On a Wednesday night in Oklahoma City, the back room of a Louisiana-style restaurant on Northwest 23rd Street fills with people holding phones, notebooks, and folded scraps of paper. Some are regulars who have been coming for months. Some are first-timers who saw a flyer and decided to try. All of them are there for the same reason: a free, all-ages open mic called Rhythm And Poetry, where the only requirement is a willingness to listen — or to stand up and speak.
The event runs every Wednesday from 8 to 10 p.m. Central at Ruth's Creole Kitchen, at 610 NW 23rd St. Admission is free, and the door is open to anyone 13 and older. It is hosted by Glenjamin the Great, Mickie, and DJ Chappell, a trio that has become the steady backbone of the night. There is no ticket to buy and no reservation to make; you simply show up.
The name is a wink. Rhythm And Poetry spells out RAP, the acronym for a genre that has always carried spoken word inside it, and the organizers lean into the connection. The night is built around poetry and spoken word, but it is not a quiet, reverent reading. There is a DJ. There is music. There is a restaurant kitchen running behind it all, sending out plates of Creole cuisine while someone at the mic works through a piece about grief, or love, or growing up in Oklahoma.
That setting is not incidental. Ruth's Creole Kitchen is a relatively new addition to the Uptown 23rd corridor, and it comes with its own story. The restaurant is helmed by Reuben Carey, a private chef turned restaurateur who was born and raised in New Orleans. Oklahoma Magazine described the place as a go-to for Louisiana-inspired comfort cuisine, with a menu that runs from crab cakes and seafood dip to shrimp and crawfish étouffée, lobster macaroni and cheese, jambalaya, and a full roster of po'boys. Breakfast and brunch get their own treatment, with banana foster pancakes, a peaches and cream waffle, and a Mardi Gras omelet built on shrimp, crawfish, and mixed cheese. Local television coverage framed the restaurant as a living tribute to Carey's Cajun roots, his family recipes, and the work it took to get the doors open.
That combination — a New Orleans kitchen and a spoken-word open mic — is what makes the Wednesday night unusual. The Uptown 23rd District has been through a long revitalization, and the stretch of Northwest 23rd Street around it has become a mix of new restaurants, shops, and neighborhood anchors. Ruth's sits inside that current, and Rhythm And Poetry gives the corridor something that a bar or a coffee shop rarely does: a standing weekly appointment for people who want to perform, not just eat.
The format is deliberately low-barrier. Free admission matters. So does the 13-and-up age floor, which opens the room to teenagers who might not otherwise have a place to try out a poem in front of strangers. Open mics in most cities skew toward adults, late nights, and cover charges; this one starts at 8 and ends at 10, costs nothing, and welcomes a high schooler and a retiree into the same audience. The hosts — Glenjamin the Great, Mickie, and DJ Chappell — keep the night moving, trading off between poems and music so the room never goes flat.
Glenjamin the Great is not a local secret confined to one restaurant. He has performed beyond Oklahoma City, including a billed appearance at a Simply Poetry event in Wichita, Kansas, in May 2026, where he was featured as a visiting poet from Oklahoma City. That kind of regional travel is common in spoken word circles, where a host in one city is often a featured performer in another, and it suggests the Wednesday night at Ruth's is plugged into a wider network of poets rather than isolated in its own room.
The event has also built a presence on social media, where the account Rhythm and Poetry OKC promotes the weekly sessions and special editions — including talent nights that invite performers to compete or showcase. Those posts are how much of the audience finds the night in the first place, since the event does not rely on ticketing platforms or advance sales. It is a word-of-mouth operation in the most literal sense: people hear about it, show up, and come back.
For anyone in Oklahoma City looking for something to do on a Wednesday that costs nothing and asks nothing of them but attention, the pitch is simple. Walk into Ruth's Creole Kitchen at 610 NW 23rd St between 8 and 10 p.m., order something from New Orleans, and listen. If you feel like it, sign up to read. The mic is open.