The Students Poets Association, the USM Creative Writing Club, and the University Libraries collaborated to host Poetry Open Mic Night on April 30, where students could either present their own poem or recite a poem written by someone else.
The event started with opening remarks from Bisakha Sigdel, the vice-president of SPA, Hasan Bukhari, the president of SPA and the USM Creative Writing Club, and Courtney Kruzan, the Research Services Supervisor in the USM libraries. The event started with an introduction to hanami, the Japanese flower-viewing ceremony that heavily features composing and reciting poetry.
The event featured poets who talked about different topics. The first poem of the event was from Aaliyah Payne. The poem talked about her background, upbringing and family history, highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly. Some of the other original poems included a feminist poem from Harper Pascale that addressed the degradation that women have to face in patriarchal society, a poem addressing the relationship with parental figures after growing up by Aiden Aultman, and a poem from Evelyn Evans dedicated to landlords that addressed class inequality.
Sigdel, the vice-president of the SPA, also shared a few of her own original pieces.
“That’s why I end up looking for home in everything/In the balcony of my cozy apartment/In the people I meet in college,” Sigdel shared in a poem about searching for home in different places after leaving her life behind in her home country.
The event also featured people who recited other poems that resonated with them. Some of the poems that were shared by students were Mockingbird by Mary Oliver, Maybe by Jessica Miller, and some anonymous poems that the students found on the internet that resonated with them. Some of the students also recited poems that they wrote in different languages and translated into English. The president of SPA, Hasan Bukhari, recited a poem that was an English-Turkish hybrid. Some other students also shared poems that they translated from different languages, including Russian and Swahili.
“We started Open Mic Nights last Spring semester,” shared Bukhari. “After that, we have been doing the event every semester and we hope to keep doing it.”
“We have had a pretty solid turnout each time,” shared Kruzan from the University Libraries. “The last time I counted, we had 39 people, and we had 41 people last April, and 22 people last fall at a weekend event.
The event is planned to take place at the end of every semester to let students relax and interact with other members of the student organizations.
