Omigod! Is that another month just flown by?! Yes, apparently, and we were all assembled again in Cassidy’s lower bar for another Last Wednesday Open Mic. Glad to see some seniors (besides myself) in evidence: Denis Kenny with a very moving tribute to the 33  people who died in those terrible explosions in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974.

Martin Egan was in fine form with poems like ‘I lived on an Island’. Helena Mulkearns was there too (not a senior) and it was great to hear her again reading that poem about the United Nations blue tarpaulin that does so many jobs in so many awful places around the world. This is one of the finest things I have heard at the open mic. I think it’s in for a Hennessy Award and if so it deserves to win. (Helena, by the way, hosts a ‘cabaret’ at the Wexford Arts Centre every last Saturday of the month, and welcomes all types of acts, including poetry: see www.cacamilis.org). Lots of other great stuff. Eileen Keane read the rest of her short story from last month but dammit! I couldn’t concetrate because she was on right after me and my own stuff was still going through my head. Does this happen to others? Or is it only me? And it seems Steve Conway, (‘Shiprocked: Life on the Waves with Radio Caroline’), our autobigrapher and prose writer extraordinaire , has now turned his hand to POETRY!!! which I think is grossly unfair to the rest of us poets as the market is already too crowded. A recent attendee at this Open Mic, Jane Robinson, read a poem involving the genetic code, which I hope I hear again, and Delta O’Hara did a scene from her work in progress about telephone sex, some of which (the work, not the sex) you can experience in ‘The patriot Inn’ in Kilmainham (opposite the Jail!) next Monday 9.00pm. This is a very well organised Open Mic and very welcoming to newcomers ( and oldcomers!). What I really like about it, apart from the material of course, is that that it always gets going before 8.00 pm, and sometimes even earlier. I’m getting a impatient with events that don’t get off the ground before 9.00 (or even sometimes 9.30) pm. But maybe that’s just me?