November Foraging Pigs

After our launch night in September, last Thursday saw the second Foraging Pigs Poetry Open Mic at the Kings Arms Upstairs, hosted by Liz and Ted.

There was new signage and special merch - a badge for our ‘top truffler’ of the night. Now, we don’t want to get too competitive here at the Foraging Pigs, because we always want poetry to be the real winner, but we do want to celebrate our poets whenever we can.

And although it was a quieter night than the September launch, the quality of poetry was superb.

We welcomed four new foragers to the mic: Diana Mitchener, Si Zec, Juliet Starbuck and Adelaide Gooda.

There were some outstanding returners, including Andrew Mayne who was a very close second with his poem Cricket is Sexy, but our top truffler on the night, who went home with the exclusive, not-for-sale, Foraging Pigs badge: Pauline Howley, with her poem, Drugs.

No doubt this resonates more for an audience of a certain age, but we both loved the echoes from the 1986 ‘Just Say No’ campaign when Lee MacDonald played Zammo in Grange Hill, the character whose heroin addiction provided the hard-hitting storyline. It came in a week where Pauline had another poetry success, with a different poem, ‘My Masque of Anarchy’, published in the Morning Star poetry anthology Who We Are.

Congratulations, Pauline!