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My First Spoken Word Event

My Experience

By Henri GouldingPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
4

I finally worked up the courage to attend an open mic event down the road from my apartment and I thought I would share my experience and maybe give some tips and advice for those of you nervous about attending a similar event or even about sharing your art.

About a week until the event and I started to practice reading my poem out loud while laying in the bath, standing in my closet anywhere where my roommates Ty and Kel weren’t. Which I admit, when you’re trying to get used to talking in front people it might help to… talk in front someone aside from your Siamese cats… they often meowed back though!

It was a smaller room, about 30 chairs in total, I tried to worm my way to the back row where there seemed to be an empty seat but there was a couple talking and not seeing I was trying to get by. I (being the awkward human being that I am) took a couple of steps back in hopes they would see me and I could get past, but I (once again being the awkward human being that I am) didn’t look behind me at stepped on the foot of an older gentleman… if the couple wasn’t looking at me before… they were now.

A man in a red hoodie, not much older than me, maybe 24-26, sat next to me, I remember seeing him when I first walked in the room, he walked past me holding a styrofoam cup filled with water. He talked to me about the night so far and asked if I was performing, I told him I was thinking about it, within seconds an older woman was standing in front of me asking my name and what I wanted to perform. Just like that, apparently, I was signed up to go right after the young man next to me.

His music was beautiful, about half-way through his last song I realized it was only a matter of minutes until I was supposed to stand up there and read, I could feel my heart racing and my palms might as well have been made of jello. The young man finishes and I get introduced.

I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of all the other poets that I’ve seen, the ones that made me laugh and cry and fill with rage and fear. I thought about how powerful those artists were that they could make me feel those emotions so strongly let alone at all. I thought about their presence on stage and how they moved their body, they were confident in what they were saying and projected their voice; they made me realize the true meaning of “Own the stage.” Not just the stage either, they owned the audience.

As I walked up behind the mic, I thought about all those points, own the stage, talk to the audience, body language, project your voice. Be. Confident. All those things ran through my head while sweat definitely ran down my back.

I sat as straight as I could. Body language. I relaxed my shoulders.

I kept my eyes glued to the mic. Talk to the audience. I looked up at the first few people in the front row, the nice older man who helped me find a seat, the young man in the red sweater.

I tried to say hello but it came out raspy. Project your voice. I cleared my throat and started again.

I greeted and told them a bit about myself and the poem I was reading.

I started reading. Be. Confident. My nose started to bleed.

Yep. Right there while I was reading, I felt a something trickle down my nose and I quickly wiped it to see the smear of red. I wiped again and continued reading.

For some reason, I was suddenly confident, I still stuttered on some words of the poem, I could tell that I was kind of curled up, definitely not sprouting confidence but I did it. I read my poem in front of about 30 people. After I finished I stood up to go sit back down and everyone clapped. The gentleman beside me took every chance he could in between the rest of the performances to talk to me about my poem, asking about some parts and telling me how he could feel the fear and the anger in it, he told me it was powerful. My poem was powerful. I made him feel those emotions. Suddenly, I realized, nose bleed and all, I did what I came to do.

performance poetry
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