Great news! The kind folk at Crescent Arts Centre have agreed to a Purely Poetry summer event. We usually take a break over July and August, but the public want more, and we're happy to give them it!

We don't want anyone to miss out, so if you could spread the word, send invites to your friends and share the invite, that would be wonderful, thank you! Come join us, Friday 1st August, doors 9pm, start 9.30pm £4 B.Y.O.

Poetry-related festival news Part Two:

The Aspects Festival programme is out, and we're delighted to announce that we will be hosting a poetry slam in Bangor as part of the line-up!

We'll be in The Rabbit Rooms at 8pm, on Friday 26th September. 
Come join us then. More details closer to the time...

You can download the full festival programme at: http://aspectsfestival.com/programme/

Ok, here's our first bit (the first of four bits) of festival-related news...

Sunflower Fest, "an excitingly different and magical weekend festival of great music, arts and entertainment" runs from 22nd-24th August, just outside of Hillsborough on Tubby's Farm.

We'll be hosting two showcases of poets who have been published in FourXFour across the weekend on the Moot Stage:
Saturday, from 14.55-15.30;
and Sunday, from 13.40-14.30.

Our line-up of poets will be announced soon. There are also lots of other poetry readings happening at the Moot Stage throughout the festival, from Catherine Brogan, Geraldine O'Kane, Colin Dardis, Richard Brennan and more.

More festival-poetry news soon...

Well, we don't usually hold our open mic night in July (we take a summer break), but I'm so glad we did! I was expecting a quiet night, but amazingly we had another packed house. What a wonderful thing it is to have to put out extra chairs for people...

Thank you to all of those were in attendance, and to all of our many readers, including a lot of first timers (always a joy to hear new voices). In on particular order, they were:

Brenda Liddy, Vincent Hurson, David Smylie, Andy Ward, Sorcha Ní Mhealláin, Helen Harrison, David Braziel, Marie Burns, Michael Bell, Mike O'Neill, Geraldine O'Kane, Eamonn Prendergast, Patricia Devlin-Hill, Anthony Ferguson, Yvonne Boyle, Tom French, Steve Smith, Ross Thompson, Ev McLaughlin, Mario Abbatiello, David Davies, Jim McLean, Mark Cooper, John Mc Guckin, Clodagh Harvey and Jason Ashford.

Public demand may dictate that we hold an August gig as well... no summer break for us! We need to confirm this with the Crescent Arts Centre, but keep an eye on here  for updates (we're also on Twitter: @poetryni). Thanks everyone for your support!

Our Purely Poetry open mic night returns once again to the Crescent Arts Centre. This is our last open mic before the summer break (we're back in September), but we will be holding some special one off events and readings, so stay tuned...

Doors open 9pm, start at 9.30pm.  For more details, see our Facebook event page.