There’s no poetry at the Cantab tonight, folks! Enjoy a summertime night off and come see us with your new work at our next show on July 11, 2018.
Please see our upcoming shows page for the schedule:
http://bostonpoetryslam.com/see-a-show/weekly-show/upcoming-features-and-slams
It’s full-on summertime, folks, which can only mean one thing in the slam world: local teams are ramping up to the National Poetry Slam! Tonight will mark the first of two Nationals-style 4×4 team slams, meaning that we’ll welcome four Nationals-bound slam teams to our virtual cage match for a four-round slam. Get your boxing gloves and whiteboards ready, because this is gonna be a hot one: Providence Poetry Slam vs. Northampton Poetry Slam vs. House Slam vs. your very own home team!
This show will have a slightly shortened open mic and will sell out quickly, so we advise arriving for door time at 7:15 to catch a seat… Otherwise, you’ll be waiting until July 18 for the summer’s only other team slam. Cover charge is $5 to help raise funds for our team to travel to Nationals in Chicago this August!
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 slam begins at approximately 10:00. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $5.
So if you’ve been missing longtime Cantab co-host Sean Patrick Mulroy, last night was your night at the show: Sean was back in town on a brief foray from his Kerouac residency, bringing us a classic feature that was equal parts elegantly sad and elegantly crafted. Our slam was a three-poet round-robin, swept confidently by a late-arriving-but-highly-prepared Evan Cutts, with no hard feelings from co-host and curator Cassandra de Alba or thoughtful newcomer James. Let’s hope the big ten-dollar slam prize is enough to get Evan thinking about a return for our Champion of Champions Slam this August!
Oh, and speaking of slam: we’ve got a great big bunch of it lined up for you next week, when poets from House (YUP), Northampton (YUP YUP) and Providence (YUP YUP YUP) come out to strut their stuff in a four-team match with your very own home team. Come enjoy a full-length Nationals-style 4×4 team poetry slam for the lowlow fundraising price of $5; we’re betting tonight’s matchup of widely acclaimed teams is gonna give any top NPS match a run for the money, and no doubt will stock your brain with linguistic fireworks to set off in your own writing sessions for weeks to come.
Sometimes a new environment, experience, or writing tool can change your work.
For your next sit-down writing session, try a simple change to your medium: if you usually write on your computer, try using paper and pen, or, if you are a devout hand-writer, try typing a poem instead. If you aren’t stuck on either, try something else new: use graph paper or blank paper, turn the paper sideways, borrow a typewriter, speak the poem into your phone’s voice memos, etc.
Lambda Literary Fellow Sean Patrick Mulroy. Photo by Lawrence Jaime.
With a diverse professional background in both spoken word and literary studies, Sean Patrick Mulroy is a nationally recognized performer and an award winning professor. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow, a 2017 Kurt Brown Prize Winner, and 2017-2018 Writer-in-Residence at The Kerouac Project.
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 poetry slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.
Pretty sweet, Cantabbers: if you made it out to catch Sara Brickman’s workshop last night, you got almost ninety minutes of fresh ideas and two new poems to show for it! Sara was kind enough to let us share one of the workshop’s two-part prompts as a Tip from the Bar, but if you’re still lamenting that you missed the workshop, put our Lyd Havens event on July 11 on your calendar right now.
Sara Brickman, by the way, rocked our mic as beautifully as expected last night, from finals-stage-level performance to MFA-polished craft and, of course, the sweetsweet combination of the two we are always seeking. Our slam worked out to be a glorious pride-month showdown, with Myles Taylor taking top honors over Lip McDonald in the final round.
Next week: we welcome one-time Cantab co-host and Lambda fellow Sean Patrick Mulroy. And for those gunning for early qualification for the 2019 slam team? Yep, we’ve got an open 8×8 just for you.
Join Sara Brickman, the night’s scheduled feature, for an early-bird workshop at the Cantab Lounge before the show. The one-hour generative workshop has limited space and begins at 5:30, with latecomers admitted no later than 6:00.
The workshop is called “Dreaming Through Nightmare,” and the workshop leader offers the following workshop description:
“What makes some experiences hard to talk about? Why are the poems we most need to write often the most difficult to produce? Where does catharsis overlap with art making or diverge from it? How can we reinvent the topic we can’t get away from? How can shame, fear, and toxic memories go from blocks in the writing process to building blocks for a new poem? Within the logic of dreams and nightmares, we are able to do things we could not do in our waking lives: to confront the dead, overcome impossible obstacles, transform our bodies, and see our most terrifying moments as our unconscious perceives them. In this generative workshop we will learn how to construct and use dream imagery to write about trauma(s) and find new routes for saying the unsayable. You’ll leave with the start of two new poems, and new tools for image making you can apply to any poem.”
Cover charge is $5-$20 sliding scale, which includes admission to the evening show. We ask financially stable poets to consider contributing the higher end of this scale (or more) in order to defer costs for others and support the artist’s donation of time to our space.
Due to the constraints of the venue, this workshop has limited space; room can be guaranteed to poets who identify as POC or queer. The best way to secure a spot in the workshop is to directly email the SlamMaster.
The venue is 18+ and a photo ID is required. For more information on the night’s open mic, slam, and feature from Sara, click here.
Split This Rock poetry contest winner Sara Brickman. Photo by Sam Smith.
Sara Brickman is an author, performer, and community organizer from Ann Arbor, MI. A 2015 Lambda Literary Fellow, Sara was named the winner of the Split This Rock Poetry Contest by Natalie Diaz. She is the recipient of a grant from 4Culture, A BOAAT Fellowship, the Ken Warfel Fellowship for Poetry in Community, a TENT Writers Fellowship, and is a member of the Bread Loaf and TILL Writers Convergence communities. Her work appears in Indiana Review, Muzzle, Shift, The New, and the anthology Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. A nationally recognized performer, Sara has been featured on Button Poetry and collaborated with musicians Mary Lambert and Hollis Wong-Wear. As an educator, she has taught at universities, high schools, needle-exchanges, and community organizing projects nationwide. Sara lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she is currently a Henry Hoyns Fellow and MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Virginia.
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 poetry slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.
HOLY WOW, CANTABBERS!!11!1!! We are still recovering from a truly awesome slam this past Wednesday, when eight poets took the stage for a four-round slamstravaganza to determine the one and only Boston Poetry Slam rep to the 2018 Individual World Poetry Slam. At the end of the night, only one poet was left standing, and a beautifully supportive packed room was there to see it. Ready for the rankings? (You’re not ready:)
1. JR Mahung
2. José Zepeda
3. RebeccaLynn
4. Neiel Israel
5. Myles Taylor
6. Sam Zilli
7. Lip McDonald
8. Cassandra de Alba
Congratulations to JR, who will represent us at the indy tournament this October! And, please, a huge round of applause for all the competitors, who, to a poet, left their heart and soul on our little stage.
This week: we’ve got glorious goodness ahead of us on Wednesday, folks. Do you need to write a poem this week? Look no further than Sara Brickman’s early-bird workshop; this award-winning poet and smart-as-a-whip workshop leader will help you generate something new. Can’t make it for our 5:30ish workshop start time? No worries: our regular-length open mic will start at 8:00 p.m. as usual, with Sara taking the stage for a full feature set around 10:00, and an open slam in our 8×8 series to close the night.
Boston Poetry Slam Online