If you want to read at the open mic Feb, 5th, I'd advise you to come early. And sign up as soon as you get there. (It's first-come, first serve, with 15 slots. 


(I was tempted when I Googled how to organize an open mic to do it like one in New York, which has no rules at all, and no host. Just the guy who brings the mic. When he puts it on the stage, there's a mad dash by the audience for it. Whoever's fastest or strongest reads first, for as long as he likes. When he gets tired or booed out, there's another mad dash. It's like that all night. Not stressful to organize.)


In our case you make a mad dash, as soon as you enter, to the book table at the back, and hope theres a slot still available, then check off whether you want to give us permission to photograph you, and especially to videotape you (as some journals consider a simple videotape on the internet of a poetry reading as publication, even though they can't search it out (we don't put a title on it). Then you go sit down and listen to the live music, which will be nice this event, to be announced here in a few days. 

Why's it going to be a full house?

Two big reasons.

First, the fairly new street newspaper, The Yodeller, is doing a substantial interview with me (Organizer Stan) and it will hit the curbs and gutters in one week, at the end of the month, which happens to be my birthday, although Jason Dickson, the writer, did now know that.  64 if you're interested. Dickson, is a novelist, poet, journalist, man about town. That interview will, I'm sure , drag a few people off the cold street into our Greek utopia. 

Also, the social media is already going crazy over our February featured poet, which is actually four poets, all senior poetry students from UWO, who will do rounds of poetry, the first one written expressly for this event, a complex and fun feature organized by current UWO Student Writer in Residence Scott Beckett. Each first poem by each author will contain the same three lines, one being the title. How different can they be? Extremely, as we've already noticed in all our readers, be they feature or open mic. 

The students are:

Jilian Baker (3rd year)
Scott Beckett (4th year)
Koral Scott (4th year)
Eric Zadrozny (4th year)

THE EVENT

WHERE:  All of our reading events except the April one are held in the Mykonos Restaurant at 572 Adelaide St. North, London, Ontario. The restaurant has a large, covered terrace just behind the main restaurant, which comfortably holds 60 poetry lovers. Mediterranean food and drinks are available. Overflow parking is available across the side street and in the large lot one block north, in front of Trad’s Furniture.

LIVE MUSIC opens each event, at least by 6:30. There is also an intermission with live music and usually more music at the end of the event. 

THE FEATURED POETS begin their rounds of readings at 7:00, followed by a Q&A.

OPEN MIC: Following the featured poets, there is about 1.5 hours of open mic, ending about 9:00 pm. Each poet has five minutes (which is about two good pages of poetry, but it should be timed at home). Sign up on the reader`s list, which is on the book table at the back. First come, first served.

RAFFLE PRIZES: Anyone who donates to London Open Mic Poetry Night receives a ticket for a raffle prize, three of which will be picked after the intermission. The prizes consist of poetry books donated by Brick Books and The Ontario Poetry Society. Donations are our only source of income. We still haven't paid off our initial debt.

This Wed. Jan. 22, Poetry London presents poets Gabe Foreman from Montreal and Kingston's Carolyn Smart!

Landon Branch Library
167 Wortley Rd., London, ON
readings at 7:30m

with pre-reading workshop at 6:30pm. (Stan: This is one of my favourite things in London. Workshoppers pore over one poem by each featured reader, a conversation on the depths, the reasons, the feelings, the meanings, the creativity, everything we can get out of the poems. With laughter and a lot of fun. Fascilitated alternatingly by the very sensitive duo of Tom Cull and Ola Novosad. Two of our poems are also workshopped, but out of ten or fifteen, that doesn`t give much of a chance. Those who do make it, however, read their poems at the opening of the big event at 7:30.)

Jan.22, 2014
Gabe Foreman grew up near Thunder Bay, Ontario. He is a founding editor of littlefishcartpress, a small poetry press based in Orono, Ontario. His first collection of poems, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People (Coach House Books), received the 2011 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Concordia University First Book Prize. His poems have appeared most recently in The Walrus, and have aired on CBC radio (Daybreak). He lives in Montreal.

Carolyn Smart's fifth collection of poems, Hooked - Seven Poems, was published in 2009 by Brick Books. Her previous collections include The Way to Come Home (Bricks 1993) and Stoning the Moon (Oberon 1986). An excerpt from her memoir, At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001), won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. She has taught poetry at the Banff Centre and participated online for Writers in Electronic Residence. She is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and since 1989 has been Professor of Creative Writing at Queen's University.

Questions? Email us at poetrylondon at yahoo.ca 
or call the Landon Library at 519-439-6240

This is in St. Thomas the day after our open mic, on Feb. 6th. I'm going to try to make it. Jacob Scheier, the current St. Thomas Writer-in-Residence, who won a Governor General's award with his first book of poetry in 2008, and who will be our March 5th feature, replacing St. Thomas' Julie Berry, will be reading, along with Julie Berry herself, who will feature in our third season. Not to mention Karen Solie and Ken Babstock!


The event is at 7:00 pm, at  the Public Art Centre, at 301 Talbot St., St. Thomas.

Algoma University and the St. Thomas-Elgin Public Art Centre will jointly present Poetry Night at the Art Centre. This unique event will feature readings from four distinctive voices, including two past winners of the Griffin Poetry Prize, Karen Solie and Ken Babstock. Current Algoma University writer-in-residence Jacob Scheier, winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for poetry, will take the stage as well. Rounding out the lineup is highly regarded St. Thomas poet Julie Berry. 

Ken Babstock is one of the finest poets in Canada. Born in Burin, Newfoundland, he was raised in the Ottawa Valley and now lives in Toronto. His fourth collection of poetry, Methodist Hatchet, won the 2012 Griffin Prize. Babstock is a past winner of the Milton Acorn Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up in southwest Saskatchewan. Her third collection of poems, Pigeon, won the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Poetry Prize, and the Griffin Prize. A volume of new and selected poems, The Living Option, was published recently in the U.K. and is a 2013 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is an associate director for the Banff Centre's Writing Studio, and lives in Toronto.

Jacob Scheier is a poet, creative non-fiction writer and journalist from Toronto. His debut collection, More to Keep Us Warm (ECW Press), won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for English language poetry. He is a regular contributor to Toronto’s NOW Magazine and was recently a resident in the Banff Centre’s prestigious literary journalism program. His latest poetry collection, Letter from Brooklyn, was published in Spring 2013 with ECW Press. Scheier is currently the writer-in-residence at the St. Thomas, Ontario location of Algoma University.

Julie Berry has published two collections of poetry – worn thresholds (Brick, 1995, 2006) and the walnut-cracking machine (Buschek, 2010). Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Canadian Forum, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Malahat Review, The Literary Review of Canada, and many others. An award-winning CBC program entitled The Poetry of the Woods features her poetry along with the poetry of her grade 6 students. Julie lives in St. Thomas, Ontario. 

When I launched London Open Mic Poetry Night in October, 2012, I had no idea how much time it would take out of my life. I found out very quickly, but plugged on, amid a flurry of second thoughts. 

So how did I solve the problem? I didn’t. I just made it worse, continuously, by hatching up a series of ideas that each added more work. 

Okay, if I were paid for all this, that would be one thing, but money is an incentive that simply doesn’t exist in the world of poetry. Sheer stubbornness has to make up for it. And lately I’ve been wondering how far stubbornness will take me. 

There are only two actions I can think of that might help ensure the open mic’s longevity. Most burdened organizers would take the first: Simply hire staff to do all the detail work. But in a volunteer organization with virtually no income, that’s not possible. Okay, then how about volunteers doing it just because it makes them smile? No way. Their own lives are already too full. 

That leaves streamlining. Streamlining has become my big thing. I`m on the lookout. My bright ideas now are not concerned with growth, but with pruning, hacking, ripping out by the roots. 

For instance, from now on, instead of posting a batch of poems by the featured poet, and then a while later an interview, I’m going to post the interview and the poems together. 

That doesn’t sound like much? Okay, look at it this way: That one extra posting has to be put on the website, on both its interview-&-poems page and its home page, also on our Facebook page, also on several other group Facebook pages, also on our email list. It also has to be written, revised and revised again and again, edited, combined with a photograph, and these posted together properly in both the website and the Facebook page, differently in each. Then there are all the keystrokes involved, the copying, pasting, entering, making mistakes and correcting them and on and on. And half a day has gone by. So you get the idea. One less batch of all this stuff is an extra year added to my life. 

But a much more blessed, happy-making, life-saving act of streamlining would be simply to shorten the season. So far, we’ve been taking a two-month break in the summer, which really isn’t more than a couple weeks considering the time it takes to do followups to the last event and preparation for the next. So here’s the big change: Now I’m cutting two more months, September and January. The first Wednesday of September is still really holiday time for many, and so is the first Wednesday of January, which this year was New Year’s Day itself, and so had to be moved. Moved twice, it turned out, losing many people in its wake. 

Now Linda and I can seriously relax in the summer, and maybe even head for warmer climes in mid-winter! She will bask in the sun, and I in her smile.