Friendly Fire Puts Writers on Front Line : Poetry: Tuesday nights at the Gypsy Den in Costa Mesa, words are exchanged in the form of readings, criticism, support--and sometimes even good-natured heckling.

They sit at small tables and slouched in sofas with their pens and notebooks, jotting down ideas and bits of poetry as the evening rolls on. For twentysomething poets, Tuesday nights at the Gypsy Den and Reading Room in Costa Mesa are a combination of classroom, workshop and support group.

It’s a cafe where regulars sign up for the 8:30 p.m. open-microphone reading, and everybody knows everyone’s name, or at least recognizes the faces.

“It’s a comfortable atmosphere,” says Natalie Giacone, 20, of Huntington Beach, who began the evening one recent Tuesday with her poetry, then warmly introduced each of the young poets as well as the evening’s featured reader. “Maybe because it feels like the inside of someone’s living room.”

The low lighting from a few small lamps, the deep red walls draped with tapestry carpets and modern art, and the rows of couches, coffee tables and comfortable chairs all simulate the pleasures of home. But just when you think Mom is about to walk in the door and say, “Time for dinner,” the smell of clove cigarettes reminds you where you really are.

“Is this your first time here?” Giacone asks as she hands Dana Hilde, 20, the microphone.

“Yes,” her nervous, shaky voice answers.

“A virgin!” proclaims an audience member.

Soon the warm welcome of shouts and applause makes Hilde feel like one of the regulars. She prefaces one poem with “I don’t care if you don’t get this.”

Poet Misty Thomas reassures her, “We’re not important.”

“It’s a mutual thing!” shouts a voice hidden behind a dark corner table.

The Gypsy Den offers its poets more than the usual patronizing and pleasant round of applause at the end of a poem. “There’s a lot of audience/poet interaction,” Giacone says.

The sibling-type hollering and heckling from the crowd is more support than criticism.

Thomas, 21, starts her reading with “Please heckle me.” She says she looks forward to the criticism because “that is how you know if your stuff is good.”

“There should be more criticism,” says Opus YB, 20, of Huntington Beach, one of the driving forces behind the Gypsy Den’s readings.

The only uncomfortable element of the poetry readings is the Gypsy Den’s location in the Lab, a cluster of stores down the street from South Coast Plaza. Although a convenient place for its young audience members, the poets don’t like the idea of the Lab as an “anti-mall.” Opus says, “It pokes fun at the counterculture.”

Open-mike night at the Gypsy Den is one of the few local poetry readings that does not request a donation or enforce a cover charge or purchase minimum. Whether poet or passerby, all are welcome to read. A sign-up sheet is placed at a counter an hour before the readings begin, and about 12 poets present to a crowd of 30 or more.

This night, Charles Ardinger, 26 of Anaheim, steps up to the microphone looking incognito with thick glasses, three-piece suit and fedora. Because he’s one of the rowdier members of the audience, his fellow poets relish the opportunity to return the favor with loud comments.

Kurt Last, a 24-year-old surfer from Huntington Beach, gets immense crowd response for his poem about media slaves of the O.J. Simpson trial, while Michelle Ben-Hur, 29 of Santa Ana, tantalizes her audience with sexual innuendo in her poem “Forbidden Fruit.”

When unfamiliar faces walk in to patronize the Gypsy Den’s cafe, they receive a communal “Shhhh” from the regulars. “Welcome,” says Giacone, “but we are having a reading.”