Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently-asked questions about Gladstone's annual Robbie Burns Memorial Supper & Poetry Slam.

Fair fa ya honest sonsie face, Great Chieftain o’ the pudding race!

Welcome to the internet home of the 15th Annual Robbie Burns Memorial Supper & Poetry Slam. Our once-a-year invitational literary dinner for men will host its fifteenth edition on Saturday, January 30, 2010.

Make plans to join us for an event the Bernardsville News called “an all-out event… a men’s-night-out to share good camaraderie, whiskey and cigars.”

Whether you’re an old hand at this or are attending for the first time, please take a tour of the site and book your seat on the page provided. Seats are limited.

Hope we’ll see you on the 30th!

How long has this been going on?

Formal Burns Night gatherings belong to a 200 year-old literary tradition that is celebrated annually throughout the English-speaking world.

Our local event began with five friends who gathered in a saloon in Gladstone in 1996.

Somebody reckoned that when the barkeep didn’t throw us out, we could probably do it again the next year and invite more guys. Funny how manly logic so often prevails.

There’s been a lot of poetry and some pretty decent single-malt under the bilges since then.

Why was I invited to this thing?

Somebody you know thinks that you’re literate. Entertaining. Maybe even a good sport. They’ve been to this event before and figure you can hold your liquor as well as any of us.

Or maybe they’re counting on tapping you as a “Designated Driver.”

Either way, you’re in good company: we’ve got doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs. Clergymen, publicans, scholars and academics. Bankers, brokers, cops and consultants. And a few other thirsty rascals that defy classification. Salesmen, maybe. Or engineers.

But every last one of them is counting on you to raise the collective IQ a few points. So don’t let us down, eh?

Do I really have to stand up in front of a bunch of guys and read?

Yes. We have just one rule that makes this event work year after year: every man who drinks with us, reads with us. But fear not: whisky emboldens.

Poems are strictly BYO and some guys go to the library weeks ahead of time and give their selections a lot of thought.

Others prefer to leave matters to chance, as it’s a safe bet that somebody will lend you a book when your turn comes around. Note however that lent books are full of archaic Scots’ brogue and leave you few rhyming options for “Nantucket.”

Gut it out, buddy. You’re among friends.

What sorts of poets will I hear?

Mostly dead ones. Although sometimes we get guys who stand up in the dark and say “I wrote this.”

After the Scottish dialect poems of Robert Burns, you’re as likely to hear Longfellow or Kipling or Robert Service. Jim Dickey and Robert Frost. Yeats and Keats, Jake and Elwood Blues. Rarely ever Emily Dickinson.

And it’s a rare event where somebody doesn’t regale us with a bit of limmerick or some barroom doggeral. Reading poetry should hardly qualify a man as an aesthete.

What we find worthy is most anything that has the brilliance of truth and sounds good spoken aloud. Burns would approve, don’t you think?

Why aren’t women invited?

Nobody remembers. We must’ve had a good reason to make this a stag event the first year or two. But why deny the Fair Sex now?

Surely, it isn’t the copious cigar smoke, the barroom badinage, or our single-minded absorption with brown potlikker and forlorn Highland hamlets?

Maybe it’s the skreeling of bagpipes and the happy mayhem of masculine amusement. Is there any woman alive who could make herself heard above such a din? (Present wives excepted, Hon.)

Nah. It’s gotta be the Haggis-breath.