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New Life in Austin poetry scene   .

Poem of the Issue  

Venues host open mic nights  

Street Poets,
Melbourne  

Crate House of Horror  

Round Robin  

Poetry Dream    

Pen Mightier than Sword

Round Robin Reunion

Summer Reading “Down Under”

The Cap City Comedy Club offers an open mic every Sunday beginning at 8 p.m., though aspiring comics who want to try out new material need to be there by 7 p.m. to sign up.

As one might expect, talent level at the Cap City Open Mic varies among the 30 or so performers on any given night. The bad, however, are even more fun to watch than the good.

Mediocre stand-up comedy can be seen on Comedy Central most weeknights, but the sort of people who make an open mic night memorable would never make the cable television cut.

Take, for example, the Austinite who accompanied himself on a handheld Casio keyboard while rapping about such subjects as homelessness and schizophrenia. The comic also encouraged the audience to keep on truckin' and to persevere in doing something that rhymes with truckin'.

This is the finest entertainment $2 (or free with a student ID) can buy.

The. open mic that runs on Mondays from 7-10 p.m. at The Hideout is a horse of an entirely different color. Participants here - with support and prodding from host and part-time muse Thom Worldpoet -are encouraged to create poetry and other writings on the spot and share them while the ink is still drying.

The Hideout stage sits in front of a picture window that overlooks downtown Austin. With this setting, the crowd and the host make it difficult to be a passive listener while those around you create and share. Be prepared to publicly flex your creative muscle when you attend.

Both of these events offer an uncensored experience, though in the grand tradition of standup comedy, hecklers at Capitol City will be happy to let you knoW in no uncertain terms that your routine is tanking.

The audience at The Hideout, by contrast, is very supportive of those who choose to share their work. This contributes greatly to the inclusive vibe of The Hideout's open mic. It is this open-minded support and the unfiltered emotional sharing it facilitates that make every performance at The Hideout compelling.

To qualify an open mic night as "good" or "bad" is to defy the spirit of the occasion. Both of these very different events have merits that make them worth attending. At the very least, it's much more fun to heckle a bad comic in person, or to feeI the emotions of a poet reading something they've just written in response to something they've just heard, than it is to post a comment  on a YouTube video.

Before YouTube and the blogosphere, there were coffee houses and comedy clubs. At these venues, performers, talented or otherwise, found two things they craved - an open microphone and an audience.

The digital age has allowed the creatively minded to share their routines, poems and stories with the world from the comfort and seclusion of their bedrooms. Thankfully, the tradition of open mic night lives on in Austin.