Providing pizza, cookies and a microphone, the University of Mississippi Department of English hosted its first open mic night of the fall semester Thursday night at the cafe in the University of Mississippi Official Bookstore.
Students presented works on a variety of topics including aliens, mother-daughter conversations and memories of childhood dogs.
Fatimah Wansley, a senior African American studies major and spoken word poet, shared her poem “Music in Mourning.” The piece resembles a playlist of heartbreak with references to how different songs have interacted with her love life.
Wansley said she chose to participate in the event because of her love for the spoken word and appreciation for the open mic events.
“I try to do open mic nights as frequently as possible because, even though I have a very politically oriented major, I do love art and I love to write,” Wansley said. “I’ve been writing poetry for about five or six years, and it’s just always special to be in a space like an open mic night because everyone who is there is probably a little different, a little weird, a little creative.”
The reading group was indeed diverse. Hailey Smith, a senior double major in biology and anthropology, also came to read. As the only outspoken non-humanities major student there, listeners applauded the STEM student.
Smith expressed the catharsis she feels poetry brings to her largely science-oriented life.
“As someone who works in STEM almost exclusively this semester, I really wanted to try to branch out and feed those creative parts of me,” Smith said. “I saw that this event was going on, and so, I reached out to my writing friend and said, ‘Hey, let’s go.’ And I had been writing a couple poems lately, just a fun side project to do to take myself out of the lab.”
Smith feels it is important for members of the science community to take advantage of the humanities at the university because having that outlet is important for everyone, not just pre-professional or professional artists.
“I think it’s really easy to get one-track minded, especially when in school,” Smith said. “It’s so important to get one project done, so you spend so much time in the lab thinking about one thing. But people are so diverse, and we really need to feed those different parts of ourselves and to experience new things that we might not have had the opportunity to otherwise.”
Lillyan Madrid, another reader and founder of the poetry club Turning the Page, also expressed why these events are vital to the community, highlighting the importance of actively sharing work instead of just writing it.
“I think it’s just the nature of the art,” Madrid said. “For me, I just have this urge to write, and it kinda correlates with the urge to share. Because when I find myself vulnerable, I want others to feel the same way as well, that they can also read, and people want themselves to be heard.”
Two literary groups were also represented at the event. Gabriel Navarro, a creative writing major, and Kayt Davis, an English and economics major, advocated for the Omnia Review, a publication they recently founded to publish student artwork and stories. The Landshark Literary Review, the undergraduate English department-sponsored magazine, was also mentioned as a publication that is always seeking written work from students.
Towards the end of the night, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a professor of English and creative writing, reflected on what it means to be a poet in her closing remarks.
“The word ‘poet’ is Greek for the word ‘to make,’ and what’s really interesting about that is they don’t specify that you have to make things with words,” Nezhukumatathil said. “It’s just to be a creator, someone who makes with food or someone who makes with paint or someone who makes with words. My hope is that everyone here at the University of Mississippi finds something that they can be a maker of.”
