Armed with scarves, beanies and gloves some of Grahamstown’s residents braved the cold weather last Friday night for a poetic evening at Reddit’s.
As the smoke danced out of the soup bowls and coffee cups, audience members listened to Harry Owen opening the night with a short speech, that was continuously interrupted as more Grahamstonians kept arriving.
Armed with scarves, beanies and gloves some of Grahamstown’s residents braved the cold weather last Friday night for a poetic evening at Reddit’s.
As the smoke danced out of the soup bowls and coffee cups, audience members listened to Harry Owen opening the night with a short speech, that was continuously interrupted as more Grahamstonians kept arriving.
This session marked the first anniversary of Poetry @ Reddit’s, an initiative started by Owen in July 2008.
“We were sitting in Reddit’s with some friends, and the idea just popped out: would it work to bring people together to enjoy poetry? That is how it started,” he recalls.
Since then, every last Friday of the month, a group of people gather at Reddit’s to read their own poems or even those written by others. The setting is very informal: if the weather allows, the event takes place in the garden, otherwise participants get together inside the shop.
Those wanting to read a poem, raise their hands and then take their turn in front of the audience. At last Friday’s sessions, after Owen’s speech and poem, a diverse range of people came onto stage to read poems ranging from classical English to personal pieces.
A Rhodes student read a poem of her own describing the shape and smell of her lover, a woman who has been a warden since 1993 shared the joy and difficulties of such a job, in an poem in Afrikaans a woman spoke of Africa, the mother earth, and she was followed by a Rastafarian who described the world he lives in.
"I live in a zone that doesn’t want the healing of the earth" he said. “This event is a mix,” Owen explains. “We had academics from the university, people from the township, the Rastafarians, sometimes we have music, sometimes we don’t and sometimes we have people who were just passing by and wondered what was going on in here. It is a mix really.”
