I didn't know Samuel Beckett was a poet until recently. Then I read two pages of prose, in one paragraph, called, imagination Dead Imagine'. It's one of the strangest, most intriguing things I have ever read. Like reading something written by an alien from another planet, you find yourself trying to get it, him, and yourself all at once.
Without really understanding logically any of them. Beyond the content and the incredible way he wrote it, it taught me what a prose poem is. It's definitely not prose turned into a poem. It's a poem written as prose. And so it taught me what a poem should be.

Rushing out to revel in heavy
and profoundly awesome
        things,
hopefully,
we bubbled on about our little
        selves--
me, a plume of dust,
she, a drop of dew --
and blew right past
the Louvre 
under the whispering sun.


Stan  Burfield
         ...I hope I make it to the open mic. I intend to.

We now have all our featured poets signed up for the first year. Each event,  except for the April one, will include an hour of open mic and fifteen minutes  of readings by a featured poet. Most will be on the first Wednesday of each
month at Mykonos Restaurant terrace, from 7:00 to 9:30, with live music and  sign-up beginning about 6:00. Cover by donation.

October 3, 2012:  ANDREAS GRIPP is well-known in london for the many readings he has given over  the years, for the 14 books and 13 chapbooks he has had published, for editing  and publishing his own literary journal for six years, and for hosting several  reading series.

November 7: KATHRYN MOCKLER has an MFA in creative  writing from UBC, has been published in many journals, has two collections in  print, has had her work screened several times on television and screened at a  number of festivals. Currently she teaches creative writing at UWO and co-edits  the UWO online journal ‘The Rusty Toque”.

December 5: RL RAYMOND has  two collections published. From a review of his first, ‘Sonofabitch Poems’:  “These poems scream with life. Really. This is not your blue-hair’d  grandmother’s genteel poetry. This is shock and awe poetry…take no  prisoners…bomb-blast poetry. Poetry perched on bar stools, lounging in beer  joints, waiting to catch you unaware and take you to your death.”
  
January 3 (THURSDAY): JOHN TYNDALL,  a Londoner since 1967, has been
published in several anthologies, and many journals. His two collections, one
with poems about the birth and childhood of his son, the second (2006) the
illness and death of his mother, have been praised by the University of Toronto
Quarterly for his use of "strange and iridescent language". Tyndall also will be
reading newer works, both found poems based on an obscure book from 1947 and  narratives in various voices, including that of his late father.
  
February 6: D’VORAH ELIAS,  who was born in South Korea, was abandoned by
her mother and adopted to the United States from an orphanage. She married the  late poet/physicist Vic Elias, and raised four children in London. She is a
playwrite and poet and has one published book of poems.

March 6:  CHRISTINE THORPE  says her poems are addressed to “those who feel in each  bright stream, the pull of an underground river. Readers are drawn from personal crossroads into subtly strange lands where skies may be truly falling but the  play of imagination endures.” Before settling for English literature, Christine  studied biology, mathematics and computer science. She has two published books of poetry.

April 24, 2013  (note this is the fourth Wednesday):  This is a special non-open-mic reading for National Poetry Month, held under the  auspices of the League of Canadian Poets.
            It will include FRANK DAVEY, who, since 1963, has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter, and who co-founded the world’s first on-line literary journal, Swift Current, in 1984. A prolific and highly-esteemed author of numerous books (the latest published in 2010) and scholarly articles on Canadian literary criticism and poetry, Davey writes “with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different
identity-based groups in our globalizing society—racial, regional, gender-based,
ethnic, economic—that drive this play,”according to his publisher’s reviewer. 
            London’s first Poet Laureate, PENN KEMP, will also read. Born in Strathroy, Kemp is co-editor and co-publisher of Pendas Productions. She  describes herself as a ‘sound poet’  and has published twenty-five books of
poetry and drama, ten CDs and Canada's first poetry CD-ROM. Since Coach House published her first book in 1972, Penn has been pushing text and aural
boundaries, often in participatory performance. The League of Canadian Poets
proclaimed her one of the foremothers of Canadian poetry. The following is from
my review for this page of Kemp’s August 4th performance: “It's the opposite of
narrative poetry. In that if you are looking for a story to carry you forward you are completely missing what's happening. What's happening isn't in the future but the moment, not the story but each word the poem is built from. Not even the word, but the sound of the word. Not just the sound of the word but many of the possible sounds of each word, all fitting together, interweaving, each evolving with each other and with the whole. Imagine hearing jazz built from vocal sounds. Now imagine it's the first time you have ever heard any jazz in your life. Beyond the experience itself there is your own mental experience: You find yourself continually working on your expectations. And your needs. Which turn out to be many.” 
    Also to be included in the April reading are LONDON’S SECOND POET LAUREATE, who has not yet been announced at the time of this writing (to be expected September 28th), and possibly one other poet, not yet decided upon.

May 1, 2013: SONIA HALPERN has won many teaching awards including UWO’s 2012 Arts & Humanities Teaching Excellence Award for her teaching and research in women’s studies and art history. She has published a number of books in that field. She has been voted one of UWO’s most popular profs for five years running. Halpern is also an actor and a composer, and has one book of published poetry, ‘The Life and Times of Transition Girl’ (2005).

June 5, 2013: DAVID J. PAUL has taught in London high schools for nearly thirty years. He has published two chapbooks and one full-length collection (2005). His poetry has been described as concrete, honest, earthy and visceral. He plans on reading poems about birds, dogs, earthquakes, spiders, writers and desire.

Enough feature poets (nearly all of the roughly twenty Londoners with published books) have agreed to read for Poetry Night to run us into our third year. We have deliberately intersperced the more well-known with the lesser-known poets so there will always be a good mixture. Anyone whom I have not contacted, please talk to us at London Open Mic Poetry Night.

    Get in its way.
    The opposite is just as true.
    I’m a mediocre poet, but when I read my poems aloud they tend to go over well. They
have an impact. 
     I thank my blind father for that. When I was a kid I would sometimes read to him, to give him a break from braille, or his talking  books, which both of us would often listen to. The readers of the talking books were always very good. We soon forgot their existence and only heard the story. I picked up on this so that when I read to Dad I tried to make the feeling and drama of the story overpower the dryness of my voice. I still read like that when I read poems to others. It works. 
     On the other hand, some of the best poets regularly butcher their poems. I often go to hear some of Canada’s greatest poets read at the Poetry London readings. I listen as carefully as I can but usually am left wishing they would read them over again. I’m lucky if I grasp more than half of any poem.
     The voices and the style of reading are usually so distracting, and the speed of reading so fast, that by the time I really take in a good phrase and enjoy the beauty of it I have usually missed the next line completely. I soon find myself putting most of my energy into just trying to figure out what’s going on and ignoring the subleties and beauty of the poetics. 
     I admit that many listeners are quicker and more focussed than I am. But let me give you a specific example. At one of the Poetry London readings the editor of one of Canada’s premier poetry journals, highly esteemed for his own poetry, gave a reading. A workshop was held before the reading, as usual, examining two poems by us local poets, and two by the featured readers. This guy’s poem was amazing. It had a huge impact on me. I can remember parts of it to this day. So I was really looking forward to hearing him read it aloud. I thought I might get more out of it than  I already had, by how he emphasized or deemphasized certain words. Well, even knowing the whole poem so intimately, from such a recent examination, most of it passed by me without any contact. I was shocked. And angry. I thought, how can he so casually do that to such an incredible poem? And that was only one of many he read. Imagine the incredible stuff I completely missed.
 `The worst thing he did was read every poem with some kind of a weird, monotonous rhythm that broke up all the phrases and sentences into totally illogical pieces. It made them impossible to follow. I suppose he was trying to get the look of the poem on the printed page across to his listeners without actually showing it to them. He would have been much better served by using an overhead projector. A poem written on paper and a reading are two completely different art forms. A person can’t hear a visual form.
     But reading a poem on paper, you can get both the form and the content at once. If you focus primarily on the content the look will still have its impact. And if one intrudes on the other too much, you can simply reread it. But none of this works at a reading. The only way to really communicate the poem is to ignore the look of it and concentrate on the content, the meaning, the phrases, the sentences. Then, if the poem is truly poetic, those poetics will to some extent make themselves felt in the normal reading of the sentences. In other words, the sentences will be different than if they had been written as prose. 
     But forgetting the look of the poem is only the beginning of communicating it. It only points the way. The reader has to really try to communicate, just as people talking to each other have to. Communicating largely involves empathy with the listener, imagining how the listener is taking everything that is spoken. If a word is spoken one way, will that lead the listener astray? Preventing misinterpretations is a very big problem in written poetry, and is part of the difficulty of both writing and reading a poem on the page, but to then read it aloud poorly is to compound the problem dramatically. And the listener has no time to think about meanings. 
     The listener has no time because the poem is usually read too quickly. Many impatient conversationalists speak far too quickly. They never seem to realize that even though they already know what they are going to say before they begin, the listener seldom does. The listener not only has to understand the words and the grammar but also must try to figure out the correct meaning at the same time.
The speaker only has to say the words. One requires more time than the other.  Many good poets also seem to be ignorant of this lack on the part of their  audience. And to grasp a poem takes much more than does grasping a simple  conversation. Reading slowly is essential.
     But few poets read with this kind of empathy for their audience. Reading each poem twice would make up for it, but that never happens. As a result, I often find myself giving up after the first few lines, shrugging my shoulders, and daydreaming through the rest of the poem.  
     Here’s my recipe for a good reading: The reader shouldn’t start out with the idea of trying to get across the complexities of the written poem, but instead should begin at the other end of the spectrum, as if the reading isn’t a reading but is actually just a conversation and the simple story in the poem is all that is important to get across. Then, with that, the reader can add more and more complexities from the written version until an optimal point is reached. Stop there. Beyond that, both content and poetics rapidly lose their stickiness until, at some point, the whole thing just bounces off the skull.