The Openned Readings

The Openned Readings is a place of nurture and encouragement. There should be no such thing as a fenced mind; criticism directed at fellow practitioners should be derived from a want to widen, strengthen or affect the cultural space that poetry occupies, never to diminish or destroy it. The stranger is always welcome; open conversation, free questioning, and non-judgmental interactions will skip down the road with razor bladed words, entering previously unexplored, unspoken avenues of the city; to riven the walls. A room is as dead as an un-marked grave, if you let it.

The Openned Readings seeks to create flexible spaces for poetry and poetic practitioners across geographically dispersed sites by inviting less established and more established writers to read together, curating publications, hosting an online discussion forum in the form of a blog, documenting readings through digital recording, publishing work, and promoting other writers via the Openned press.

The Openned Readings has been described by Scott Thurston as an 'intriguing mobile conceptualisation that can land in different locations and take on its own flavour therein and models the way in which other cultural movements develop.'

The Openned Readings walks the line between finding readers from within its own immediate 'community' whilst attempting to wedge that 'community' open, welcoming newcomers. The aim is to expand the 'community' of poets and readers, exploring the perceived binary between poet and reader, growing the cultural space currently allotted to poetry.

The Openned Readings will always seek to interrogate the specific nature and specific use of the word 'community'. It will do this through an intense focus on the processes of address that are integral in the construction of a particular audience for a particular event. Every reading series will consider how the wider ethical concerns of The Openned Readings can be figured, and if necessary refigured, for each particular local, for each particular event, for each particular time. In this way The Openned Readings will facilitate a conversation within itself by juxtaposing various and specific figurations and geographical instantiations of The Openned Readings' ethical concerns against one another. For the moment the conversation travels between London and Manchester unearthing prescient questions which up until now have remained unasked.

The Openned Readings believe in the face-to-face meeting. The Openned Readings are a 'community', not simply an entertainment event. For this reason we rarely accept readers through e-mailing alone, and though we encourage you to send us your work, we want you to be as invested in the project as we are. The social aspect and politics of The Openned Readings (whether installed in London, in Manchester, on or off line, or perhaps inevitably in both) is vitally importantly and indeed concomitant with the poetry itself.

We look forward to see you at the next reading.

Steve & Alex