Robyn Hager began her final open mic event at the Green Kill gallery by reading the same poem that she read at the start of this series four years earlier – "The Idea of Order at Key West" by Wallace Stevens, a classic American poem she'd been swayed by in grad school. In it the narrator describes hearing a woman singing by the sea. The rest is word music and metaphor. At the mic she had a stately presence in a sleeveless black dress with a plaid red collar, quasi-religious bathed in spotlights against a black stage backdrop. In front of her, David Schell, the gallerist, quietly hustled back and forth between three tiny cameras on tall tripods and his small box switcher on a side table with red and white buttons. We in the audience in the theatrically dark room could either watch Robyn read live from her phone or watch her in camera close up live streamed up onto the gallery wall and out into the world wide web.

In his early years at the gallery David hosted plenty of events with wine and boisterous energy, but with Covid he converted the space into a broadcast studio with black curtains, overhead stage lighting and ever improving computer wizardry. Out in the seats I had mixed feelings. Was I watching a reading or a studio taping, a poet or David shuffling back and forth with his floppy white hair trimmed at the collar? Yet I couldn't say I didn't love many of his wild and dreamy visual effects. An artist himself, he could turn an open mic into experimental filmmaking.

But not this evening, not for the finale of the White Noise series. He shot everything straight and austere. Not religious exactly, but reverential towards the spoken word, the acoustic guitar, the improvised rant, the karaoke song, the dozen-plus performances by newcomers and old hands. After completing the poem, Hager returned to a few lines that expressed her initial hope for the series. The narrator, observing the woman singing by the sea, states:

Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Poets, songwriters, ranters. Don't we all sing our own worlds into being? Then step up to the open mic to share it with others?

The evening began with a stray cat darting into the gallery, smokey gray with a milky white chin. It explored among us, then meowed from behind the black stage curtains. No question, it would steal the show. Half the people settling into chairs debated taking the cat home, or so it seemed, and the same half told themselves not to. For streaming events, David draws a heavy black curtain across the front windows to block out the street lights. But we all heard the tinkling bell as the front door opened. Then a woman's voice, "Anybody seen my cat?"

At the end Robyn offered a few parting thoughts on what has been a treasured part of her life, maturing in front of an open-mic audience, many of us much older. She'd first read at Green Kill as an 18-year-old freshman from SUNY New Paltz, a self-conscious, insecure product of suburban New Jersey who couldn't have imagined reading her poetry to strangers. But the open mic host was encouraging. Her boyfriend was also a poet. Sometimes what we fear turns out to be what we love. She returned every week, appreciating "the special cast of characters," as she told me. Four years later, after that host moved away, she and two other women launched the White Noise series which had a run of 100 shows or so. She'd seen a bit of everything, including clowns, the only thing missing in my opinion from the final event.

She didn't get sad or maudlin. "Part of me thought I should cry," Robyn said at the end. "But I just didn't have it in me." In fact, she hopes to find a new venue for White Noise, perhaps a new vision for what the series might be. As for David, the only person who didn't sit down once during the two hours of readings and acoustic guitars, busy as he was adjusting the mic stand for each person on stage, then tweaking camera angles, then tweaking some more – when a poet on stage asked if he'd miss doing these shows, he snapped back, "Oh, god, no!" Later he told me, "Covid is over."

Livestreaming events – his answer to the pandemic--had run its course after 600 shows. Back when he bought this building, then an empty dilapidated storefront with peeled linoleum floors and birds in the apartment upstairs, he said to himself he'd run it as a "peer-to-peer" art space (steeped in the computer world, he wanted to foster horizontal connections among artists rather than impose his own curatorial hierarchy) for 10 years until he was 70. After a year of refurbishing, the gallery opened in 2016, and now, well, he's 71. He wants to rent the downstairs gallery space to people with their own artistic visions. He wants to retire to his apartment upstairs to paint. He's sick of digital. He wants to apply acrylics, dirt, whatever else tickles his fancy to canvas. After a lifetime at keyboards he longs for the tactile joys of painting that first absorbed him in childhood.

I can't say I shed a tear over Green Kill's closing, either. It took me a few years of hearing about it through the poetry grapevine to get there myself. Then it became a center for my creative life. In the Covid winter of 2021, David gave me a white wall for my first photography show, a series of selfies in a large rubber crow mask loosely inspired by Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Series. We didn't sell any, but I didn't really care because I got to see my iPhone whimsies treated as serious photography. (David recently told me that Green Kill was a success as an artists’ space, a success at promoting good work, and a failure at making money.) One of my crow photos appeared on a Green Kill poetry broadsheet still pinned to my bulletin board to this day. The crow with a beak like a tricornered licorice blade leans in close to the camera against the backdrop of a snowy farm road. Yes, that was me, I remind myself, at Covid's peak. Little did I know that during 17th-century plagues, doctors wore bird masks not unlike mine with long beaks, though their beaks were filled with medicinal herbs. Mine was stuffed with a sock.

In recent years I'd fallen away. A painting at a group show in February, another in May, a couple of nights at White Noise, a life preoccupied with other pursuits. What I'll miss most – and I did like a lot of the art a whole lot, especially the bathroom painted like a raucous floor-to-ceiling fantasia of red devils – is simply talking to David after a show or during the downtime of an exhibit. We're nearly the same age and have led comparable lives, immersed in the city of the 1980s and 1990s before making the break to upstate. But I was over in Hoboken struggling to get started as a writer while he was working in an art supply store in the thick of the East Village art scene that has since become the art history of our generation. Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat (whose studio David visited the day after he died), and five dozen others not destined for lasting fame but big at the time. I missed most of this, but as with secondhand smoke I get a whiff of the youthful excitement I never quite had whenever David tells stories. He was close to Martin Wong in particular, whose work I now see all the time in museums, but who lived in a crowded East Village apartment for years. He sold paintings, but then he sold a painting that changed everything, his first to the Museum of Modern Art. According to legend he stripped naked and ran through the East Village, shouting "I made it! I made it!" "A crazy guy," David says with an appreciative nod. Like so many, Wong later died of AIDS.

When I lived in Woodstock, I loved the local motto: You're never too old to have a happy childhood. At Green Kill I felt like I wasn't too old to become an artist, not even in middle age. So here's to David painting upstairs in his apartment. And to Robyn carrying White Noise forward to its next home.