World Poetry Open Mic

Jenn Cohen | May 1, 2013 | 0 Comments

by Kingmi Baby

In the new age of tech, connection with people from all over the world has become easier than ever before. Artists, musicians, poets, etc., have moved online to bring attention to, and distribute, their work. However, with such a large amount of people doing this in an attempt to get recognition, the environment has become increasingly competitive. The new project by J Todd Underhill and Michael Amidei tries to find an elegant way around that.

The new project is World Poetry Open Mic. Broadcast off of KZKO, a local online radio station, it is the first online show of its kind. By running an online radio show in the same way one would run an open mic, it hopes to attract an audience of other artists and fans that would be more receptive than the regular web surfer that might happen upon your work.

“It’s something we’re experimenting with,” said Underhill, co-founder, and poet who has hosted poetry open mics throughout Denver for years. “It’s a way to give poets across the world a new venue to display their work.”

“There have been a lot of attempts to unite the poetry community and put other poets work out there, but on a poetry website, you have to read through all these pages and compete for attention. An open mic puts the poet in front of an audience,” said Amidei, the other co-founder and creator of Iedima.

But one could ask the question, why poetry?

“Poetry is really a big part of our lives anyway, but we just don’t notice it, it’s mostly in song lyrics. It’s really something that’s been a part of human culture for thousands of years, and there are literally millions upon millions of poets around the world, so I guess the question is really, why not poetry?”

While open mics have been around for many years, this is the first time that it has been attempted online as well as on an international scale.

“Because we’re new, we aren’t expecting much, but we hope that eventually poets will start flocking to us,” said Underhill. “In the future, we want to grow it to a multi-hour show where we can showcase more poetry for people that really enjoy it; we also want to bring in poets of all variety of styles.”

You can catch the World Poetry Open Mic on Fridays between 8-9 pm on either kzkoradio.com or worldpoetryopenmic.net.