April is National Poetry Month and the theme is food and poetry. So join us at the pub for food, drink, and poetry, and maybe even poetry about food!

As Vancouvers Poet Laureate Rachel Rose said - "Everyone has something to say about food, whether it is the activist challenging the cruelties of conventional farming, the exile remembering the waft of spices on lost streets, or the child writing about the sockeye salmon she buys at Granville Island. Food is personal, political, sensual, and powerful. It concerns every one of us. Its time to write hymns to dumplings, sonnets to community gardens, love lyrics to beekeepers, odes to the food banks that fed your family while you were sick, pantoums to the lost spices of home now that you are an exile, fierce free verse about conventional chicken farming, performance poetry about guerilla gardens, hymns to the feasts your grandmother prepared, incantations about poverty and food insecurity and bohemian rhapsodies about dumpster diving.

So eat, drink, and be merry with our guest readers:

The Poet Laureate of Toronto 2012-15, George Elliott Clarke is an Africadian African-Nova Scotian. A prized poet, his 13th work is Traverse Exile, 2014, an autobiographical poem. His forthcoming title is the epic poem, The Canticles, whose subject is slavery, to be published, over five years, beginning in Fall 2016.

Currently the inaugural E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto, Clarke has also taught at Duke University 1994-99, McGill University 1998-99, the University of British Columbia 2002, and Harvard University 2013-14. He has won several awards for his poetry and a novel, and received eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer.

Sue Goyette has published three collections of poetry and a novel, Lures. She has won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the Earle Birney Prize, the Bliss Carman Award and has been shortlisted for the Governor Generals Literary Award. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia where she teaches creative writing and works part-time at the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia. Her collection Ocean was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014.

Kate Marshall Flahertys latest books of poetry are Stone Soup with Quattro Books and Reaching V with Guernica Editions. Shes been published in Descant, Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, Saranac Review and other Canadian and International journals. She has filmed several of her poems to the music of composer Mark Korven with MicroFilms on You Tube. She has been a poet-in-the-schools, through the League of Canadian Poets, across Canada, has poemed people in unsuspecting places as Random Acts of Poetry poet, and has given Writing as a Spiritual Practice workshops in Community Centres, Hospitals and Universities. She lives in Toronto, where she hopes to make more space for writing, her life-line.