Meanwhile ...

This month I shall be mostly ... completing my editing of the Pop Up Anthology 2014, a highly eclectic collection of poems from the people who have read at the spoken word nights at the Bar des Arts in the last year, and featured guests whom we've booked for events up to December 2014. This is the second one. Last year there were 50 contributors and this time there will be at least 63, not including myself and Dónall Dempsey.

It was Dónall's birthday on the night of the July Pop Up, so of course there was cake. It was as usual a thoroughly enjoyable event. 
We had four lovely guests - Robert Garnham up from Torquay where he hosts Poetry Island at the Blue Walnut, Ernie Burns from the Poetry Café's Platform One in London, Holly Hopkins with her new poems and pamphlet, "Soon Every House Will Have One" and Jen McGowan from Oxford, mediaevalist, archer and fantastic poet, with her pamphlet "Life in Captivity". She has a new book, too,"Sounding". 


Dónall was in amazing form, despite his birthday, and a very good time was had by all.

... meanwhile,  on 15th July in the Bar Des Arts, our regular third-Tuesday-of-the-month home, we were not deserted by all our regular open mic readers (as we had feared - it was the next evening following after the Keystone Slam.) 


Instead, we acquired some new faces in the audience. Tom, Tom, Harry and Not-Tom were scribbling all evening, while studying iPhones and looking mysterious. They were persuaded to read at last and aired the poems of terrieblessing.tumblr.com
to very good effect. 


If we can find Terrie himself, we'll look to include him in the 2014 Anthology. (If he has a photo to be included on the back of the book, this will entail a drastic new edit of the collage that I thought I'd almost finalised (left) 


We don't have a glass boot for him to try on to identify himself, just a blog URL. Will the real Terrie Blessing (or whomsoever) please step up! If Terrie is in fact four men, that will make the job easier (Dónall and I will make up the numbers in an extra row!)

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