Open Mic Night: A Privilege, Not A Right

Last week, my peeps and I went to an open mic night at a local high school where my friend Carrie teaches. One of her students organized the event as part of his senior project, and it was really really really good. There was some singing and some dancing, but the vast majority of the kids read poetry they had written. I was struck by the sheer number of kids who a) had poetry to share and b) were willing to share it. As I sat there listening, I thought to myself, "This would never have flown at my high school." No way. If it were discovered that you wrote poetry back in my day, you could expect somebody to be waiting for you after sixth period with a baseball bat. At this particular high school, however, even the jockiest of jocks had a gut-wrenching, soul-bearing poem to share and everybody was cool with it. My, how times have changed.

Unfortunately, there was one part of the evening that left a bad taste in my mouth. Anyone heard of a nation-wide organization called Youth Speaks? It's a group of kids who get together to write bad poetry and perform it at open mics and slams near you. What is this group all about, you ask? I quote from their web page:


Vision
Shift perceptions of youth by combating illiteracy, alienation, and silence to create a global movement of brave new voices bringing the noise from the margins to the core.

Mission
Youth Speaks empowers the next generation of leaders, self-defined artists, and visionary activists through written and oral literacies. We challenge youth to find, develop, publicly present, and apply their voices as creators of social change.

"...through the medium of overwrought, heavy-handed, melodramatic, aimless, preachy, meandering poetry."

OK, so that last bit was mine. It is, nevertheless, true.

These kids bugged! There were four of them, and they showed up to recite a few crappy poems and plug their next poetry slam event. Each kid recited (from memory--gotta give them props there) a freaking epic poem that lasted like, ten minutes each. And they all were about the evils of society, and how each one of us is a perpetrator of said evils. In one poem, I heard some dude lecture me about:

American Idol
Sweat shops
Rape of Congolese women
Atrocities in Darfur
Aids
Poverty
Racial profiling
...and a million more societal ills.

It's like he opened up the newspaper, pulled 50 headlines from the "World News" section, and screamed them at me, one after the other. And I wanted to scream back "Oh yeah? And what exactly are YOU doing about the illegal trafficking of conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone, you freaking upper middle class CHUMP kid?" And as if it weren't annoying enough to be lectured by a bunch of privileged private school brats, while one kid was up reciting his/her poem, the rest of them were sitting behind him/her, slapping their chairs and snapping their fingers in the air whenever they found a part of the poem particularly poignant, as if to say "Preach on, my brother/sister! Remove those blinders from their pathetic, self-absorbed eyes! Show them a better path! Hearken, O ye wicked and perverse generation!"

Gag.

On a lighter note...one of my favorite poems of the evening came from a kid who wrote about his favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. I think his best line was:

I even eat them on the toilet.
Although it might smell bad,
It doesn't spoil it.

Now THAT'S a poem.