Cantab Recap For Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024

Hi Cantab! Last Wednesday was another great night with a lot of highlights to report on! Shout out to our first-timers Flora, Casey, and especially Matt, who read two poems about that same person, but written ten years apart from each other. We had showstopping work from Erica Garcia and Jack Chasse, mournful work from Brynna (re: Marcellus Williams) and Cam S (“I sweep and I sweep and the face still reappears”), and a great piece from Isaiah that was simultaneously about not wasting your vote, sending audition videos to the show Survivor as a means of survival, and how “the heart is survived by its own betrayals”.

It was also a night of notable cover poems: Cameron V did Daniel Ortberg’s “Male Novelist Jokes“, Ed Wilkinson covered Omoizele “Oz” Okoawo’s classic piece “The Beast:1944“, and Myles Taylor covered Cantab alum Jess Riz. All of this plus we had our last chance haiku slam, which featured stunningly sensual work from Arielle Gray, and surprisingly-hilarious haiku by Cam S, who took the big win!

A final note: the smoking section also featured longtime Cantab bartender Chris reading a farewell poem to the room. Chris has always been one of the biggest supporters of the Boston Poetry Slam for over a decade, and he will be greatly missed!

Our feature was the great Ayokunle Falomo, who came straight-off-the-plane to read for us. He read from his two books, “Autobiomythography of” and “AFRICANAMERICAN’T”, and his set perfectly mashed up performance and page poetry. His work intensely interrogated what it is not only to be a Nigerian and a Nigerian-American, but what it is to be a human who truly knows who they are, and what the next phase of one’s life journey should be after realizing that. He ended with a poem based on Frida Kahlo’s “Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” that got a standing ovation! Thank you Ayokunle!

Tonight: it’s our second annual HAIKU TOURNAMENT, featuring a year’s worth of past haiku slam winners and runners up! There will be a haiku suite round, a themed round involving dirty and experimental haiku, as well as a head-to-head final round! The winner gets $170 (!), the runner up gets $30, and both finalists will be invited to our 2025 Team Selection Slam. You don’t want to miss it!

– MFG 🚪

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