The Sunless Sea Open Mic: Poetry and Spoken Word Show

A thought from Unitsi Ai.

Wisdom from the Strunk and White classic, The Elements of Style.

New fliers for The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show by David Sylvester Robinson Hicks.

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show Halloween Special at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica CA, October 31st. Message us on Instagram for details.

👻 🧛‍♂️ 🎃 🧟‍♂️
With one more hour of Caligula’s Birthday left (August 31st) it seems appropriate to announce that Halloween falls on a Tuesday this year. You know what that means. . .The Sunless Sea falls directly on Halloween Night! So come prepared with your scariest, creepiest, weirdest, most otherworldly—or just your candy-sweetest and most autumnal—poetry and art. Let’s make it a night of spoken word worthy of the mad Roman emperor who called Seneca’s oratory “sand without lime”.

To get yourself in the mood, maybe check out this comic series in which Caligula is a vampire. 👻 🎃 🧛‍♂️

To all my fellow lovers of Ancient Roman History today is August 31st—Happy Caligula’s Birthday! Had he truly been a god, and if Cassius Chaerea hadn’t run him through with a gladius, the emperor would be 2,011 years old today. And this is what he’d look like (according to AI) if he had loved to see the inside of a diner in the 1950s.

Halloween falls on Tuesday

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm, at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica. All arts, media, and genres welcome. Come hungry! 😊 ♥️

For this week let’s remember Dorothy Parker, born today (Aug. 22nd), Guillaume Appolinaire (born Aug. 26th) and H. P. Lovecraft (born Aug. 20th).

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show, tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica. All genres and media are welcome. Come hungry. 😊 ♥️

Plus, a Happy Upcoming Birthday to Charles Bukowski—August 16th

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show, tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica. All genres and media are welcome. Come hungry. 😊 ♥️

Plus, a belated Happy Birthday to Alfred Hitchcock—August 13th.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was a British writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets.[3][4] A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats.[5] American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."

One of his most famous poems is “Ozymandias”.

“My name is Ozymandias King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair!”

Conrad Potter Aiken August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973) was an American writer and poet, honored with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and was United States Poet Laureate from 1950 to 1952. His published works include poetry, short stories, novels, literary criticism, a play, and an autobiography.

He won a special place in my heart with this poem:

From The Vampire . .’Her eyes have feasted on the dead, 
And small and shapely is her head, 
And dark and small her mouth,' they said, 
'And beautiful to kiss; 
Her mouth is sinister and red 
As blood in moonlight is.'

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm, at The Unurban Coffee House. All media and genres are welcome. Come hungry 😊 ♥️

This week I thought I’d commemorate a few poetry with their birthdays in early August. This is Robert Hayden (August 4, 1913 – February 25, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, and educator. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role today known as US Poet Laureate.[1] He was the first African-American writer to hold the office. I wasn’t able to find one of his poems being read or sung in the music selection here on IG, but search out “A Plague of Starlings”.

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm, at the Unurban Coffee House. All genres and media are welcome. Come hungry. 😊 ♥️

Requiescat in pace Paul Rubens. P*e Wee’s Christmas special was one of my favorites as a kid. ♥️ 😊

Rest in peace Sinéad O’Connor.

She was a master vocalist capable of gorgeous and heartfelt singing in many genres, as a brief search in the Instagram catalogue will attest. I remember her best from an album of Irish folk music she did (not the one this song is from) that included “Oro se do Bheatha Bhaile,” “Molly Malone”, and (if I remember correctly) “The Wind that Shakes the Barley. None of these were I. The IG catalogue, but oh well. Check them out yourselves if you can. 😊 ♥️

Just had to do another post to honor Coleridge. This is called “Frost at Midnight”. . . See you all at The Sunless Sea tonight at Unurban Coffee House at 7:30pm.

The Sunless Sea tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm, at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica. All arts and genres welcome. Come hungry! ♥️ 😊

On this day—July 25th—in 1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge died. Famous for writing “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan” among many other works, Coleridge was one of the first generation of Romantic poets in the English language. He collaborated with William Wordsworth on the first book of Romantic poetry—the Lyrical Ballads—and later prompted Wordsworth to right his famous “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” which became a de facto manifesto for the whole movement. Coleridge was an avid student of philosophy, however, and found Wordsworth’s formulation insufficiently rigorous. So he gave his own account in his “Biographia Literaria”, which included a detailed metaphysical and psychological account of poetic imagination.

The name of our show is a reference to “Kubla Khan” and I recite it at the beginning of every show. This time it will have an especial significance. RIP Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The Sunless Sea Spoken Word and Poetry Open Mic Show at The Unurban Coffee House tonight and every Tuesday at 7:30pm. All genres and styles are welcome.

This week I thought I’d spotlight Dylan Thomas, favorite poet and namesake of Bob Dylan. Let’s have a little Christmas in July for the poem to cool us down. . .

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Show tonight and every Tuesday, 7:30pm, at the Unurban Coffee House in Santa Monica. All media and genres welcome. 😊 ♥️

This week I thought I would give a little nod to Sylvia Plath. Enjoy!

Just more opportunism on my part to propagandize for John and Abigail Adams. . .the lyrics to this song from the musical 1776 were taken from their letters, which were published in the book in the picture. A romance in writing for all you poets for July 4th if you are inclined. 😊 ♥️ 🇺🇸

A letter from John to Abigail Adams

A love letter from Abigail to John Adams

Happy 4th

“John Quincy Adams once wrote, ‘Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet.’ Although literary fame would escape the sixth president of the United States, throughout his life Adams was a serious reader and writer of poetry. Adams's poetic efforts included secular verse, hymns, and versifications of the Psalms. He also translated poems into English, including Christoph Martin Wieland's fairy-tale epic Oberon (the translation went unpublished until 1940). His long poem, Dermot MacMorrogh or the Conquest of Ireland, met with poor reviews. . . Although Adams's poetry did not long remain in public consciousness, the first poem in Poems of Religions and Society, "The Wants of Man" (originally published 1841) briefly surfaced again in the literary world upon its inclusion by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Parnassus, a collection of Emerson's favorite poems.”—https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/jqa.html

John Quincy Adams also opposed Andrew Jackson (which is always a good thing), and slavery. Notably, he defended the slaves taken hostage by the Spanish Schooner, La Amistad, and got them returned to their homes. He and/or his wife apparently developed a taste for Gothic literature as well. 😊 ♥️
Happy 4th of July.

The Sunless Sea Poetry and Spoken Word Open Mic Show will meet tomorrow for July 4th, but The Unurban Coffee House will be closed so we will have no stage. Meet me outside the Unurban or message me, and we can read poetry round-robin-style at a nearby establishment. Happy 4th of July All! 🇺🇸

I present to you here my favorite founding father, John Adams. I was a fan even before the HBO miniseries. This man basically invented the concept of checks and balances, opposed slavery and never owned a slave, was married to America’s first feminist—to whom he wrote passionate love letters whenever he was away from home—and fathered a son, John Quincy Adams, to whom he said, “you will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” He had a vast library and was, obviously, a great lover of poetry, as well as philosophy, politics, and law. 😊 ♥️