Brian Robinson, poet and host of Open Mic Surgery — a weekly open mic poetry night held at Never Ending Books — joked on Tuesday evening that poets are always late. Yet when he arrived at the appointed time of 6:30 p.m., he found a room of people waiting for him.
“Everyone’s here on time, and it’s kind of weird,” he said.
“I think it’s a sign that more people are coming,” someone in the audience said.
The series, which Robinson began in late July 2022, has been going strong ever since, with just a few breaks for holidays. On this first installment of 2023, it showed no signs of abating, as Robinson laid down the easy ground rules. Many open mics have sign up sheets. Open Mic Surgery doesn’t. Robinson invites everyone to participate, but there’s no pressure either. Some come to read; some just to listen. Poets can go more than once if everyone who wants to read has had the opportunity to do so, and if the audience remains amenable.
“We just let the zeitgeist carry us,” Robinson said. “We’re hanging out in a big family room with more chairs. Let’s read to each other.”
Robinson began by reading a poem he had written in the 1990s, when he lived in New York, worked at FAO Schwarz, and frequented the city’s then-busy poetry scene. The poem was written from a prompt a friend had given: “Tackle me, baby,” and Robinson noted wryly before he began that he used to rhyme his verse. The poem was charming and funny, but also, as Robinson noted, a poem by a younger man, who was still finding his voice. “I read that in my self-important voice,” he said, mocking himself, at the end.
Robinson’s first reading set the tone. Open Mic Surgery wasn’t a competition; it was an invitation to share, to take risks, to be vulnerable. Over the next hour, the poets that followed accepted that invitation.
Karen Ponzio, poet and regular contributor to the New Haven Independent, thanked Robinson for the platform to share poetry, noting that it was a factor in helping her to write more often.
She read a poem that was something of a letter to her younger self, encouraging her to remember the feeling of buying a fake fur coat when she was a teenager, and wearing it home, “even though it was July, and 88 degrees, and the air conditioning in the car only wheezed the tiniest bit of chilled air out on any given ride” she read. “You stood in front of the long mirror outside the dressing and slid one arm at a time into the sleeves, adjusted the collar, and zipped up that jacket so you could run your hands down the front of it while you smiled like a Cheshire cat, and your mother said, ‘excuse me, are you purring?’ ”
She asked her younger self to recall, too, wearing it to school and being teased for it, “and feeling the tears building up inside. But instead you crossed your arms, and ran your hands over the sleeves, and imagined poetry, and tenderness, and destruction, and resurrection, and the way cats always land on their feet. And you purred.” The poem pulled power from vulnerability, and drew hearty applause. It also sparked conversation, about fur coats, and about wearing dresses (for both women and men), and about the moment people realized in their youth that they might be weird.
Ponzio mentioned that she made a goal to fill every page of the notebook the poem was written in. “I’m glad you filled that page,” Robinson said.
A poet introduced as Barb then read a deeply personal poem about a relationship that might be failing. She mentioned that she had written two endings for the poem — one in which her fears the relationship might be over were unrealized, and one in which they were — and she would read whichever ending she felt more strongly at the moment. It turned out to be the second ending, which prompted a moment of silence from the room, and heartfelt support. Musician and poet Laura Klein rose to share the evening’s shortest piece: “The heart is four rooms. Although they may feel empty, they are full of blood.”
“That was a Wednesday Addams poem,” Robinson said.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Klein said.
“Very much so,” Robinson said.
Everyone else in the room made clear that they were there to listen, so Ponzio returned to the microphone to read a section of a longer, exploratory piece looking back on youth. Robinson then closed out the night by sharing three short pieces, each of them marking the ends of three years. They were full of honesty about the joys and difficulties of family. They were about acceptance without turning a blind eye to problems, about moving toward places of honest reconciliation. The last one, written just a few days ago, took the evening full circle. The poet had found a much more confident voice, but one that led to no easy answers, and there was a kind of hope in that.
“Those are all my New Years,” Robinson said, “or at least three of them.”
