It’s been eight years since university pals Adam Dickinson, Jonathan Meakin, Paul Pearson, and Andy Weaver invited Alice Major to headline for the inaugural Olive Reading. Since then many poets and poetry devotees have come out on the second Tuesday of the month, from September to April each school year, first at Martini’s downtown, now at hulbert’s in Belgravia to enjoy some food, drink, and poetry. The original four Olives have all moved on to careers that keep them connected to respective arts & culture currents (we’ll look at that in another post), but the legacy of the Olive Reading Series continues.
It’s only taken eight years to get our weblog up and running. We have certainly entertained the idea in the past, but the demands of finding excellent poets and staging first-rate live readings with well edited and designed chapbooks have tended to keep us from branching out any further. The bulk of the blogging effort this far has been to backfill history with the correct dates and poets for over sixty readings that have taken place since Alice Major inaugurated the Olive. You won’t see hoards of content for a while, but you may be interested to scroll back over the past eight years to see just who has read at the Olive.
Check back often as we prepare during the summer for our ninth season; the Olive blog will be accreting more and more history as it were. Ideally we would like to make available digital copies of our well regarded (and free) monthly chapbook, which has featured poetry from the month’s headline poet. It should take some time to contact past readers and ask permission to post their chapbook poems online as this was never arranged when we acquired their poems for the print versions of the books. Ahh technology.
(If you are a past Olive reader who would like to see your Olive chapbook freely available on our site and would like to make our job much simpler, please drop us a line and let us know that we can post your chapbook.)
Meanwhile, two of our current members, Olives and past readers, Doug Barbour and T.L. Cowan, have already agreed that making their e-chapbooks freely available is a good thing. You can find them under the dates they read.
We are also interested in posting photos of past Olive readings. We have a few pics from Stephen Brockwell’s and Christine Stewart’s reading, but that’s about all. If you happen to have any photos you’d like to contribute to the blog, please let us know.
And we would love to know what you think about the Olive and our new blog! If you have any recommendations for improving the site or the readings, or have any interesting Olive anecdotes, or simply want to say, “hey!” please leave us a comment below!
Happy summer!
Jeff Carpenter, Olive
The Olive Reading Series 