Couplets: Poets in Dialogue is a new London Open Mic Poetry series presented by Chapters. It will be hosted the third Friday of every month, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm at Chapters (South) in London, ON (1037 Wellington Road).
 
If you want to measure the true value of a poetry reading—for the audience and for the readers themselves—you should aim your valuometer at what happens after the final round of applause: the informal Q&As, the handshakes and book signings, congratulations and introductions, the exchange of email addresses, phone numbers, or Twitter handles, the too-sincere compliments, the pinball machine of playful arguments, the two or three poets ‘accidentally’ holding court.

Couplets: Poets in Dialogue is an attempt to bring some of this value—the affirmation of community, the promise of new connection—into the reading itself, to make it the focus of the event and to make it more available to those poetry fans who don’t write themselves.

Each ‘episode’ of Couplets will feature a pair of London poets: an established ‘anchor’ poet, drawn from the list of former featured readers at London Open Mic Poetry Night, and a younger or earlier-career ‘wildcard’ poet. A month in advance, the anchor and wildcard will begin collaborating on their evening of alternating readings, response poems, duets, live interview, live writing exercises, live argument, and general poetic tennis (net optional). The episode will be the culmination of this collaboration, a unique performance sparking in the gap between two poetic minds.

It’s my hope that no two Couplets episodes will be alike—but that each will be one part traditional poetry reading, one part interview, one part comedy podcast, one part informal mentorship, and maybe half a measure audience heckling.

 ~ Andy Verboom, organizer of  Couplets: Poets in Dialogue Reading Series

Couplets episode 1, starring Laurie D. Graham and David Huebert, will be on Friday, May 20th, 6:30 – 7:30pm.

Andy Verboom hails from subrural Nova Scotia. His poetry is published or forthcoming in such journals as CV2, Arc, BafterC, Descant, and The Puritan; has won the Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem; and has been shortlisted for Arc’s Poem of the Year. His chapbook Tower (Anstruther Press) will drop in the summer of 2016. He is the managing content editor of The Word Hoard, a literary and humanities journal, and the proud new organizer of Couplets: Poets in Dialogue, a collaborative reading series.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS:
 
While established poets will be invited from the long list of former featured readers at the London Open Mic Poetry Night, Couplets is seeking applications for the position of ‘wildcard’ from London poets who have not yet featured at London Open Mic. Preference will be given to younger poets who have not yet published full-length collections.
If you’re interested in participating, send the following items (in a single attached Word or PDF file) to coupletsreadingseries@gmail.com:

• 50 – 100-word bio;
• 50 – 100-word statement of your interests and investments (e.g., formal, social) as a poet;
• 4 – 5 pages of your poetry, particularly of the type you’d like to read at Couplets;
• 4 – 5 brief examples of how you would engage with an established poet at Couplets.

These engagement examples might include sample interview questions, sample rapid-fire quizzes (e.g., “Plath or Hughes? Brodsky or Walcott? Apples or oranges?”), sample preplanned writing exercises (e.g., “I asked you to write a couplet about Walcott eating an orange. Can you share that now?”), sample on-the-spot writing exercises (e.g., “In the next two minutes, write a couplet about an orange eating Walcott. Can you describe your process out loud as you write it?”), or—really—any other prompts for intriguing, insightful, or surprising dialogue. Please be very creative!
This is an open and ongoing call. Exciting applicants will be contacting on an ongoing basis to ensure their availability for upcoming months, and our poet couplets will be put in touch a month before their shared event in order to plan their collaboration.

The original idea for this series came from Frank Beltrano. Thanks, Frank!


​

On this the 400th birthday of Shakespeare’s death on our milk crates we stand, teeter, and with books in hand we wag our lips. Hopped up on words, on rhythm, on the plenitude of vocal cords and tongue, we stand on our milk crates and read on this the 400th birthday of Shakespeare’s death, which may also be the anniversary of his birth, if historians’ speculations correctly show his mortal coil both found breath and lost on this the day of April 23rd, cruelest month when lilacs spring and memory and desire meet. And so we prop our voices and tell of the cold towns we live and die in and that special way of being afraid.
 
Think how resounds the passage of air through mouth. Articulation. The precise placement of tooth and tongue and how rhythms smack off lips and how rhymes plump the cheeks and sounds set the air slithering and the curlicues of voices batter eardrums and set neurons sparking. We hold being on our tongues, we birth sound from our lips, and, if there is truth, with each word we kiss it.
 
o place-giving hallowers, namegivers, o poets o see-ers o seers, enchanters of being, tellers of tales, gift-giving bards revealing, seeding the good soil, worldgiving historians of light

~ Shelly Harder

We are in the process of making a radical departure from our past.

We have always been a single-event organization run by a single organizer. But during this month, April, 2016, which is coincidentally National Poetry Month, we are breaking out of that mould, becoming a multi-event organization with each event run by its own organizer.

And now, instead of the one central organizer trying to plan every detail, which is only possible to a certain extent, at least without causing seriously debilitating anxiety, he is stepping back to allow others to take over the planning of their own spin-off events

This relaxation, openness, and "spontaneous" growth of new events and poetic happenings could continue indefinitely, as more people become aware of us, are excited by the possibilities, and create their own ideas. And the more that poetry becomes a part of the landscape of London, the more people will begin to see it everywhere, and not only throughout the city, but also in the community-building social media. Poetry could become the fashionable art of London.

It would follow that this rapid growth in quantity (as we create more spaces for poetry, and so excite more people) could provide a rich breeding ground for changes in quality as well.

Thanks to an idea by Frank Beltrano, we will launch a series of readings in the Chapters book store near the White Oaks Mall, probably in May. At each monthly event, organizer Andy Verboom will be pairing one of the featured poets who has earlier read at our four-season series at Mykonos Restaurant with a lesser-known poet who has not yet been published in book form. Andy is in the process of working out the format but it will include readings by each poet (a longer one by the featured reader), some form of conversation between the two, and of course questions from the audience. These new organizing ideas are so exciting that we may try to adapt them to the larger stage at Mykonos.

We are launching an E-journal, wherein each month the open mic readers at our events will publish one of the poems they read that month (if they would like to), along with a photo of them reading it. Also, the featured poet's three poems, interview and bio would be included, and possibly those of the poets reading at that month's Chapters event. The organizers (publishers, editors) of this publication are Koral Scott and Christine Ellwood.

Our already-announced series of Guerrilla Poetry readings in the central library (if it goes as planned) will have a spin-off in the Chapters book-store near White Oaks mall. It will be organized and hosted by Brittany Renaud. (The original series in the central library down-town is launching this Saturday, April 23rd, at 2 pm.)

London Open Mic Poetry is rapidly changing from a Mykonos event series into an umbrella organization. It now has eleven members. Projects that have been put off for lack of people to run them may soon be launched by new people who may want to work with us in the future.

For instance, we need someone to head our Prison Poetry project, a woman (since it would be in the women's prison in the Kitchener area) who has the time, the energy, the right expertise, and who has experience dealing with institutions.
We need people to try to start workshops and possibly open mics in other long-term care institutions.

We need someone to promote with the city our idea of having city workers stamp impressions of poems into side-walk areas as they are being repaired. This has been done successfully in St. Paul, Minnesota.

We need people to carry out our dream of exciting the city's high-school English students in poetry, possibly by means of a city-wide contest.

As London Open Mic Poetry grows in size, its abilities are also growing. For instance, we now have a social media expert on board, Koral Scott, who is reorganizing our presence on the internet to make it more effective.

We're open to people and their ideas. We're no longer just imposing our own.