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“I don’t want to X‑ray your ghost,” Brian Robinson began, speaking to someone to told him that “it was just a rash and you would get it checked / You told me you would clean up, stop drinking, and fix up the sun room / where the folded cardboard Amazon boxes sneer a stupid arrow smile / alongside Mike’s Hard Lemonade and chewy pet supplies / all wedged behind the rusted patio furniture you never sit in to read a book.” The poem, in exquisite detail, portrayed a life spun slowly out of control, “even as you fold another box and call to say your results came up negative.”
His poem, “Sun Room,” was part of his opening set for Open Mic Surgery, a poetry open mic Robinson has started at Never Ending Books on State Street that will happen most Tuesdays in August — Aug. 2, 23, and 30, and possibly beyond — starting at 6 p.m. This poetry open mic is new to New Haven, but for Robinson, who works at the Yale School of Music and performs as Brian Ember, it’s also a resuscitation of an old poetry practice.
Robinson “read actively” in New York City from 1996 to 1999 and hosted his own reading series, also called Open Mic Surgery, for a year during that time. “I had about a two to three open mic night a week habit,” he said. “I didn’t have any money. I lucked out on an apartment in Astoria where I was paying $350 a month in rent, and I was working part-time at FAO Schwarz and a computer store on Fifth Avenue.” Performing music could be expensive; “everything’s expensive, but a notebook is three dollars at Walgreen’s and I can wander park or go to a diner and write a poem.” He wrote two or three poems a week and read them, “so that’s where I come from. Then music took its sway and the rest is history.”
When he moved to New Haven in 2003, after attending and graduating Mannes School of Music, he wanted to continue the series. Beatnik 2000, the Cafe Nine series of open-mic poetry and music, was still running. “But I just didn’t have the time and the discipline,” he said — and he had young children. “So it went by the wayside and I would write for myself privately, in the hopes that one day I would read again out loud.”
During the pandemic he found himself taking his own poetry more seriously, sending poems to professors he knew to help him develop his craft. Then “a couple things happened, back to back to back.” His kids are now teenagers, so he has a little more time. Then in March, he was visiting a venue in Providence that was hosting an open mic poetry. He had his poetry on his phone. “I took three poems I knew would be barnburners, and I got up. The response from the audience was fantastic, and I thought, ‘oh, I miss this,’ ” he said. “It lit me up.” In June an old friend digitized VHS tapes of Robinson performing poetry in the late ’90s and he remembered how much he enjoyed it.
He plans to try to strike a tone of balancing fun and seriousness. Poetry, he said, is “serious business, but if you don’t disarm people, they can’t be vulnerable.” Hence the title of the series, Open Mic Surgery. It’s a silly pun, but it’s also about creating a place for “exposing your innermost demons for public consumption, in the hopes that others will benefit from your own observations and realizations.”
In resuscitating his series, Robinson is aware of the changes in himself from his early 20s to his mid-40s. Then, he was still “full of hormones and full of energy that was misplaced. Now I have the patience to sit with my words a little bit more carefully before I put them down. That’s not to say that any way is better. I’m trying to find a balance” between the immediacy of the way he wrote then and the care with which he tends to write now.
The space — Never Ending Books — has something to do with it as well. “I like the vibe of this place a lot. How on earth is this here?” he said. “This is purely an artistic space. It is intended for education and learning and expression, so it was the right space for it.”
For the open mic itself, Robinson set the tone with a few of his own pieces, ranging from the absurd — a take on Sodom and Gomorrah as though written by Dr. Seuss — to the more contemplative “Sun Room,” which he explained was written just a few days before. The audience responded with warm applause.
Robinson’s combination of whimsy and openness felt like an invitation. Jules Bakes — member of the Volume Two collective that runs Never Ending Books, who explained that she had asked for Open Mic Surgery to be on Tuesday nights so it would happen during her shift manning the store — got up to read a piece about her adventures in diving into fantasy, writing runes and learning about spells while also navigating her own life. “I’ve come to terms a long time ago with with the fact that I’m not a storybook character, not the main story,” she read with wry humor. “I just don’t work. in the real world, I’m about as moving as a shoebox. The plot I got stuck with will never find some clever and unlikely way for me to get me the things I want most. Our story has inconveniences like physics, gravity, math teachers.” For “the heroine in the story, it all would have gone down differently.”
Jeff got up to read a series of poems, perhaps most moving, one a tribute to friend and New Haven fixture John Davern, who died in March. “I come to John’s beach today / though it wasn’t my first choice, I have to say,” Jeff read. “I knew that here beyond crowds there’d be space / and I knew that for John, there was no other place … He used to come here a lot back when / we would all come late, stay ’til dusk, then eat ’til ten.” The poem took an even more somber turn. “Look forward to summer all year / But I’m losing interest, I fear / And lately I’ve lost a lot of friends / Too many who’ve met untimely ends / Though friendship faded a bit with John / It’s no matter now, now that he’s gone.”
He apologized at the end, but Robinson assured him there was no need. A few others in the room missed Davern as well.
The intimacy of the crowd drew Mirilla to the stage; she said at first that she’d just come to listen, but had a piece to read, a poem she’d written a few years ago, about a time her father brought home flowers for her mother on Mother’s Day, when she had forgotten the holiday. He handed the flowers over saying “my job is done”; “I remember the prick of their thorns,” she read. “When my mother saw them she smiled at me and I thought things between us would be okay.” The poem walked a tightrope of tense emotions, pointing to a complicated family dynamic that she hoped could improve. It drew healthy applause and wows from the audience.
Mark Lamoureux, a poet and writing professor, then read a few pieces from a collection of poems he had published, most movingly one that he wrote for his daughter, mixing observations with the three simple words — “I love you” — repeated over and over like an incantation. “With words or without / during the time we walk together / and when you will work without / I love you. / Not like something I said or did / Not having made you, you, who will make herself / I love you,” he said. “Though I have never loved the world / there is no other world, not really / not reality, which is not my gift to you / Not the world, I love you.”
In the appreciative, caring applause that followed, it was clear Robinson had created the tone he’d hoped for: open and honest, funny and vulnerable. As he told one reader when they apologized for getting a little too heavy, “poetry is about all the emotions.”
Open Mic Surgery happens again at Never Ending Books, 810 State St., on Aug. 2, Aug. 23, and Aug. 30, starting at 6 p.m.
