command of the language and the natural cadences of speech, and full of regurgitated bullshit. It was like being at a Toastmaster convention, watching a virtuoso performance filled with the same trite bits of advice, the same jokes, the usual anecdotes, and everyone laughing on cue. Beyond that, I wondered if there was a mockery of me, a suggestion that I was boring.

The crowd loved it. A published poet handed his card to the boy and gave me a pitying look. I kept up my happy face, but on the way home I started sounding out the piece that appears below. It doesn’t speak to the incident, but to other sets of acts committed around me that evoke similar feelings.

Sometimes I get so tired of the crowd and the easy pleasure it gets from hearing the same things. It’s getting close to Fourth of July and I gather that I am not supposed to be talking about our disaster in Iraq anymore. It’s off the news, though it is still happening.

Is it worthwhile to strike out for the new and what is not being talked about? Is it bad taste to be both cynic and dancer? I won’t be getting answers from my real life friends: they never read the blog.