Amazing Open Mic Experience: 19th Annual Bear Pond Books

Reciting poetry at an open mic can be an amazing experience. Or it can be one of intense agony waiting for the crickets to quiet down, pursed-lipped audience members to depart, and the wound-licking post-catastrophe nobody-liked-my-stuff period to begin.

Thankfully, reading recent poems this past Tuesday at the 19th annual Bear Pond Books open mic—part of the 2016 PoemCity Montpelier—was of the amazing variety. The crowd was fun, ready to laugh, and full of "atta boys" afterwards.

Just my kind of event, indeed.

I read a set of newer stuff (all searchable at this blog), from last Fall up to this April—oldest to newest. Poem titles were:

• "As You Are Now" love (9.12.15)
• "My Ardent Plea" life (10.15.15)
• "Like a Flame" love (11.1.15)
• "Nothing Much" life (11.12.15)
• "Cookies" lifestyle (11.12.15)
• "When Your Dreams All Scatter" life (11.12.15)
• "Love So Baffling" love (11.14.15)
• "In the Way" love (12.19.15)
• "Listen to the Babbling Brook" life (1.17.16)
• "For All Eternity" life (1.21.16)
• "Harvest Fire Ants" love (1.22.16)
• "That Green Roof" life (4.17.16)

Any aspersions I might have cast on the town of Glover, Vermont, career possibilities one might find there—or any possible future Puerto Rican lover—were completely unintended.

I spent much of the night gazing upward—toward the pink-painted roof with the shiny metal heating ducts—admiring the green dragon hanging down. Apparently it's flown there for many years, and may have come from a Montpelier store (Planet Something?) that's now closed.