Open Secret! Wednesdays @ Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais (a secret passage that Tinder-dates both Boulevard Saint Germain & rue Lagrange – look for the Franprix-in-the-alley) 75005 Paris. 8:30 open mic sign-up buds, & at 9pm it blooms crazily as angel-headed sunflowers! Métro Maubert-Mutualité (line 10) or Saint-Michel (line 4). Innovations in writing, song, comedy, performance art, theater, & dance, eeeeeven – strut yer proverbial stuff!
Our theme this week, inspired by our featured poet Raluca Petrescu’s fine, poignant, & masterful work, is “Words About Silence.” Her words acknowledge the presence of great poets of the past, from the classics to the moderns to more contemporary verse, but she creates a world of her own. Thought-provoking & inventive, she recites with the strong emphasis of an actor…with the driving force of sincere self-revelation, as well as honoring the power of silence. This is an event that if you miss, you may grow raaather sad about dat 😦 so come on over to Le Bistrot des Artistes for our warm weekly gathering!
Rethabile Masilo blogs at Poéfrika and co-edits Canopic Jar. He is a Mosotho poet from Lesotho and has lived in Paris, France, since 1987. His work has been published in various anthologies as well as hard and soft-copy magazines, including Canopic Jar, The Bastille, With Our Eyes Wide Open, Seeing the Unseen, Tears In The Fence, New Coin, Botsotso, Badilisha Poetry, and others. In 2014 his poem ‘Swimming’, published in New Coin Poetry, Vol 49, N°1, won the Dalro First Prize. The same poem won the Thomas Pringle Award for Poetry in Periodicals in 2015. 
Jonathan Schiffman has established himself as a tolerated presence on the Paris SW stage. Originally from New York City, Jonathan received degrees from Yale and Juilliard, then came to France on a Fulbright Scholarship to study music, wine, psychedelic drugs and plenty of other shit. After his fellowship money ran out (much of it squandered on a single overpriced meal in the 16th arr.), Jonathan served as an assistant conductor to the Orchestre National de France and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Then Jonathan served as Music and Artistic Director of the Orchestra of Avignon where for three seasons he subjected his ever-dwindling public to a strict musical diet of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Philip Glass. After his unexpected firing, Jonathan pursued a freelance conducting career while devoting the remaining 95% of his time to the writing of a novel, or, more precisely, to the mental preparation necessary to one day sit down and write a novel. This novel will possibly be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2017. Since 2014, Jonathan has been thrice elected to the SWIC (Spoken Word International Council), a governing body which formulates the rules and guidelines for all official Spoken Word chains and franchises. In addition, Jonathan is the co-founder of SW3 (recently defunct) and SW4 (moribund)
SpokenWord Paris 