Lee Johnson will be one of two featured poets at the exciting May 7th London Open Mic Poetry Night at Mykonos Restaurant. He will be co-featuring with Susan McCaslin. Both are touring their new collections. The crowd will be warmed up by rising local singing/songwriting star Carly Thomas. And a large contingent of open-mic poets will step up to fill out the evening.

Lee Johnson, who was Susan McCaslin's PhD dissertation advisor at UBC, and her favourite professor, grew up near the centre of the continent on a chain of lakes in rolling countryside and developed a love of Nature in all its forms. His intended careers at that time were to become an ornithologist and an astronomer, depending on the time of day. There were, and are, so many birds around a region of lakes because of the abundance of food; and the night skies in a rural area are compelling. Is it any wonder, then, that, in early youth, the poetry of Wordsworth called to him with the force of a conversion experience, showing how interactions with Nature could be recreated in poetry? Later, as a professor for four decades at the University of British Columbia (1970-2012), Lee even wrote two books on this particular poetic mentor: Wordsworth and the Sonnet (Copenhagen: Anglistica, 1973) and Wordsworth’s Metaphysical Verse: Geometry, Nature, and Form (Toronto UP, 1982).