Background

Open-floor nights are those sessions, usually in the back rooms or basement bars of pubs, at which anyone can get up and have their five minutes performing their poetry, music, comedy, or whatever it is they think they can do. If the organisers have some money to invest they may book in a known performer as a headline act; but usually the organisers are volunteers doing it for love and running the events on a shoestring, and always it goes without saying that most of the participants aren't famous and never will be. On the other hand, these sessions are where most poets begin their performance careers, and are the spawning grounds for bigger things.

Any regular session survives and thrives partly on its own sense of community and partly on a sort of community reputation, which is almost entirely separate from the mainstream of literature and of other arts. Like little magazines, these sessions come and go with sometimes alarming frequency. This essay is a somewhat personal attempt to track the continuity of regular poetry sessions in Liverpool, beginning where most examinations of Liverpool poetry end: the disappearance (whether permanent or simply on tour) of Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten.

Liverpool city centre is a compact area, a little over one square mile in size, and nearly all the events I'm talking about take place in this area, bounded by the lines of Great Crosshall Street and New Islington to the north, Smithdown Lane to the east, Upper Parliament Street to the south and the River Mersey to the west. That's pages 66 and 67 of your Liverpool A–Z: the spread it falls open at.

By Word Of Mouth

Though I'd been writing poetry for six years, the first time I ever read any poems in public was one Saturday night in September 1980, in between the folk songs at Oily Joe's Folk Club. This was in the back room of the Hare and Hounds pub on Commutation Row, whose single row of buildings sat on the crest above William Brown Street. I'd found out about the weekly sing-around because I went to the same speech therapy group as the emcee, which says something both about the nature of the folk club and also why I'd never read out any poetry before.