Poets Celebrate A Year Of Community On State Street

Photo courtesy Brian Ember. 

Sopia Arnaout’s words have a way of transporting a reader line by line. One moment, she is looking at the plate glass windows of a beauty salon, inspecting the flowers that grow on their perimeter. The next, she is a small child again, held tightly in her mother’s embrace. Another, and she is wondering if a plum tree might take root in her belly, the pit sprouting branches around her soft, glittering intestines. There’s something very William Carlos Williams there, but something quintessentially her, too. 

Now, those words are part of Never Ending Poetry, a forthcoming collection fêting the one-year anniversary of “Open Mic Surgery,” a weekly poetry night and all-out celebration of words at Volume Two: A Never Ending Books Collective. Edited by Brian Ember (a.k.a. New Havener Brian Robinson)—himself a poet, musician, and the emcee and organizer of the weekly event—it features the work of 20 poets and writers, including Ember himself. It is available for preorder here through Oct. 31, which also happens to be the Halloween-themed reading for the series. 

Poets include Sophia Arnaout, Jules Bakes, Meg Brazill, Carlos Raúl Dufflar, Brian Ember, John S. Hall, Elizabeth Mead Kennedy, Laura Klein, Ángel Martínez, Julie Meehan, Michael Mercurio, Tom Ndiaye, Paula Panzarella, Karen Ponzio, Alice Prael, M! M! Shor, Jeff Smith, Barb Wolfer and Mirilla Zhu.  

“It did what I wanted it to do, which was to represent the variety of ways people express themselves through poems,” Ember said during a recent interview at the Arts Council’s Audubon Street offices, surrounded by the work of photographer Kim Weston. “Without the rigor of a practice, without a professor that’s like, teaching everybody their style … without all of that hanging over you, you’re just coming into a room and saying, ‘This is how I write.’ And I love that.”

For him, and for many of the poets featured in the book, it is a labor of love decades in the making. Growing up in Guilford, Conn., Ember fell in love with poetry almost as soon as he could read words. As a kid, he was inspired by Shel Silverstein, the first in a long line of poets who he would come to love. By the time he was 12, he had written and illustrated his first book, presenting it during a school presentation. While one title, critiquing the lies that parents tell, landed him in therapy, nothing could stop his interest in writing. 

Instead, he was—proudly—that weird and endearing kid in every graduating class who is totally infatuated with the written word. In high school, he joined the crew writing and editing the literary magazine. He scored a publication in a now-defunct New Haven zine Next Phase. In the mid-1990s, he moved to New York, and found his way into the open mic scene while working at FAO Schwarz. A patron for whom he'd saved a toy introduced him to the Brooklyn Moon Cafe—and saved him a spot during its weekly open mic night. The rest was history. 

"Being a kid from Guilford, I had never heard anything like Black poetry, slam poetry, spoken word," he recalled of that first open mic. "And I was like, gobsmacked. I realized that I was way out of my league. I had no idea what I was walking into. But in spite of the fact that I got absolutely slaughtered on the stage—very politely slaughtered—it really proved to me that I wanted to keep doing it."

Ember started attending readings wherever he could, sometimes criss-crossing the city for a good open mix. For four or five years, he was a reliable part of a poetry circuit on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, including a reading that he hosted reliably on Avenue C. Then in the early 2000s, he put poetry on the back burner as he moved back to New Haven, and parenting took center stage. It took almost two decades to get back to it. 

During that time, he said, he never lost his love for spoken and written word: he just had other things taking up his time. Ember is also a musician and a dad: he works full-time for the Yale School of Music, and also has a vibrant gigging life. But around 2021, a friend shared old video cassettes of him hosting and performing in New York. 

"I was like, 'Gosh, this is old stuff,'" he remembered with a laugh. "I really should try this again."

It was a welcome blast from the past, so much so that he digitized the tapes and put them on YouTube. The idea of restarting an open mic delighted him, a record scratch in his brain that wouldn't go away.  

Last summer, he reached out to the team behind Volume Two, which had by then established the storefront as a sort of grassroots, do-it-yourself space for artists. The answer was exactly what he'd hoped to hear: people who used the space wanted an open mic, and it was just missing the right emcee. He had come to the right place. In July of last year, he launched  a Tuesday night open mic series, curious to see where it would go. 

One month became two, which soon became six, and then eight, and then 12. Ember, who is also a musician and lyricist, reached out to longtime friends who were scattered across the East Coast, asking them to come as special guests for the series.  He cold called the writer John S. Hall, thrilled when Hall said he'd be happy to come for an evening (he later submitted poems based on New Haven to the collection; more on that below). The State Street storefront, with its tightly packed rows of chairs, lone mic stand and stage boxed by windows, became a kind of second home. 

Brian Ember. Lucy Gellman Photo.

In May of this year, "I thought, I really want to commemorate this somehow," Ember recalled. A book—that is, a physical document of the past year—felt instinctively right. He made the barrier to entry as low as possible: to be in the collection, a writer had to have read at least once since the series' start date in 2022. Almost two dozen poets submitted their work, with a celebration of the craft that was and is as wide-ranging as it is polyphonic.  

"I wanted to make sure people knew that there's a poetry reading that happens, and you don't have to be an academe to come,” he said. “You can just, you know, have something on your phone you want to workshop. You can come and listen. I wanted it to be a really accessible thing. I wanted to represent a community."

And from start to finish, Never Ending Poetry does exactly that, with an array of voices that are intimately personal, laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes unapologetic without ever being overly brash. In Martínez “A Nâzim Hikmet Dream,” so named after the late Turkish poet, the author’s longing for peace and safety becomes an ache, palpable as he both grieves and honors the poet and this world. In “Grey Hair,” Zhu takes an old wives’ tale and turns it into a love letter to the matriarchs in the family. 

Other poets soar across the pages—and take room to be silly, to experiment, to play with voice and narrative. Floyd Cheung imagines, with biting wit, a conversation between two Subaru Foresters. Tom Ndiaye brings in the reader with the use of the second person, snapping them back to attention as he leaves them to wonder who his imagined “you” is. Amari Rogers’ “Tender-Headed” is a prayer to Black women and mothers everywhere, so deeply felt that it’s worth reading three or four times in a row. 

Several of the series’ featured guests, including Hall and beat poet and activist Carlos Raúl Dufflar, wrote poems directly inspired by their time in New Haven and Never Ending Books itself, meaning that the State Street storefront is now chronicled at a specific moment in its history. For Ember, who thinks actively about what it means to build an archive and records every reading on his phone, that kind of document feels momentous. 

“I think historians and archivists have this incredibly important role in art, where they are just as much curators as an actual curator is,” he said. “If you’re taking the time to parse out the writing and the video and all the stuff that gets taken and to put it out there and make it public and recognize that these people were wandering the streets making art … I think that that’s huge.” 

So too, it turns out, do several of the poets who are featured. Early in the collection, Arnaout’s “Plum Pit” and “A Note I’ll leave In Your Coat Pocket” give the reader sweet, intimate and careful insight into the writer’s relationship with her mother, all relayed in a language of observation that is sometimes as lush as it is thoughtful about its cadence and economy. 

Now a freshman at Connecticut College in New London, Arnaout had high praise for the open mic night. Last year, she started attending during her time as a student at Wilbur Cross High School and the Educational Center for the Arts (ECA). She often went with her dad, which she described as “really special,” and then would walk home afterwards, talking about poetry the whole way back. 

While she studied creative writing at ECA—meaning that workshops and feedback were a routine part of high school—the experience of sharing at the open mic was completely different. 

"It was very low-key, and I didn't feel like anyone was there, trying to like, criticize my writing," she said in a recent Zoom interview, adding that it gave her a chance to indulge her love for writers like William Carlos Williams, ​​Wisława Szymborska, Pablo Neruda and Ocean Vuong. "It was a nice space for everyone to just enjoy some poetry, whether it was my own writing or someone else's."  

"It's really exciting!” she added of the book, which marks her first official appearance in a publication. “I'm really happy about it—I didn't think this was gonna happen so soon.”

While his work is already much more widely published, poet and writer John S. Hall echoed Arnaout’s excitement for the book. When Ember first called him to talk about “Open Mic Surgery” months ago, he said, his interest was thoroughly piqued. A longtime resident of New York City, he hadn’t visited New Haven for years, since a reading just after the 2000 election of George W. Bush. In 2022, he also hadn’t left the city to read in over a year. The timing felt right.   

That remained true as he arrived in New Haven, grabbed dinner with Ember, and headed to Never Ending Books, taking photos at each location to remember his trip. When he walked into the storefront, he was delighted by what he saw. The spot later became the foundation of “Poem No. 649 (Two New Haven Haiku),” which opens the book. 

“A lot of poetry readings in New York and Manhattan happen in restaurants or bars. They're loud, they're made for other things. People can feel like they're interrupting,” he said. “When I walked in [to Never Ending Books], I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is perfect.' It seemed like the perfect place to have a reading … it seems remarkably fortuitous that there was space for a stage.”

“The room is the right size that you don't really need a mic, although there is a mic there,” he added. “That's the kind of freedom that you get with that kind of space … it did feel like there was a good energy there, and everyone was responsive.”

During his time at Open Mic Surgery, Hall also experienced the sense of community that so many New Haven-based poets have come to love in just a little over a year. In front of the group, he tried out a new song “that I wasn’t really sure about” at the time.  After the night had ended and he had headed back to New York, an audience member reached out to him saying that they liked the song. He has now workshopped it and made it part of his repertoire. 

“It was this person I didn't know at all really, and we had this little interaction,” he said, applauding Ember for the sheer amount of behind-the-scenes work that goes into running the night week after week. “I think that's another feature of poetry communities—people can help you with your work.”

Alongside the guest artists who now grace its pages, Never Ending Poetry is foremost a celebration of intergenerational New Haven voices, all of them frozen at a specific moment in time. There will never be, after all, exactly the same constellation of people in the same places and pages at once. Even if Ember repeats the process each year—and this reader certainly hopes he does—it will never capture this exact same collection of voices at this moment in their lives.   

That sense of in-the-moment sweetness shines brightly throughout the book. Readers see it especially vividly in the work of writer, educator and arts reporter Karen Ponzio, whose pieces revel in a certain self confidence that one can almost hear radiating from the page (“Who wears a fake pink fur? First of all, I do. Second of all, I do,” she writes in her poem “Animal Prints”).

A longtime fan of both the written word and the space itself—Ponzio broke the story on Never Ending Books closing when it was still a small business in 2020, and has since written extensively about its rebirth as a collective—she said she loves the series for its sense of openness and invitation. Attending week after week, she’s seen seasoned poets read their work alongside quiet wallflowers and creative writing students who may be presenting for the first time. 

“I think Brian is very good at being welcoming like that, and I think Volume II is this cool little hangout,” said Ponzio, whose reporting has helped chronicle the city’s arts scene in the digital pages of the New Haven Independent. “It’s this space where you can kind of do what you want. It's just the place you go … almost like you're going to your friend's house.” 

There’s also something that feels very full-circle, she added. She and Ember met at Never Ending Books close to a decade ago, when owner Roger Uihlein would still greet visitors from behind a desk wedged behind densely packed shelves and stacks of books. At the time, musicians Lys Guillorn and Paul Belbusti were putting on a Friday night music series. 

Once they discovered a shared love for poetry, they began trading poems; Ember was the first guest on Ponzio’s Cygnus Radio program, “The Word According to KP.” She was thrilled when Ember told her he’d be launching an open mic night. 

“I was so excited for him and for us, because I knew it would be this supportive, super enthusiastic gathering space,” she said. “I knew it was going to be special. Not just because we're friends, but because I know the enthusiasm and high regard he has for poets. I've gone three on nights when I'm not in the best frame of mind or I'm having a rough week, and I still go and I feel better.” 

“There's just something about poetry,” she added, “It's just so cool to see that people can look at the world and interpret it in a way that makes you go, ‘Oh, yeah!’"

Never Ending Poetry is available for preorder here through Oct. 31, which also happens to be the Halloween-themed reading for Open Mic Surgery.