Shelly Harder, one of London Open Mic Poetry’s regular readers and a valued committee member, has read her last poem at the open mic. In August, she will be leaving for Ireland to do her MA in literary studies and creative writing.
 
We at London Open Mic are sad to see Shelly go. She has been one of the most fascinating people in our lives, and one of the most creative and focussed talents to grace our stage. To say that her poetry is astonishingly beautiful is not an overstatement.
 
We feel very lucky to have known Shelly during these short years, lucky to have been a small part in the incredible journey that is her life, past and future. Those long, intense conversations over beer and tea will not be forgotten, nor will the feelings they have engendered in us.
 
Shelly has never been one to shower people with her talents. We discovered them slowly, usually by accident. Only some of us have heard her play classical piano, and fewer yet knew that she was apprenticing to play one of the grandest church organs in the region, in Saint Thomas.
 
For four months in the summer of 2015, and mostly alone, Shelly backpacked through Europe, writing poems as she went. Afterwards, she thought of collecting those poems into a volume, and, given enough time in her busy future, may yet do so. A few of us read them live, as she posted them to her blog during her travels. We were transported there ourselves, via those beautiful, often profound, always heart-felt poems. It was a rare and wonderful experience. That journey can still be read on her blog, its first entry (May 15th, 2015) being the first poem of the trip, in Athens. The blog is called “as tumbled over rim in roundy wells, stones ring”. It can be found at https://hardershelly.wordpress.com/.
 
Shelly Harder can be heard in probably her last reading in London today, July 29th, as she takes part in the Couplets Reading Series, co-featuring with Monika Lee.  
 
Couplets: a Collaborative Reading Series: Friday, July 29th, 6:30pm – 7:30pm @ Chapters (South), 1037 Wellington Road, London.

Friday, July 29th, 6:30pm – 7:30pm @ Chapters (South), 1037 Wellington Road, London.

What is "Couplets: a Collaborative Reading Series"? Each episode of Couplets features a pair of poets who write (or have written) in London, Ontario (or the surrounding region): an established ‘anchor’ poet and an emerging ‘wildcard’ poet. A month in advance, the anchor and wildcard poets begin collaborating on an evening of alternating readings, response poems, renga, duets, live interview, writing exercises, arguments, and general poetic tennis (net optional). Their episode is the culmination of this collaboration, a bespoke performance sparking in the gaps between two poets.

Monika Lee is a Canadian writer and literary scholar awarded an Ontario Arts Council grant for poetry in 2010. Her collection Gravity loves the body was published by South Western Ontario Poetry Press (2008) and her chapbook slender threads appeared from EBIP and the Canadian Poetry Association (2004). She has published poems in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, including Canadian Literature, Vallum, Scrivener Creative Review, Windsor Review, Dalhousie Review, Nashwaak Review, Harpweaver, ARoom of One’s Own, Event, Atlantis, Fiddlehead, Antigonish Review,Ariel, Quills, Qwerty, Ascent, and Grub Street Literary Magazine. Monika graduated with distinction from the Humber College School for Writers in 2008. Her play “The Petting Zoo” was performed as part of the Playwrights Cabaret at the McManus Theatre. She’s also published a book of literary criticism,Rousseau’s Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self (1999), and scholarly articles on Shelley, nineteenth-century literature, Canadian literature, and creative writing. A full professor in the English Department at Brescia University College, she teaches nineteenth-century British literature, creative writing, and other courses in English literature.

“gravity loves the body… offers us rich, tactile images of a woman, mother, and lover: ‘[w]e are the petals of one flower.’ Lee never strays into easy summary or sentimentality. She refuses to hide behind language or obscure literary allusions. …Along with her, we nurse a baby in the bath, visit Marrakech, and lose a mother to death. Her humor, wit, and unflinching view make us trust her, and want to live in the richness of this book as long as possible.” —Emily Wall, Canadian Literature
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Lee was the featured reader at the London Open Mic Poetry Night on June 4th, 2014. On the London Open Mic Poetry website, you can read an interview with Lee and four of her poems.

Shelly Harder is a poet, teacher, gardener, student of literature, occasional tickler of piano keys, and dabbler in philosophy. Some of her work may be found at hardershelly.wordpress.com.

“skin to skin is a collaborative text documenting our reading for Couplets. After juxtaposing and splicing together selections from our work during an evening of poetic improvisation, this conversation became a poem which was caught in paper and ink. Some of the poems stand whole, but they are diversely shadowed and tinted by coming into each other’s light. Others are grafted with lines we chose from each other’s work. The title piece merges two previously unacquainted poems, which immediately interlocked. These interweaving lines and poems form counterpoints from which new and surprising harmonies have coalesced.” —Monika Lee and Shelly Harder

Thanks Mayor Brown, thanks to the City of London, and thanks to the London Arts Council for creating and funding this position. Finally, thanks to all of you who have come today. I see representatives here from London Poetry Slam, London Open Mic, and Poetry London—I am so grateful that you are here for this announcement.

I am thrilled and excited to be named Poet Laureate for the City of London. I want to begin by acknowledging the hard work, devotion and successes of my predecessor, The City of London’s first Poet Laureate, Penn Kemp. The first poem I ever published was part of a program called Poetry in Motion, a program Penn created in her time as the Poet Laureate. Poetry in Motion was a poetry competition that invited submission for poems that would be published on city busses. My poem was one of 50 poems chosen and I remember quite distinctly meeting Penn soon after. She said “you are a poet—keep writing” This was a very important moment for me and it gives me a great deal of appreciation for how this position can be used to reach out to artists and would-be artists to help foster and encourage their development.

This is an exciting time to be a Londoner; there is an energy and dynamism in this town and it is being felt nowhere more keenly than in the Arts. I look forward to using the position of Poet Laureate to not only champion artists and arts institutions in this city, but I also want to focus on projects that build and encourage inclusiveness, diversity and collaboration in our city. The arts are for everybody. The arts can help us think through what we as citizens collectively value, and thus the arts can facilitate engagement with the civic process—giving us ways to think creatively about how we want to build and shape this city we share.

To this end, I’d like to conclude with a poem that is inspired by my love and concern for one of London’s most defining natural features---the Thames River, or Antler River as it was and is known to First nations groups whose traditional lands, the river runs through.



Trash Fish

In April, the carp return to Wellington Bridge.
Lumbering mud barges, they dredge the muck,
sub-terminal mouths shaped like the Scream of Nature--
they munch tasty bits of crud, sending up plumes of silt
like spice harvesters on a watery Dune.

Saturday six-pack anglers sit under the bridge,
flick cigarette butts into the river and wait
for the bobber to dive. The ponderous pull
of a hooked carp is hardly sport—landing
one is like lifting a sleeping infant out of a car seat.

The man hoists his catch for his toddler to see.
Spent, the fish musters one mechanic convulsion and falls on some rocks.
The man kicks at it and it slaps back into the water.
Too late, too battered, it flounders about in the shallows gasping--
capsized like a Carnival Cruise.

The cars rush overhead; home from the market, hemp
bags stuffed with tilapia, trout, farm fresh salmon, line-caught halibut.
The fishermen beneath crack their last tall boys, the osprey
and heron bide their time, and the carp under Wellington Bridge
hunch against the current—their teeth in their throats--
and continue to pack on the pounds.


​The London Arts Council's biography of Tom Cull


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Brad Shiell · Friends with Tom Cull
Thomas I looked up on google what your role is as poet laureate and you came up on Google ! The girls in the office think you are "hot " ! You now have a following in Australia !

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Tom Cull Thanks Brad. the photographer used a special lens called "hot in australia"
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Debra Franke Way to go Tom Tom Cull--what wonderful news!
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Tom Cull Thanks Debra Franke!
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Cornelia Hoogland Congrats Tom, enjoy the postition!
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Tom Cull Thanks Cornelia!
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Patricia Black Great poem Tom; great cause; We do have Poetry in Motion in common.
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Tom Cull Fantastic! That was a fun program. Guess I'd better get to work!
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Anna Yin Congratulations!
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Before the Mayor's announcement today at Innovation House, I looked around at the people milling there to see if I could figure out who the new Poet Laureate would be. The only major poet I recognized was Tom Cull. Tom is one of my favourite people, so my hopes shot up, but, when I asked him, he managed to make me think it must be someone else, saying with a tiny smile, "I have an educated guess who it is". I didn't press him. So when the mayor said, "Tom Cull", I was very surprised, very excited and suddenly very happy.

What a great selection. I can't imagine a better person for the job. Tom is not only an excellent poet, he is a man with a strong, deep social conscience, and a love for his city and a desire to improve it. He has put a huge amount of work over the years into cleaning the Thames, in the process organizing an awful lot of people to help him do it. And Tom has the social skills to be an effective Poet Laureate. He is a very social person, an easy and natural one. Who better to inspire Londoners? Wonderful!

Stay tuned for more on Tom and his new post.

​Stan

Here is the London Arts Council's biography of Tom

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Tom Cull Thanks so much Stan! I was so glad you were there for the announcement. You are a pillar of the poetry community!
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Stan Burfield Now I get to take that seriously! Ha ha
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Jo-Elle Christina · Friends with Tom Cull and 3 others
How wonderful! Congratulations Tom Cull! Well deserved, indeed!
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Tom Cull Thanks Jo-Elle Christina!! Say hi to Marc!
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Patricia Black Congratulations Tom. We met once a couple of years ago. Enjoy your exciting role!
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Tom Cull Thanks Patricia---hopefully our paths will cross again!

On Saturday, July 2nd, a group of poets from London Open Mic Poetry, joined by poetry fans, read at our first Guerilla Poetry event at Chapters Bookstore South. Some of us donned our black Guerilla Poetry t-shirts, and we migrated into the fiction section, there reading poems with drama to any and all browsers, dropping on them some of our own, but enjoying even more the chance to read aloud the masters, the way we each felt they should be read. Who gets to do that in public? And who ever gets to hear those great poems read aloud? Very few. We remember the silent versions, silent inside our heads, as we read them so long ago from a text for a class. Moving out of the fiction corrals, we stormed the children's section, grabbing large, colourful books from the shelves, and, with smiles all round, read long poems filled with rhyme, humourous word-play and laughter.

The reading was organized by Brittany Renaud, who had the most perfect poster made up in advance for backdrop and promotion, and who loved, especially, the possibility that the children playing there might stop, listen and enjoy. And how could they not?


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Cambridge N Calvin Keenan That's awesome Stan 🌞
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