Tips from the Bar: Rumors of the Alpacalypse Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

You have custody of a llama for twenty-four hours. What do you do?

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, November 13: Janae Johnson

Janae Johnson performs at the Emerson Poetry Project. Photo by Evan Walsh of the Berkeley Beacon.

Janae Johnson performs at the Emerson Poetry Project. Photo by Evan Walsh of the Berkeley Beacon.

Janae Johnson is a spoken word performance artist originally from the “mean and preppy suburbs” of Sacramento, California. Shortly after moving to Boston in 2010, she attended her first poetry slam at Lizard Lounge and immediately became addicted to the spoken word scene. As a former collegiate basketball player at Virginia State University, Janae uses poetry slams to fuel her competitive edge; and uses writing to become a more creative, loving, conscious and well-rounded human being.

A two-time slam team member for the Lizard Lounge, she was part of the powerhouse top-20 team from this year’s National Poetry Slam. She is the reigning “Lizard Queen” at the eponymous Lounge (the venue’s top slam title) and she also acts as coach and advisor for the Simmons College Slam Team.

This show in our weekly Wednesday series takes place at the Cantab Lounge, 738 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. Doors for the show open at 7:15. The open mic begins at 8:00 and the feature performs at approximately 10:00. An open slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, November 6, 2013

University of Hell in the house! This past Wednesday, we were proud to welcome National Poetry Slam finalist and outgoing Portland, Oregon SlamMaster Eirean Bradley. A local favorite at this year’s National Poetry Slam, Eirean drew out some of our favorite open mic poets for a really grand night of solid writing, including a spotlight from his pressmate, Leah Noble Davidson. Eirean himself was powerful, polished, touching and sassy; if you missed a chance to buy books from either of them, you can check out the i in team and Poetic Scientifica here.

After the feature, we entered a wild poetry slam, packed with talent! Sure, maybe it’s writing season– or maybe it’s because we’re down to the last eight slams to qualify for 2014 team tryouts. Either way, these poets were serious; the final round came down to a match between open-mic-regular Marisa Glynn, who put up a remarkable and strong showing for her first time slamming, and… Excuse us, but was next week’s feature in the 8-spot? It was! Janae Johnson took the win and the ten dollars.

Next week: if you missed the fun surprise of last week’s slam, you can still catch the winner for a full set. California transplant, Lizard Lounge franchise player, and seriously, folks, kind of a jock; the incomparable Janae Johnson will be our feature this week, plus another open poetry slam.

Tips from the Bar: Get Out! Get Out! Get Out!

Write a dirge/eulogy/Dear John/get-out-of-my-house letter to 2013.

Moonlighting: A Queer Open Mic and Reading Series on Thursday, November 7, 2013

This reading is part of our monthly LGBTQ series, Moonlighting. Click here for more information about this recurring show.

Caroline Harvey, performer, teacher, and poet.

Caroline Harvey, performer, teacher, and poet.

The featured reader for November 7 is Caroline Harvey!

Poet, educator, and activist Caroline Harvey performs and teaches internationally. Caroline was a member and coach of multiple award-winning poetry slam teams, and was featured on Season Five of HBO’s Def Poetry. She has shared stages with Mary Lambert, Melissa Ferrick, Livingston Taylor, Alicia Keys, and Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), among others. She was a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2012, and a nominee for Best New Poets in 2013.

Caroline was featured recently at the US Embassy in Serbia where she performed original work and led workshops about free speech for the first generation of youth to grow up post-Milosevic. Her writing has been published in national and academic literary journals, including the National Poetry Slam Anthology High Desert Voices, Gertrude Press, Radius, The Legendary, and The Lowestoft Chronicle. Her most recent collection, bird wing and bone marrow, is receiving international acclaim.

Her poetry is equal parts folk & punk, sacred & irreverent, and it tracks her belief that every moment is an extraordinary opportunity for healing, beauty, and illumination. When not touring, Caroline lives in Boston and is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music.

This show in our monthly Thursday LGBTQ series takes place at Fazenda Coffee Roasters, 3710 Washington St. in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston. An open mic begins at approximately 7:00 p.m. and the headliner follows the open mic. The show is all-ages and a $3 donation is requested.

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, November 6: Eirean Bradley

Eirean Bradley, Denver transplant and outgoing Portland (Oregon) SlamMaster.

Eirean Bradley, Denver transplant and outgoing Portland (Oregon) SlamMaster.

Eirean Bradley is an eight-time National Poetry Slam competitor who believes that poetry should be done like everything else: loudly and unapologetically! As such, he has performed his poetry in all of the lower forty-eight states and initiated the famous crowd-response head-to-head poetry slams in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of two full length books of poetry: the I in team and the little big book of go kill yourself on University of Hell Press.

University of Hell poet Leah Noble Davidson. Photo by Phillip Stewart.

University of Hell poet Leah Noble Davidson. Photo by Phillip Stewart.

Tonight’s show will also feature a spotlight open mic appearance from another Eirean’s pressmate, Leah Noble Davidson. Trained originally as a storyteller, Leah has been writing and performing poetry for well over a decade. Her debut book, Poetic Scientifica is “at once urgent and gorgeous and brutal.”

This show in our weekly Wednesday series takes place at the Cantab Lounge, 738 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. Doors for the show open at 7:15. The open mic begins at 8:00 and the feature performs at approximately 10:00. An open slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, October 30

This past Wednesday, the whole Cantab– both floors– paid a sweet tribute to a heartily missed regular, the late Jack McCarthy. Upstairs, the blues jam took a back seat to the Red Sox’s first home-field World Series game 6 since 1918; downstairs, after a thoughtful open mic, four teams took the stage for a slam battle royale, armed only with a selection of Jack’s poems. Had Jack been there, we know he would have been checking in on both shows as politely and enthusiastically as possible.

The slam kicked off with a lengthy, snarky sacrifice from Sean Patrick Mulroy, covering Jack’s “Sour Grapes”, after which Mark Palos, SlamMaster of New Hampshire’s Slam Free or Die, led off the first round with “Song of the Open Mic” to represent Team Drop the Chalupa. Christopher Clauss of Team Nightmare on Mass Ave. followed with “Annals of Science,” a somewhat more risque poem with a performance tic that got the audience really giggling. After that, it’s hard to pick out just a few highlights in this all-all-star slam, but we can try: consider Kevin Spak slamming for Team I’ll Come Back as a Hawk, entering the home stretch of “Walk of Life” just as the sixth inning finished up upstairs; or Marshall Gillson (of the same team) laying down “Victory” as the band fired up “Sweet Caroline” upstairs, only to be followed by Caroline Harvey herself with a hopeful rendition of “Merton” for Team Drop the Chalupa; or Tom Slavin, the champion of it all, batting clean-up for Team Catholics & Car Thieves and bringing the slam home with a flawless performance of “Great Catches” to raucous applause both up and downstairs.

At the end of the night, the top slammers came from Team I’ll Come Back as a Hawk: the aforementioned Kevin Spak and Marshall Gillson, joined by newcomer Alison Truj and one of Jack’s most famous contemporaries, Brian Comiskey. A respectable almost-win goes to Team Nightmare on Mass Ave., captained by the famed Richard Cambridge and rounded out with Christopher Clauss, Cassandra Euphrat Weston, and Kemi Alabi. The Catholics & Car Thieves banded together to make third place with Sue Savoy, Kieran Collier, Mckendy Fils-Aimé, and Tom Slavin, and Team Drop the Chalupa earns the top pick in next year’s slam draft with a fourth place finish, certainly not due to any lack of heroics on the part of Sophia Holtz, Sam Teitel, Mark Palos, and Caroline Harvey.

Thanks so much to all our slammers who worked so hard to bring Jack’s work to life… Especially those who sacrificed their baseball-watching plans to make our historic show. We like to think Jack wasn’t there only because he was watching the game from his own easy chair.

Next week: we’re in for a wild ride with feature Eirean Bradley from Portland, Oregon! He’ll be joined by his tour partner and spotlight feature, Leah Noble Davidson, and we’ll close the night with an open poetry slam in the 8×8 series, the last series before we select our team for 2014. See you there!

Tips from the Bar: The Jack McCarthy Prompt

Listen up: write down your favorite lines from the open mic. Pick one that inspires and use it to prompt your own new poem. Don’t forget to credit the author!

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, October 30: Jack McCarthy Memorial Slam

This night is an installment in the Boston Poetry Slam’s “Sober October,” a month-long series of shows and readers selected to celebrate the sober and recovering artists in our scene.

The late Jack McCarthy performing at his last Cantab feature on June 15, 2011. Photo by Richard Beaubien.

The late Jack McCarthy performing at his last Cantab feature on June 15, 2011. Photo by Richard Beaubien.

“For me, the live audience is really the only audience I ever think about… When I put something down on paper and publish it, my highest hope is that someone somewhere will pick it up and read it to a third party. My sense of audience does not stop with the person who reads the poem. I hope the poem goes on to another life.” –Jack McCarthy, speaking to the Boston Globe, December, 2012

The Dead Poets’ Slam, a show dedicated to performing the works of long-gone artists, traditionally falls on the Wednesday closest to Halloween. This year, we will move the apostrophe back in order to honor just one: a friend of the Cantab lost in the past year. Please mark your calendars for the first-ever Jack McCarthy Memorial Slam.

All-star performers from the New England scene will perform work from the late, great, and much-missed Jack McCarthy, and they will be scored by a selection of judges, resulting in a landslide win for, well, everyone. Folks familiar with Jack’s work can expect very few of the standbys; Jack wrote thousands of open mic poems over years of performance and some still-hidden gems will have a chance to shine tonight. If you’ve never heard Jack, then this is your best chance to enjoy his work as it was meant to be: live on stage, and delivered with love.

Confirmed performers:
TEAM 1: Tom Slavin, Kieran Collier, Mckendy Fils-Aime, Sue Savoy
TEAM 2: Brian Comiskey, Marshall Gillson, Allison Truj, Kevin Spak
TEAM 3: Richard Cambridge, Kemi Alabi, Cassandra Euphrat Weston, Christopher Clauss
TEAM 4: Mark Palos, Caroline Harvey, Sophia Holtz, Sam Teitel
Sacrifice: Sean Patrick Mulroy

Open mic poets are also welcome to cover Jack at the show. However, we ask that you time your performance (Jack didn’t always stay under 3 minutes on the open, but you still have to!), and that you consider consulting with the SlamMaster to make sure the poem you have selected isn’t already scheduled for the slam.

To learn more about Jack, see his Wikipedia page, local obituary, or the website maintained by his family.

This show in our weekly Wednesday series takes place at the Cantab Lounge, 738 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. Doors for the show open at 7:15. The open mic begins at 8:00 and the featured slam begins at approximately 10:00. An open slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, October 23

Last night, Omaha poet Andrew Ek knocked it out of the park at the Cantab. If you missed his series of perceptive, poignant, and scientific stories, you may be out of luck: this was his one and only show on his trip to New England! He’ll be in Manchester on the open mic tonight, but if you want to order one of his sold-out chapbooks, you can contact him through his blog.

After Andrew’s feature, we rolled right into a crazy-all-star Champion of Champions Slam! It was a full line-up waiting to challenge returning champ Tom Slavin, including Bobby Crawford, Marshall Gillson, Meaghan Ford, Melissa Newman-Evans, Mckendy Fils-Aimé, Sophia Holtz, Ed Wilkinson, and Kieran Collier… With more than a few not-so-secret grudge matches in that mix. Marshall and Ed rose to the top of the big eight, with Marshall taking the season championship! His triumph was short-lived, however, when despite a great new-poem effort in the title round, Tom Slavin dispatched him on a unanimous decision. Tom retains the title until his next match in January of 2014: in the meantime, we’ll start up a new 8×8 series, the last before our team selection slams for next year.

Next week: we’ll close out our Sober October with our very favorite sober artist… It’s the first-ever Jack McCarthy Memorial Slam. Some of our favorite locals will be slamming Jack’s work in this show, including Brian Comiskey, Richard Cambridge, Kemi Alabi, Mark Palos, Cassandra Euphrat Weston, Alison Truj, Sue Savoy, Kevin Spak, and our recently re-crowned champ, Tom Slavin himself.