The Poets

Lolita Vilar is a young poet who writes in prose, with a flair for abstract metaphor. Her poetry focuses on the magical, the mundane, and the music of our world.

Philip Tran is a poet of many mediums—words, collage, and the ephemeral art of live performance. Hailing from Denver, he is a passport-wielding wanderer, a florist with an eye for beauty, a handyman with a poet’s touch, a roller skater chasing rhythm, and an emcee who curates spaces where voices rise and resonate.

As the longtime host of Denver’s beloved 4th Friday poetry open mic—formerly at The Mercury Cafe, soon to be The Pearl—Philip fosters a stage where vulnerability meets applause. His podcast, From My Open Mic, captures the raw electricity of live poetry, available on Spotify.

In 2023, he launched Bound By The Beat, an event weaving together Denver’s rope bondage and jazz communities, an experiment in trust, tension, and improvisation. With a choose-your-own-adventure poetry book in the works and a hunger for new stages, he may soon be performing near you.

When asked what superpower he’d choose, he answered: To awaken the superpowers in those unaware of their own.

@invader_4 & (NSFW) @invader__4

Racine Muse and iLL bg join return to the show to discuss their EP, Both of Everything. We talk about the collaborative process, their workflow, inspirations, and themes of the music. This episode also includes performances of three songs from the album, recorded in studio. You can listen to the EP here.

Follow Nikolai on ⁠IG⁠ @thenikolairiddle and at his ⁠website⁠.

Nikolai Riddle is a born-and-raised Coloradan, writer, poet, and sometimes artist living in Denver. His writing has been described as “diabolical” and often involves things weird, dystopian, and darkly humorous. His work has appeared in Ludicrous Worlds Magazine, Birdy Magazine, and The American Journal of Poetry.

1. Haiku 21
2. Paranoia
3. The Day the Humans Died
4. Postcards
5. The City
6. Elegy for your Strays
7. Hopes for My Ex
8. Curious Child of Death
9. Karma Advance
10. Haiku 777

Local artist and art enthusiast, Jabe Pazoo.

Marissa Forbes (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize nominated author, visual artist, and creative instructor. Her poetry books, Surviving Peter Pan (Beyond the Veil Press) and Brief & Bleeding Margins (World Stage Press) were published in 2023. Other published poems and short fiction stories can be read on marissaforbes.com and @word_nerd_ris. She is the Managing Editor for Twenty Bellows, a CO indie press, the Development Coordinator for Civic Center Conservancy, and teaches poetry for the Denver Chapter of Community Literature Initiative’s 10 month Poetry for Publication program. Marissa was the 2024 Winter Resident with Tiny Spoon, has curated poetry activations with Aurora History Museum and the Center for Colorado Women’s History, coordinated the second annual Creative Colorado Writer’s Retreat held at Mint & Serif in 2024, and was named the 2025 Poet Laureate for 40 West Arts District in Lakewood CO.  Forbes has resided all over the country but now lives a colorful life in Denver with her two children, where she hones her personal mission to amplify art and community in Colorado.

IG @word_nerd_ris

Marissa's Website

40 West Arts District

Twenty Bellows

Bardo is a feral rat that experiences moments of clarity and in that clarity writes pretty decent poems.

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Correction: I said in the episode that this is ep 119. Obviously it is ep 118 (see above).

"What, do you expect me to keep track of my own show?"

Mitch

Cecily Stone is a mother, writer, computer nerd, and author of These Chasms in the Earth.  Her works have appeared in Welcoming The Muse (Twenty Bellows), Poems in Praise of Libraries (World Stage Press), Gypsophila Literary Magazine, Canvas Creative Arts Magazine (Indiana University), Retrograde Review, and on a set of compost liners distributed by Compost Colorado.  Stone shares her stories of motherhood, sacrifice, and rebirth at open mics and on instagram: @cecilystonespeaks.  On the weekends, you can usually find her behind the mic, outdoors climbing rocks, or camping with her husband Michael and their large zoo of children and pets.

cecily-stone.com

worldstagepress.org

Guest host Moses Graytower, of Congress fame, interviews Viviantte aka Dell Allenn and Yasser Govula. They discuss making the art you want to make, finding fulfillment, music, and respecting those who came before you. Check out Viviantte's album Lucy and Moses Graytower's album Congress as well as Dell and Yasser's project gardeniia, an unadulterated publication.

@mosesgraytower @dellallenn @got_b6

…rendering poetry more entertaining to general audiences.

One of Colorado’s best known performance poets, SETH has made a career carving out creative ways of presenting poetry, with attention paid to both craft and performance. An actor and percussionist as well as a poet and fiction writer, SETH has collaborated with countless musicians, poets, actors, dancers and other performance artists for more than 30 years in his never-ending quest to render poetry more entertaining to general audiences.

He was a founding member of the performance poetry troupe Open Rangers (1989- 2000) and member of the critically-acclaimed performance arts trio Jafrika (1993-2004). He currently spearheads Art Compost & the Word Mechanics, an improvisational poetic-musical ensemble appearing every Sunday night at the Mercury Café. Their first CD, Love, Death & Poetry, received Westword’s Best of Denver 2005 for Spoken Word CD. Over the years SETH has won several Best of Westwords for his pioneering efforts to meld spoken word with the other performance art forms.

SETH is author of A Black Odyssey, a poetic memoir which uses Homer’s ancient epic as an allegoric scaffold for his own experiences as a Black poet in contemporary America. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. His satirical novel, The Perfect Stranger, received the Award of Excellence from the Colorado Authors League and first place in literary fiction from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. For more details visit www.wagingart.com.