"Do you have an instrument? What are you going to do?" songwriter Jen Sygit said to Masaki when he showed up to an open mic at Dagwood’s Tavern & Grill in Lansing. Masaki is a poet — people knew that — and he said they would start to panic when they saw him gear up to perform. The open mic, as it were, was a musician’s game. It didn’t go well for poets.
But Masaki had new friends he needed to fit in with, so he read it anyway. And it went over well. It was comical — a poem about dating himself.
About five years later, his (presumably impressed) friend Dylan Rogers opened up a venue in Lansing, The Robin Theater in Reo Town, and he asked Masaki to help start an open mic show that now runs on the last Tuesday of every month. Masaki called it The Poetry Room. This time, however, the open mic isn’t just limited to musical artists; the event is actually almost exclusively dominated by poets, with a few musicians still performing here and there. It was started with the mission to hold a space where people of color could tell stories as they wish to.
It’s packed nowadays — both in terms of audience attendance and people performing. In addition, Masaki hosts workshops and other poetry open mics around campus for anyone to participate in.
What started with poems attempting to untangle his plethora of experiences as an immigrant in America has since turned into a mission to help others find their space and to fire up the tenacity of young poets — and Masaki has no sign of stopping anytime soon.
Right now, any poet in and around Lansing knows the name Masaki Takahashi.
Masaki came to the United States when he was three or four years old. He had lived in Japan, Taiwan, Massachusetts and Michigan by the time he was 13. He’s kept a keen interest in language since being in ESL classes up until the second grade.
Since getting into poetry, he’s come up with a series of mentors and poets he learned the craft from. But before then, he learned to write at age 16 by watching and listening to MC Jin, the first Asian American to be signed to a major record label for rap. Back then, he resonated with MC Jin’s ability to quickly rebut insults.
Masaki’s name is important to him. "I can remember always having to fight for this name, schoolyard bullies hunting me like dead meat," he says in his poem titled "Butcher My Name." But when he was young, he was more drawn to freestyle battles, so he rapped like MC Jin.
Eventually, he remembers his mom telling him, "You say such hurtful things." He realized he didn’t want to, which drew him to spoken word poetry.
Professionally, he works in IT. Having been in the Lansing area since he got to Michigan, Masaki went to MSU and later Davenport University on a full ride scholarship for computer science. He joined the poetry club at MSU where he started to find his writing groove. When the pandemic happened, he really got into it. He invested in workshops and one-on-one coaching when he could.
He didn’t just come up on his own; he knew he had talent, and he honed it. Through that he found poetry as a way to unravel his experiences. He knew his story was important to tell.
Masaki wrote about what he knew: his life as an Asian American man in the United States. Freestyling in his youth gave him a different view of poetry and performance by the time he got into it. Maybe poems didn’t have to be written fully, maybe that meant he was improvising on stage sometimes. He learned to go with whatever feelings were present in the moment.
On his process, he told me over lunch at Charlie Kang’s — a restaurant he worked at years ago — that he tries not to write things down immediately when he thinks of them. Before he writes, he likes to let his poems simmer for a while, often freestyling before he puts them to page. “When you start writing off the bat you can hide behind skill, and poetry is about vulnerability,” he said.
"Butcher My Name" opens with a scene of him at a deli. A meat clerk attempts to call his name and mispronounces it several times and, as the title suggests, butchers it. He uses the anecdote to further explore how microaggressions and stereotypes have contributed to his life-long struggle. He goes on to discuss his name being the pride of his family, how he refuses to anglicize it, how he’s had to bleed for it.
"I would much rather starve than allow anyone to just butcher my name," he says at the end of the poem.
I first saw Masaki perform at (SCENE) Metrospace for a poetry event he opened. Masaki is a stylish dresser, both on and off stage, his outfits consisting of a lot of sports jackets and cardigans. When he came up in conversation at a poetry club meeting, someone called him a bit intimidating, but in a way "where he’s a force of positive change."
As he opened the event, what first struck me was his ability to warm up a crowd, which was by no means big. He spoke to us casually, as if we were all his friends hanging out. When he gets up on stage, he transitions into his poetry nearly seamlessly. I thought it was fun, a cool style even. When I later watched him open for an open mic event held for the anniversary of the MSU shooting, I came to understand the effect his approach had on the crowd. It not only got people laughing, but it also loosened them up. Performing poetry is rough (there’s a reason I don’t do it), it’s asking the poet to be vulnerable in front of a crowd of people, and to do so eloquently. Masaki’s introduction visibly eases up a stiff audience.
He also sets rules at the start of an event, and they do exactly that. At the first Poetry Room event I attended, prior to the open mic starting, he laid down some ground rules for performance:
"If you’re an a–hole, we will treat you like an a–hole."
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"Being jarring for the sake of being jarring is really cringey."
"It’s OK to suck."
He also asked for performers to have their phones or books ready by the time they got on stage, a change from previous events where he’s said performers should be memorized (although he never really enforced that, it seemed more like some kind of encouragement).
I asked him if he’s noticed the effect he has on crowds, or if that effect is otherwise intentional. He told me poetry sometimes comes with the connotation of being uppity and uptight — for people with more class. And so, he wants to be able to deconstruct that and make it more relatable, more human — something that comes from his experience in hip-hop.
"I can't write about pretty flowers when I don't know if I get to stay in this country next week," he said. "I can't write about eating an apple when I'm not sure if I have enough money for this pack of diapers."
It’s in this way that he bridges a gap that exists between performer and audience. More recently, I saw him compete at a techno-themed slam sponsored by the MSU Museum. The rules work like this: A certain number of poets perform pieces one after another according to the theme of the event, and they are judged on a scale of 1-10 by audience members chosen at random at the beginning of the event. After everyone gets a chance to go, a second round takes place wherein each poet performs a poem of their choice, which no longer has to fit the theme.
Prior to the competition starting, Masaki paced back and forth. He would periodically close his hands into a fist and pump his arms as if pushing a bench press, like a boxer warming up for a big fight. At the end of each performance, when the judges would announce how they rated the performance, he’d write in a small notebook, tallying what I assumed to be the scores. I don’t know if that was his official job, or if he just wanted to keep track throughout.
When he got up for the first round he performed a poem on theme with his familiar cadence. The judges expectedly rated him highly, but he was not in first place by the end of the first round. For the second round, a performance of "Butcher My Name" was enough to land him in first place, making him the winner of the competition.
I sat in on a workshop with the poetry club after seeing him perform a few times. For his first exercise, he had us each read a sentence off of small slips of paper he gave us, which we had to do in accordance with an emotion written on a separate slip of paper. The group had to guess the emotion, the point of the exercise being to show the importance of tonality when performing — which also served as a reminder for why I don’t perform. After the exercise, he opened the floor for everyone to share what they were working on.
While listening to the other poets share, he often closed his eyes as if falling into a deep meditative state. Sometimes he’d open them and stare at the floor nodding. At the end, he’d ask the same question: "What do you want?" If it’s just positive feedback, he’d give that as easily as if they had just wanted help with the ending stanza. He later told me that he does that because, if someone doesn’t know what they want, it’s easy to tell them what they want.
"I think the reason I do pretty well in these workshops is I break it down like this: All year, teachers give in so much input, this is a place where I don't really give them input, and they have maximum output in whatever they want to do," so he focuses on asking them questions, hearing what they have to say. Sometimes, he said, he has them talk about whatever they want to talk about flatly, without poetic language, before bringing in logic, much like how a computer program works.
It seems like Masaki knows he’s good, both at performing and coaching. He speaks and conducts himself onstage in a way that might come off as intimidating (as someone mentioned a while back), and perhaps even a little arrogant. Whether or not that’s intentional, the more I watched him the more I realized that Masaki is someone who is so confident in his skills that I almost feel like he deserves to be a little arrogant. So much so that I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t a single point at the Techno open mic where he didn’t think he was going to win first place.
I asked Masaki if he’s ever gotten into any other kinds of writing. "I’m like an amazing sushi shop that serves you one thing … I'm really good at this one thing. I'm not good at any other things, and I don't want to be better at it. I am a sushi shop that's not gonna serve you gyoza. I'm just gonna serve you this one meal, and it's fantastic, and that's what I'm known for."
It’s that confidence, skill and care for the craft that led him to the title of Lansing Poet Laureate in 2019, a role he recently passed to Ruelaine Stokes in 2024. Lansing’s poet laureate is expected to host a certain amount of community events and workshops every month. Masaki said it was an honor to serve with that title for the city. As for the workshops, he was already doing them, so all he had to do was keep organizing events and utilize a stipend, which he put toward more workshops with other poets.
His constant encouragement goes beyond just workshops, though. I've seen him fall into a similar meditative state at performances. Other times he’ll face the wall in thought, letting out the occasional "new sh–!" if the poet announces that they’ve just recently written what they’re about to perform.
At one Poetry Room open mic, a high school junior told the crowd it was her first time performing — she was visibly nervous, and people cheered in encouragement. But it was Masaki’s voice that came most clearly through from the crowd: "let’s go!"
And it’s not just blank encouragement. He’s not just trying to help a high school kid get over her stage fright; he has a genuine appreciation for young, new poets and what they bring to the craft. Watching students in workshops reminds him of a sense of curiosity that is eventually lost in adulthood. In workshops, he tries to tap into that magic that only exists in the absence of knowledge of technical skills — a genius that only exists in youth.
He said highschoolers in particular will often finish writing poems and think, this is the best poem ever, and he loves that. He knows it’s not the best poem ever, and it’s far from incorporating any of the technical tools of poetry, but he’d never tell them that "because it's genuine to them," he said. "But the fact that they're so proud of it, it is, to me, the best poem ever too."
His desire to help young writers even extended to me, which took me a bit off guard. At one point during our lunch, he asked what I was going to be writing about. It was a good question, and one I didn’t have the answer to yet. At first, he was asking so he could better understand my questions, but then he asked me, "What’s the emotional hook?"
It was a surprising question. It felt like he completely turned the conversation around on me, as if, suddenly, he was the one interviewing me. Am I being coached right now? I thought. He suggested an angle for the title to me as well: something highlighting how he’s a man that’s gone from ESL classes in second grade to the Lansing poet laureate just a few years ago.
Eventually a mutual friend came up in conversation, an MSU student he’s known since her freshman year who’s now a senior. He said this was, in his eyes, the right time to come into the community, because when she arrived at MSU, The Poetry Room was reaching its height. She's someone he can look at and say, this person has put in a lot of work to grow, and much of that is attributed to the community, resources and opportunities she’s had access to.
"I think she thinks this is like, a normal thing," he said. "You want to have that as an adult, because by the time you're an adult, no one tells you anything is possible."
Since coming to MSU, she’s become the president of the poetry club and works with Masaki to organize various events around campus. That’s the reward for him, to see her graduate thinking: I can do anything now! He laughed after saying this, the kind of pure-joy laughter that’s infectious. It reminded me of something someone said about him at a poetry club meeting: "The best thing is if you can make Masaki laugh at something."
He didn’t have anything like The Poetry Room when he entered college, he had to make those opportunities. And so, his joy with the craft comes from the people he coaches, whether it be younger kids or college students — in part because out of many of the people he did poetry with in college, he’s one of the few that is still active.
He told me his favorite poetry memory about the time he visited a middle school in Jackson, Michigan to run a workshop. He did some exercises before eventually turning it over to the students, which more or less turned the workshop into an open mic session. There were two students in particular who he asked to tell him about something they didn't like, which ultimately led to them dissing each other in a playful way — not dissimilar to how he got his start as a teenager.
The teacher pulled him aside to ask if he wanted to get back on track with his original lesson plan. "No, let’s go with the energy right now, they’re loving this so much," he said, the youthful defiance of poetic conventions fueling his joy for the moment.
He doesn’t want any of it to stop anytime soon, either. He has dreams for The Poetry Room: after school programs, involvement from more high schools and project anthologies are all on the list.
It’s hard to prevent Masaki’s passion for poetry from rubbing off on you. A few weeks before deciding to write about him, I got back into poetry after years of being unable to write and being uninterested in the craft as a result, something I told him when we began talking about the Robin Theatre. I later added that I was planning on attending the next open mic to watch him perform.
"Are you going to bring a poem?" he asked.
"Maybe."
"Let me know, I can put you more in the beginning, it won’t be so scary," he said.
I might take him up on that later on.
