Chicago poet and Austin resident Janet Kuypers returned to Chicago for a few days in August, and during her stay she was honored with the opportunity to feature with a poetry show at the open mic she ran for over half of a decade in Chicago (then titled “the Café Gallery” at the Gallery Cabaret). Her feature was held for Poetry at The Gallery Cabaret (2020 N. Oakley Ave. in Chicago - one block east of Western Avenue and one block north of Armitage) Tuesday, August 13^th 2019, where most of her new 2019 books were sold there live.

    Because Janet Kuypers knew she was coming back to Chicago in 2019, Janet Kuypers was thrilled that Scars Publications was able to release the two new books of hers that she could read from in her In her feature “Poetry at the Gallery Cabaret 8/13/19” show. After moving from Chicago to Austin in late 2015, Scars Publications released in 2017 2 poetry books from Kuypers of her new poetry, book “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 poems” and “(pheromemes) 2015-2017 show poems”, and this journey welcomed the third book in the “pheromemes” series (and possibly the last“pheromemes” book), “(pheromones) haiku, Instagram, Twitter, and poetry”. This book was mentioned in her previous show at this venue, during the night of her Life and Death and Everything Between feature and open mic hosting at The Gallery Cabaret, and her feature on this night is where she not only read from the book, but also showed (in some cases) the Instagram/Twitter images that accompanied her poems online and appear in the book.

    In 2019, Janet Kuypers also made a New Year’s Resolution to write a poem every day. In her daily search for poem-worthy topics, she has found daily “fun” and “off-beat” “holidays” and events throughout the year; in light of this one-year-long writing tangent/direction, Scars Publications opted to release a book of Kuypers’s poetic interpretation of every event of the year, but since there were already over 200 pages in the first half of the year along, Scars Publications chose to release this collection in ytwo volumes, and therefore released the book “Every Event of the Year (Volume one: January-June)” in time for her visit to Chicago, which gave her the opportunity to read from this book as well for her feature.

    Toward the end of the open mic, host Deve Gecic’s poetry segment to honor dead poets from the Chicago area capped the evening, where many poets took turns on stage reading a poem by Shel Silverstein. Because poetry feature Janet Kuypers vividly remembered reading from his books when she was little, she was the final reader of Shel Silverstein poetry, and she read “Sick” (a poem she even remembered the beginning and ending to from when she was little).

    Enjoy the video links and poem writing links below for recordings from this live evening, including before the show of individual poems readings, as well as the entire show performance!