Word of Mouth Productions will be providing a forum for young poets’ dreams tonight in the Maintenance Shop with a Canadian Cocktail Fiesta.

“The cocktails are fiction,” said Gunnar Benediktsson, master of ceremonies for the evening. “We actually aren’t serving cocktails besides what the M-Shop serves.”

What they are serving is the original literature of all genres by volunteers. “We enjoy poetry; we enjoy music productions, just about anything,” said Benediktsson, graduate student in English.

Word of Mouth Productions, formerly Word Up, is the spoken word division of The Writers’ Bloc, a campus writer’s group.

Word of Mouth tries to have an open poetry night once a month, and Benediktsson said this month’s presentation will have a Canadian theme in honor of Canadian Remembrance Day, which is today.

Benediktsson, a native Canadian, said Canadian Remembrance Day honors the Canadian men and women who have died in combat.

As master of ceremonies, Benediktsson said he will be introducing the performers and reflecting on Canadian Remembrance Day.

“I’ll be trying to make it as fun as I can because we all know that Canadians are fun people,” he said.

Paul Cockeram, treasurer of The Writers’ Bloc, said this sort of spoken word performance taps into a history of story telling that goes back centuries.

Cockeram, graduate student in English, said if more non-English majors attended events such as the Canadian Cocktail Fiesta, it would reinforce the fact that everyone is an artist in his or her own way.

“I would emphasize that the people who don’t normally attend these kind of things to go out to it and give it a try,” he said. “They might find that they like it.”

Aimee Brown, secretary of The Writers’ Bloc, said she hopes people will get a better appreciation of literature from attending tonight’s event.

“They will see that it is something that centers around oralness and physicalness and things that are not normally associated with literature,” said Brown, graduate student in English.

Brown said there will be music as well as spoken literature.

For more information, The Writers’ Bloc Web page is located at www.stuorg.iastate.edu/bloc.

The Word of Mouth Productions’ Canadian Cocktail fiesta will start at 9 tonight in the M-Shop. Those wishing to share their work should come 30 minutes early to sign up for a time slot.