College Students Gather for Night of Poetry, Coffee and Bad Jokes

Students gather for American Literary Magazine’s Open Mic Night at 

American University’s Davenport Coffee Lounge on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014. 

The magazine is an artistic outlet for AU’s students. (Photo by Rahi Patel)

More than 20 people stood in front of a microphone and read poems as part of American Literary Magazine’s open mic night on Thursday, Oct. 9. The event was in American University’s Davenport Coffee Lounge, where the magazine invited anyone to share poetry, literature, or music. The small space was crowded with more than 20 people at the beginning of the event, but the number of attendees grew throughout the night.  

AmLit’s Editor-in-Chief, Julia Martins, hosted the event and encouraged people to participate. Students hesitated to speak, and there were often breaks in between people reading poetry. When these breaks happened, Martins would get up and ask others if they would like to speak. If no one stood up, she would threaten to make bad jokes until someone else decided to participate. Her threats worked, as people continued to get up and read poems off of their cell phones or out of AmLit’s published magazines.

Sophomore Barbara Martinez had been to two of AmLit’s open mic nights before. She said she comes to them to “get a creative splattering of people and poems.” Martinez even spoke Thursday night. She got up and said she can’t take herself too seriously, so she decided to read a “pornographic poem about pasta.”

Some people got up more than once to recite a poem. One woman rapped a poem her first time but went up a few minutes later to just read one. Transfer student Anna Rutenbeck also read two poems. Her first one was written by herself and her close friend. They both wrote it together when they visited Montreal, Canada. Rutenbeck regularly attends and organizes her own poetry slams. To her, writing poetry is a great way to blow off steam in a beautiful way. Her friends say she “writes as a means for survival.”

Unlike Rutenbeck, it was Mike Creedon’s first time participating in an open mic night. He read a poem that he wrote that night in ten minutes while watching other people present. Creedon has a creative writing minor, and says he writes for fun and to take himself out of the moment.