‘You can tell me to sod off if you like, but our guest poet’s from Northumberland and it’s a long way to come to read in this noise. I’ve no right to ask you to move, you’ve come for a drink and you want to enjoy it, but, could you move a little further down?’

Bad choice of days: a monthly Friday night in a pub under London Bridge. They would smile and reluctantly move. Well, generally.

I was tired of doing this, the poets, the non-reading audience looking at me with weary déjà vu as more customers came in, more drinks, more noise. It was the third venue in five years. I needed a new one. The first had been in Borough Market, a second floor room in a Georgian house above a shop - you could look through a twelve-paned box sash at the railway bridge less than ten yards away, the building vibrating as trains crossed - with the smell of grilling sausages filling the room from Posh Bangers below. Although we had, as an American visitor put it, ’the classiest lectern in town,’ the fumes had got thicker than the camaraderie, the congregation sparser and it became too uncomfortable.

After three years or so we went across the road to the Kings Head and a large, badly lit lincrusta’d room with a pool table at one end and unmanned bar at the other with a relentlessly whining air conditioner above it.

It had begun almost accidentally with me wandering into a Charing Cross Road bookshop where there was a reading going on with open mike spots run by a Ghanaian poet. One evening, a few weeks later, he didn’t show up. There were a dozen or so people waiting so I offered to take over. This I did for two months till the bookshop changed hands and there was no more poetry - at least, spoken. Somewhat hypocritically I believed that, like Victorian children, poets should be seen and not heard, reading aloud being merely an audio version of the real thing: that singular, elemental contact between reader, writer and the written word. Certainly double standards, as I listened to poets and would-be ones - wondering what the collective noun for poets was, someone once suggesting a ‘malice’ - at least once every four weeks, listened to the posturing indulgence of rap poets ruining rhythm, murdering melody, the post-modern poets with their pseudo-original stream of disconnected, inanimate objects, going nowhere and saying nothing; and neo-surrealist poetry whose only frame of reference was itself. We don’t know what we have to presuppose to settle an aesthetic matter, but craftsmanship, clarity, and a hoped-for originality are the criteria for me, and I wanted this place to be for genuine poets, both established and those at the beginning of a love affair with poetry.

So, here we are at my fourth place; a Victorian coffee shop off Brick Lane with no name on the fascia and, inside, sacks of coffee from around the world: I’d found it while wandering around the City and said to the girl behind a counter supported at one corner by part of an old Anderson shelter, that it would make a nice place for poetry. She had attractively unkempt hair, hot pants, tights, a wide smile and, handing me a cup of Venezuelan coffee, told me the owner, her uncle Antonio, was a poet.

This was in January last year, we started a month later. People can have the ground coffee beans of their choice, there’s wine and there’s Antonio, the laid back owner. We have had 40 people, but average between 25 and 30.

And there’s always Sophia…

Ken Champion runs MORE POETRY at The Coffee Shop 13 Leyden Street, London E1 7LE. We now have hundreds of event organisers using this website, and would be delighted to hear more organisers' stories, comments or thoughts about any aspect of organising live poetry, or whatever we should be calling it. Send yours to julian@writeoutloud.net.