Open Mic: Featured Readers, Etiquette
OPEN MIC: FEATURED READERS
You can have it both ways! If you are running a reading series and want to attract more people, or just open things up, add an open mic. And if you’re running an open mic and you want to attract an audience that includes some nonreaders, try adding a featured reader.
The Featured Reader will have a set time limit (these days it’s usually 20 minutes, back in the day it was 45), and can either precede, follow, or be sandwiched by the open mic.
Featured readers open up the open mic scene to other poetics; they can also be a sought-after slot allowing a regular a chance to stretch out and strut.
This is how I got my first feature: Donald Lev, the street poet in the great 60s film Putney Swope, gave me the opportunity after I’d shown up regularly at his series at Forlini’s Third Phase. I was a student at Columbia at the time, and when I saw Don’s flyer advertising a poetry series, open + feature, I figured I had to get there early to circumvent the horde of Columbia poet wannabes who would surely be showing up to read. Of course, there was only one other student who showed up -- Columbia may be a breeding ground for poets (Ginsberg, Koch, Howard, Padgett, et al) but there is among many poets a class system that manifests itself primarily as an abhorrence of open mics. Still, there is a rich lore that surrounds the populism of the opens –- how Jim Carroll started the open mic at St. Marks, how Gwendolyn Brooks never left an open mic till everyone had read, the night someone pulled a knife on me when I was running the open at St Marks….
The danger in having regulars feature is creating a pecking order of poets, exactly what the open mic was created to destroy. Many series (Jackie Sheeler’s Pink Pony at Cornelia Street, Bar 13, and Urbana at BPC, for instance) do not allow regulars to feature, preferring to bring in established poets who not only serve a pedagogical purpose for the regulars but also allow the regulars to be heard by an outsider that can lead to publishing and reading opportunities.
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF OPEN MIC ETIQUETTE
- Thou shalt not leave the scene till the last poet blows. Still, PWBP (Poets will be Poets), and just as the shuffling of papers to pick out an order for the poems occasionally threatens to drown out the poetry, shuffling out of the room to make an early exit is part of the theater.
- Heckling is a part of the poem and is to be encouraged...
- Unless you feel there should be a churchlike respect for the Holy Task of Poetry, in which case if someone dares intrude they have to stand in the corner with their pants down for the next three readers (an O’Debra’s rule).
- No shuffling papers while waiting your turn –- listen to the goddamn poem!
- Read the goddamn poem! Keep oral footnotes, explanatories, apologies to a minimum.
- Learn mic technique. Adjust the mic before you start. Speak into it. Listen to yourself –- can you hear yourself through the speakers? If not, why not? Are you too loud (note people holding hands over ears)?
- Read new work. Use the open reading as part of your editing process.
- Don’t bug the host to let you read early.
- Patronize the bar, coffee shop, bookstore.
- Start your own damn reading!
BOB’S IRONIC RULES
- Always apologize before you read (The standard opening: “This poem isn’t finished, but…”)
- You don’t need a microphone to have an open mic, but do not underestimate the fact that we now have chips implanted at birth that make ears perk up when sound is electronically enhanced.
Onward...
- More of the article, Open Mic: The O’Debra Twins’ Handy Dandy “Show & Tell” Lawbook
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