Biederman’s Open Mic Nioght Celebrates the Release of Centripetal

It was a feast of friends at Biederman’s Tuesday night for the Open Mic celebration of the Fourth Edition of Centripetal. Poets and Writers from Plymouth State College’s past and present met for a night full of sustenance, merriment, and cheer, or rather, poetry, prose, and beer. And when the first reader took stage, somewhere around 7:30 p.m., the standing room only crowd listened with attentive ears and boasted about this being the best Open Mic of the year.

Now from this point on, I must warn the reader that my detailed account of the evening may not be that accurate and in fact, some of what you read here may seem like something from a bad movie. This is due to the fact that my attention, while I intended to fully provide it to the thirty some odd readers and performers, was consistently distracted by the all too familiar barroom babble and barkeeper questions like, “Can I get a Long Trail please?”

This disclaimer is by no means an excuse for a poorly written review. It is simply an attempt to give the reader a greater sense of the reason why this is not full of ‘bravos’. As I check over my notes of the evening, looking for sparks of enlightenment; I find only fermented ink smudges and illegible names and titles. So as I jog my me-mory for something concrete to write about (other than the after party) flashes of remembrance slowly seep onto this page.

Having missed every Open Mic of the semester, I found joy in my first attendance of the year. It felt like an English Major family reunion, with cameo appearances by John Link and Andy (I don’t really know his last name, but we kept running into each other in the men’s room and after the third time, I told him that ‘This really needs to stop’). The band “Cornerstone Genius” provided a musical accompaniment for every reader. While some found this to accentuate the poems and make them sound profound, others used the backbeat of the drums and sax to flow through their verse with an essence of bee bop. There certainly was liveliness to the evening that cannot be explained in a few paragraphs.

The most beautiful part of the evening came in the realization that Plymouth State College has a remarkably diverse writing population. Thanks to publications like Centripetal and events like the Open Mic, students and faculty alike have an opportunity to share their individual talents. Centripetal is an incredible creation…props to the staff and all the contributors who keep it alive.