Cafe Souterrain Poetry Reading Feb. ’20

Just got back from my once a month, multi-lingual, old brick cellar poetry reading and sidewalk recreational herbal ingestion period, and it was a good one.
Got there and saw it was in the main room, which generally I don’t like. The back room gives us isolation from the bar crowd. Nothing against the bar crowd, it is a bar and therefore it’s their objective to get as many people in to buy as many drinks as possible, but those who do not come deliberately for a poetry reading tend to have an indifference to poetry that is overwhelming. They talk as if we weren’t there, and it can be a noise war.
Anyway, I saw right away that we were in the main room, and during our 1st sidewalk recreational, concerns were expressed. But, it wound up being no problem at all. The poetry crowd grew throughout the evening, and the bar crowd dwindled.
Lots of people got up and read, many for the first time, and a way higher than average percentage of women, like maybe almost half. I always like that. It adds a different perspective. One girl read a short story about the very sad life, and somewhat bizarre suicide, of a lonely, 30ish woman with no friends and no social life, and it was horrifyingly sad.
There were poems in French, Spanish, German, Russian and Czech, I think one in Slovak, too. A couple of musical acts.
The scene was popping, so much that I had to leave early because tomorrow is a workday. It was not raining on the way home, but it had rained.