Apposite Poetry Open Mic Ft. PENN KEMP & KARL JIRGENS

Name: Apposite Poetry Open Mic Ft. PENN KEMP & KARL JIRGENS
Start: 2026-04-08T18:30:00-04:00
Location: Mykonos Restaurant

Schedule

Wed, 08 Apr, 2026 at 06:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Mykonos Restaurant | London, ON

"April is the cruelest month" but it's nothing a little poetry can't fix! Join us to welcome in spring with another edition of the Apposite Poetry Open Mic 🌱
SIGN UP: 6:30
SHOW: 7:00
ADMISSION: Pay What You Can
All styles of poetry are welcome so don't be shy to sign up and share! Open mic slots are up to 4 minutes. That can include one longer piece or multiple shorter poems.
We're excited to bring you TWO amazing features for our April show:
Karl Jirgens, former English Dept. Head (U Windsor), is author of six books (Coach House, Mercury, ECW, The Porcupine’s Quill and Exile Editions). Jirgens edited two books (on painter, Jack Bush, and poet, Christopher Dewdney). His scholarly and creative texts are published globally (recently in Japan). His poetry was selected for Best Poetry of Canada, 2023. Jirgens founded, edited & published Rampike magazine, featuring celebrated international artists, writers, and theorists. Rampike is digitally archived (free: https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/rampike/about.html), and print archived at Thomas Fisher Library (U Toronto). His prize winning short-fiction collection, The Razor’s Edge was published in 2022. His latest book is Travesties (Exile Editions, 2025). See; https://www.jirgens.org/
Poet, performer and playwright Penn Kemp has been celebrated as a trailblazer and a literary ninja since her first book from Coach House Press, 1972. The League of Canadian Poets honored her with their Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award (2025), as Spoken Word Artist of the year (2015), and a foremother of Canadian Poetry. Recent collections include: Ordinary / Moving (Silver Bow Publishing, 2025); Lives of Dead Poets (above /ground press, 2025); INCREMENTALLY (Hem Press, 2024); POEMS IN RESPONSE TO PERIL, an anthology for Ukraine (co-editor, Pendas Productions, 2023); P.S. (with Sharon Thesen, Gap Riot Press, 2022) and https://publicreverie.com/poems-for-barry-a-digital-chapbook/ (2026). Penn is active across the web with multimedia collaborations: see pennkemp.substack.com and pennkemp.weebly.com.
Our features will be reading from new work plus a participatory sound poetry collaboration, "All in All". They will also be joined in the open mic by some favourite local poets bringing ekphrastic verse, so if you have a piece inspired by art, feel free to jump in on the theme! (Not mandatory, we welcome pieces on all topics.)
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the The League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Canadian Heritage.