OPEN MIC at Planet Earth Poetry

Our Friday Night Open Mic is the longest running open mic in Victoria—consistently making space for local poetry since 1995. (And at 29 years, we’re one of the oldest poetry open mics in Canada!)

We offer our weekly community open mic EVERY FRIDAY AT RUSSELL BOOKS VICTORIA during the season (the season runs from Sept-June, with a break in December)

We also offer a MONTHLY community open mic at NEW HORIZONS in James Bay during the regular season.

It is our joy to welcome all voices and all styles of poetry to our community--we love hearing you read!
PLEASE SEE OUR OPEN MIC ETIQUETTE, as well as revised our sign-up procedure below.

We’re trying something new—we’re not sure if it’ll work, but we’re giving it a go (and if it fails miserably, we’ll ditch it):

We warmly invite our open mic participants to follow these easy rules when participating in our POETRY ONLY open mic:

1. All poets get to read one poem (even if it’s really short).

2. Poems must be no longer than 3 minutes.

3. No misogyny, homophobia, racism, etc.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a POETRY ONLY. If a poem contains a few lines of song lyric, that’s totally fine, but it needs to be a POEM, not a song. There are plenty of singer-songwriter open mics around town.

SPECIAL NOTE: Hosting the open mic is not an easy gig, please be gentle with our hosts. Our hosts are all skilled volunteers (and poets themselves), and while they do their best to make room for as many poets as possible, there’s not always room for everyone—thank you kindly for understanding.

Open mic begins at 7:30pm, followed by two featured poets reading from a recently released poetry collections.
RUSSELL BOOKS: 747 Fort St #100, Victoria, BC V8W 3E9

We aim to give preference to voices we've not heard before, or that we've not heard in a while, or to those coming from long distances or only in town for a week. You're always welcome to ask for a spot, and we're always happy to see you, even if we can’t offer you a spot. We try to fit everyone in, but it's not always possible. Our livestream opens at around 8pm to welcome the Featured Poets, and for this reason we try to finish our open mic promptly.

On rare occasions there is no open mic, and we aim to add this to our social media when advertising those special events.

And sometimes we dedicate an entire evening to open mic.

We have a mutual respect policy on our website, and everyone is welcome to read it. We're really big on mutual respect and community building (as evidenced by nearly three decades of service to poets and poetry!)

We can't wait to hear what you've been working on! Thank you for bringing your poetry to our open mic.

You’re also welcome to read the poetry of other poets—this is a great way for us to weave other voices to our community!

MONTHLY AFTERNOON COMMUNITY OPEN MIC

We host an open mic before our monthly in-person readings too!

Sign up begins at 1:30pm (and it’s usually pretty easy to get on the list for this one every time!)

Open mic begins at 2:00pm, followed by one of our out-of-town featured poets, reading from a recently released poetry collection.

NEW HORIZONS: 234 Menzies Street, Victoria BC

DATES for this reading vary month to month.
Please sign up for our weekly newsletter to learn more (the newsletter is less regular from June through August)