The True Story of How I Got Back Into Reading Poetry in Public…

A bonus Substack newsletter for all about the way in which I returned to reading poetry out loud

My friend

Emily Writes

was a guest reader at a poetry event several years ago. She wasn’t really a poet, at least that’s how she described herself (I’m sure she is, or has been). She had written some funny and interesting things for the event, and some of them rhymed and some of them weren’t poems at all. And that was fine. She was the guest poet, the headliner. Before that there would be an open mic with a bunch of people reading. It was a Sunday afternoon.

I was back writing poems after several years off. I was pumping them out on my blog-site — for something to do. I had started off just sharing the music-related ones (and there weren’t actually that many of those to begin with…) Soon after I started adding some of the older poems about all sorts of things, and this got my writing new ones — and then music became so much the focus of a lot of the poems. Anyway, that was all happening in the background in the 2010s.

And then Emily asked me along for a bit of moral support or whatever, and said I should come to the poetry event and maybe even read at the open mic. Why not, I thought, having not stood up to read poems in about a decade.

I had this poem about how Prince was considered the weird one in the 1980s. And not Michael Jackson. It was about how silly that all seemed now, and had done for a while, and rode along on something approaching a chorus around “Remember when Prince was the weird one…” And then comparative examples of how bad Michael Jackson had been outside of music, vs. Prince just doing odd things in the studio or whatever.

It wasn’t the greatest poem, but I liked the idea of it and was considering reading it. I asked Emily what she thought — and she told me it was probably a risk. But she laughed. When Emily laughs, at least in those sorts of moments, she is both condemning you and egging you on all at once. Could be both, could be either.

There were a few other poems I’d printed out — and I figured I could edit the short set on the fly.

Then the open mic started, and it was serious, and conservative — if anything. And Emily said, “you’re not going to read the poem about Michael Jackson are you?” in a whisper between poets. And I said, “I bloody am going to read the poem about Michael Jackson”. And she said, “you can’t”. And I said, “I can”. She said, “Aw...it will be awful, I can’t bear to watch, you can’t....” I thought about it for a minute. This seemed a rather serious plea. I weighed it up and said in my best thoughtful voice: “I probably will still read it...”

All while this was going on, the poets continued to get up and read. There  was a song or two as well. And a story, a prayer, and look, all up, I guess it was going pretty well really.

Then the poet before me got up to read her poem. She had Michael Jackson’s music playing in her headphones so everyone could hear, she even introduced it, drew attention to the music to show it wasn’t a mistake and that she’d just left her headphones on. It was in fact planned. Then she read a poem, the gist of it: Guns are bad/Michael Jackson, not bad. They said he was bad. But  he’s not bad. Guns are bad. She finished by saying the words “Beat It”, “Beat It”, “Beat It” about  nine times in a chant — and it was in reference to how we needed to beat guns. To control them. She hadn’t been playing Beat It in the background through her headphones though. She had been playing the song Bad.

So, it was my turn next. I shuffled the pages as I got up. And read my poem about Michael Jackson first, to immediately follow the one that had just been said that referenced Beat It and Bad. Mine was all about how back in the day MJ was deemed wholesome, while Prince was the one that everyone thought was weird. A pervert, so obviously strange. And sinister. A creep, apparently. I read lines about Michael Jackson masturbating onto the split cheeks of his underage victims. And then I read another one, about Eddie Van Halen, joking, since it was already fairly awkward, that this was about a different kind of masturbation altogether.

I really enjoyed getting back  on the horse. And hearing most of the work by the other poets as well. 

And that was that. I’ve been reading my poems up at the microphone once a month or so, as often as I’m able and when I remember, pretty much ever since that awkward Sunday afternoon about a half decade ago, or more.

I’m never sure that the poems are the sort people want to hear. And that’s been a huge motivation for continuing to turn up. To give it a go.