Midnight rubbed his hands together and flashed the room a couple smiles. “Hopefully this is enough fire for y’all.” He gave himself a moment, leapt into the first line of his poem, “The Photographer,” and for the next three minutes was a man transformed, and transfixing.
“This is how you know a poet ain’t no amateur,” host Baub Bidon said afterward with a smile on his face. “He don’t need no mike.”
Brian Slattery Photo
It was the latest staging of a durable New Haven grassroots event called Free 2 Spit, which continues to bring poetry to the public despite changes in venue and, this past Friday night, freezing temperatures.
Free 2 Spit started in September 2004 at June’s Place on Water Street, migrated to Grand Avenue briefly, and settled into the New Haven People’s Center on Howe Street in 2008, “two days after Barack got elected,” said Bidon. He has a composition notebook filled with sign-up sheets, a page for each date. Some of them have two dozen names on them. One early page has the numbers 1 through 10 in a hopeful column with no names and a long diagonal line across the page.
“That was a really bad night,” Bidon said good-naturedly, playing down his persistence in keeping the event going.
That persistence, in running Free 2 Spit and other series has paid off. Despite last Friday night being freezing outside and inside the building, and despite a transportation snafu with the featured performer (he’ll be rescheduled), over 30 people showed up to hear some poetry, share their own, and more.
Much more.
Bidon and Peters
At the beginning of the second set, artist and community anchor Elaine Peters, whose parents founded and ran the seminal Bowen-Peters School of Dance on Dixwell Avenue, got everyone out of their seats and warmed up with a performance of a three-part Nigerian song.
Two young women named Justine and Jasmine graced the mike with their work.
And New Haven-based slam poet J‑Sun unfurled a crowd favorite.
It was an audience member’s birthday, and she’d brought a cake. Baub said they’d cut into it in a minute.
Before that, though, he told everyone there to make sure they introduced themselves to three other people in the room “you have never met a day in your life.” A few minutes later, he quizzed audience members to see who they’d met and what they’d learned. An hour passed as Free 2 Spit spontaneously became a community meeting, with poets and audience, younger and older, talking openly and honestly about the struggles they face in the schools and in the city at large.
The cake lay waiting to be eaten. There was all the time in the world for that. Like Bidon said, “this is family here.”
