Campus creatives took to the Makerspace Thursday night with nothing but their notes app and a microphone in hand for this year’s Take Up Space open mic, featuring a guest reading from Oakland-based poet Sarah O’Neal.
A joint effort from In the Ords, the Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB) literary arts club, and the feminist literature club LitMatch, attendees were eased into the event with a group breathing exercise and a poem-read aloud. After the reading from lecturer Alexandria Jones’ poetry book “Saltwater Moonshine,” led by LitMatch president Lucie Nepacena and secretary Gaby Weedon, the mic was open.
Nepacena and Weedon went down a list of pre-registered participants to hop on the mic, sharing everything from poetry to rap songs. Attendees were allowed to sign up for impromptu readings of their work as well.
Fourth-year cinematic arts and technology student Vincent Santos took to the mic and performed two self-written raps accompanied by premade beats. One of his songs titled “Hyphen” was written back in 2016, but its political lyrics and call to action still ring true 10 years later.
“As a Mexican-American, you always feel like you’re not Mexican enough, you’re not American enough, you’re always in that in between, that hyphen…I feel like that hyphen is a way to disconnect you from your cultural roots, and kind of oppress you,” said Santos.
After a few more participants got a chance in the limelight, the night wrapped up with guest poet O’Neal gracing the audience with several of her published poems across varying chapbooks and zines. O’Neal shared her thoughts about the crucial role that poets have today, with many of her poems stressing the importance of art and poetry in times of oppression.
“We’re living in a time where the truth is being obfuscated, right? There’s like a war on truth and a war on reality. We’re constantly being told that people speaking back against the empire is violent, as the violence of the empire is pushed on everyone else…so, the role of the artist, the role of the poet, is to make that reality clear and to obliterate those lies,” said O’Neal.
O’Neal also spoke about the Oakland-based writing collective she is a part of known as “When the Smoke Comes.”
“There’s a couple of us poets that are part of “When the Smoke Comes,” and we are a creative writing space that is specifically thinking about what it means to bring about the end of systems of oppression, and not just to imagine the end of those systems of oppressions, but to actually think about what it would take, what it entails, what we all need to be committed to do in order to bring out that end,” said O’Neal.
“I feel like the better you’re able to express yourself, the better you’re able to understand and navigate through that, and help others navigate through that, because if you don’t know, you don’t know, and how do you fight something you don’t understand?”