Greetings, people of Earth! David Leo La Nouvelle Scène “Le Bateau Ivre” upon the Seine “Please buy our Madeleines” Amen! Sirois pontificating here. Open Secret welcomes you, your 4-armed open mic (porting poetry, song, comedy, & all-things-theatric in each of its hands) every Wednesday (2nite!) at Le Bistrot des Artistes, 6 rue des Anglais (a cutesy passageway uniting Boulevard Saint Germain & rue Lagrange) in the “Amor vincit omnia” quarter. Metro Maubert-Mutualité (10) or Saint-Michel (4). 8:30pm sparks nightlong sign-up, 9pm the fireworks begin!
Our theme this week is a quote from Henry de Montherlant: “Il y a l’amour, puis l’art, puis rien.” Our very special guest, preeminent French poet Adeline Baldacchino, who also hosts readings/interviews with internationally-known Francophone writers every month at Théâtre les Déchargeurs in Paris, provided this universal topic. Her poetry is overwhelmingly powerful & exquisite.
About the theme – it’s kinda like how T.S. Eliot once said “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” What else could matter more to a human than love & art? What makes life more beautiful & interesting?
There are a lot of of cheezy songs I could quote at this fine moment, but I refuse. 🙂 There shall be no cheese tonight, only the finest French verse – even one in English translation, titled “Poem for nothing.” One of Adeline’s most haunting & human.
Her bio:
Adeline Baldacchino is a writer and, in a parallel universe, a civil servant dedicated to the common good, whatever that may be. She has been writing poetry since she was 7, due to a strange encounter with a cherry tree. She published her first texts when she was 17 and recently released “33 poems composés dans le noir (pour jouer avec la lumière)” (Rhubarbe, 2015). She also wrote a very personal biography of the poet and journalist Max-Pol Fouchet, head of the main poetry magazine during WWII, Fontaine (Max-Pol Fouchet Le feu la flamme, Michalon, 2013). She proposed a translation of lost fragments of Diogenes of Sinope and an exploration of the Persian and Arabic heritage of the Cynic Greek school (Fragments inédits, Autrement, 2014). She wrote a political pamphlet on Orwellian tracks, arguing for a poetic and cultural renewal of the French “elite” of the ENA (national school of administration) from which she graduated (La ferme des énarques, Michalon, 2015). She recently explored the relationship between poetry and philosophy in an essay on the poetic works of one of the main French intellectuals, Michel Onfray. She is always in between two or three journeys – she recently visited Uzbekistan (L’oiseau de Boukhara, Les Venterniers, 2015) and is heading to India. She loves interviewing contemporary poets (you can find her and her guests one Saturday per month at Théâtre les Déchargeurs in Paris) and more generally sharing her passion for poetry, be it at the Université populaire in Caen or through various lectures. http://abalda.tumblr.com/
See you tonight @ Le Bistrot des Artistes!
In his own words :”Jason Stoneking is a guy who writes stuff. Mostly poems and essays. He’s been around for a long time. He’s read with so-and-so, and published in the such-and-such. He’s had brushes with fame and brushes with death. An uncomfortable amount of his past can be found on the internet. He recently released a new collection of essays, and he currently spends most of his time in Paris where he can occasionally be found reading his work in the basement of a bar.” www.jasonstoneking.com
Our theme this Wednesday is “Freedom is dancing with both hands in the air!”
He doesn’t remember how he ended up in Paris, but can only assume it was for a good reason..A former member of many bands of which you have never heard :
The theme tomorrow is: LATE NITE tv/insomnia
Janine Booth (www.janinebooth.com) is a poet, trade unionist, author and lefty campaigner from the UK. As ‘The Big J’, Janine was part of the 1980s ‘ranting poetry’ movement. She’s here with her new book ‘Ranting Rhyming Revolting’ and we’ve made that the theme for tomorrow. Expect angry but funny verse aiming furious fire at Tories, class inequality, domestic violence, normality and more!
SpokenWord’s theme this Monday is GARDENS. And the guest poet is Mitko Gogov – 
SpokenWord Paris 