Cantab Workshop for Wednesday, March 14, 2018 with C. Bain

Join C. Bain, 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.

Workshop description from the artist, with more available at the poet’s website:

How do we use myths while the truth is fracturing? The glory and the terror of our time is that systems of meaning-making which used to work have stopped functioning. What do we have now in place of myths? What stories do we agree on and live our lives by? In this workshop we explore how myths bridge us from the personal into the social and spiritual. We will enjoy the trove of images mythology makes available to us, and pull those tools into our contemporary landscape. This is a generative writing workshop and all are welcome.

Cover charge is $5-$20 sliding scale, which includes admission to the evening show. Note that this is an excellent bargain for workshop with this leader, so 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. The best way to guarantee 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 C. Bain, click here.

Announcing the Fourth Annual Grudge Match Poetry Slam!

Thursday, March 29, 2018: come to OBERON at 2 Arrow Street in Cambridge to spring into National Poetry Month! Let our all-star lineup of seven matches (plus one bonus sacrifice round) from House Slam and the Boston Poetry Slam spring you into National Poetry Month just a few days early.

This is an 18+ show with custom cocktails available when doors open at 6:30. Music and comedy will open the show at 7:00 with the slam beginning at 7:30. Tickets are $10/$12/$15 and will sell out before the night of the show, so click here to guarantee yourself a seat!

For more detailed info on our performing artists, click here.

CANCELLED: Cantab Feature for Wednesday, March 7, 2018: CUPSI Warm-Up

Poetry fans and hardy New Englanders! We regret to announce that due to weather concerns, there will be NO POETRY SHOW on Wednesday, March 7, 2018, at the Cantab Lounge. Although the forecast may not be reliable, we cannot justify asking our many out-of-towners to risk traveling for this slam.

The Cantab Lounge upstairs bar (21+, cash only) will remain open this evening, although no entertainment is scheduled.

Please join us next Wednesday, March 14, for an early-bird workshop and feature with C. Bain!

The annual collegiate national poetry slam tournament is the driving performative force behind a large number of the Cantab’s regular readers and listeners. This year, our local students (and some local familiar coaches as well) will be headed to Temple University for the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational. To help our town favorites gear up for the national competition, we’ll be offering the CUPSI Warm-Up, a team slam featuring four teams in a nationals-style team slam, incorporating all the collegiate regulations, poetry, and intensity of competition we’ve come to expect from CUPSI.

This year’s event will feature Emerson College, Wheelock College, Wellesley College, Smith College, and sacrificial poems from UMass Boston! It’s (just some of) the future of slam, folks: bring your fight songs, flags, and/or tough, objective judging faces to help these poets prepare for their national tournament in April.

Host Kieran Collier performs in the Team Selection Slams. Photo by Marshall Goff.

Host Kieran Collier performs in the Team Selection Slams. Photo by Marshall Goff.

Our host for the slam, by the way, will be familiar Cantab host Kieran Collier, a Boston-based writer and educator. He is the author of When the Gardener Has Left (Wilde Press, 2015) and This to You (Beard Poetry, 2016). His work has been featured in the anthologies MultiVerse: A Write Bloody Superhero Anthology and Again I Wait for This to Pull Apart, as well as multiple online and print journals. The only four-time CUPSI member of Emerson College’s existence, Kieran is uniquely qualified to heckle, cheer, and introduce all of the competing poets. If you look closely, you might catch him weeping into a Shirley Temple intermittently throughout the night.

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 $3.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Hot diggity dang! What a fabulous ending to Black History Month 2018, Cantabbers: our open mic was packed with good thinkers (and just a little sweet sweet love) to close out a truly excellent February. And then our feature, D. Colin, was everything we’d dreamed; she brought a carefully crafted, pull-no-punches set showing off all her poetic chops for the Women of the World Poetry Slam she’ll be competing at in just a few weeks.

Yes, yes, we, too, were super-sad that D was out of books to sell us last night. But listen: you can support the heckoutta a Black womxn’s art by checking out Empress Bohemia, D. Colin’s Etsy shop of her handcrafted, Afrocentric-inspired jewelry, paintings, and photos. (Oh, and, yes, if you want a copy of D’s book, Dreaming in Kreyol is available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.)

Our slam, by the way, was also full of sweet thinkers and good lovers (wait, is that the same or possibly better than the open mic?); the final pairing came down to Mugs Myers vs. Liv Mckee, with a squeaky-tight 0.3 margin in the final 1-minute round. Out-of-towner (and August 2017 feature) Liv took the win and the $10 home, leaving Mugs free to slam another day. And, cool news: that means that if you want to support two poets from upstate NY who made our show awesome last night, you can drop your cash on the YouCaring page for Liv and D’s tandem trip to WOWPS this month.

Next Wednesday: GET READY FOR A HOTT NIGHT FULLA NERVOUS CUPSI POETZ, KIDS! That’s right, it’s our annual CUPSI Warm-Up, the shake-the-dust slam we offer to our locals who are collegiate-nationals bound. Come for one of the most intense open mics of the season, and stay to judge some much-in-need-of-judging slam students from Emerson College, Wheelock College, Wellesley College, Smith College, and Tufts University! Yes, we are 18+, so bring your friends, buy a soda, tip your bartender and get some poetry in your ears in the dirtiest bar in Cambridge.

Tips from the Bar: BotWho?

Write a poem using the Botnik keyboard of your choice.

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, February 28, 2018: D. Colin

Albany area poet D. Colin. Photo by Robert Cooper.

Albany area poet D. Colin. Photo by Robert Cooper.

D. Colin is a Capital City region poet and a member of the 2012 first ever Nitty Gritty Albany slam team, representing the venue at the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2016 and 2017: she is currently ranked 35th in the world. She holds a Masters in Africana Studies from the University at Albany, was a 2016 poet in residence for Voices of Community in Putney and Brattleboro, VT., and a Breathing Lights Grant recipient. D’s first collection of poems and prose is entitled Dreaming in Kreyol and is an homage to her Haitian heritage and history. She also handcrafts jewelry and paints; check out all the artist’s work at dcolin.com.

Note that tonight’s open poetry slam is a speed slam with 3-, 2-, and 1-minute rounds. Slam winners qualify for the 2018 World Qualifier.

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 speed slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Cantabbers! Thanks to each and every one of you for coming out to the basement last night for SPRING BREAK 2018 Team Selection Semi-Finals! After a roller coaster of a slam, with much of our audience casting some high-quality side-eye at a few judges, we have results. It took two rounds to get the standings to shake out like so:

1. Brandon Melendez 57.9
2. Neiel Israel 57.6
3. Allison Truj 56.4
4. RebeccaLynn 56
5. John Pinkham 55.9
6. Evan Cutts 55.8
7. George Abraham 55.7
8. Meaghan Ford 55.5
9. Sara Mae 55.3
10. Myles Taylor
11. Kieran Collier
12. Anna Binkovitz

Our top nine poets (in bold) have qualified to advance to the March 21 three-round Finals (should they choose to accept the challenge). Extra thanks to Lip McDonald and Colin Killick for fabulous sacrificial poems, to our five judges (Fernando, April, Sean, Benji & Megan, and Shreya) for standing strong on their scores all night long, and to meticulous Ravenclaw Cassandra for spot-on scorekeeping.

Next week: we close out Black History Month strong with one of the Capital Region’s best, as D. Colin takes the stage for a feature set. We’ll also welcome up to eight slammers in our second open speed slam in the series, which includes rounds for 3-, 2-, and 1-minute poems.

Tips from the Bar: Freddy Krueger Works in HR

Consider a work-related nightmare (the waking or dreaming kind). Revise it to fit your own needs.

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, February 21, 2018: Team Selection Semi-Finals

The Cantab’s Team Selection Slams are the venue’s biggest, wildest poetry slams of the year. This February, we continue our selection process with the second round of three, the Team Selection Semi-Finals. With two poems behind them and five to go, competing poets are likely to be reaching deep into their pockets on this particular night, or even trying out untested work in hope of saving some major ammunition for the upcoming three-poem Finals… Making Semi-Finals just possibly the most interesting night of the selection series.

Competing poets from this night have be drawn from Heat One and Heat Two of the Team Selection Preliminaries. Poets will each perform two poems, with the first round kicking off in this order:
1. Evan Cutts
2. Myles Taylor
3. Sara Mae
4. Meaghan Ford
5. Allison Truj
6. RebeccaLynn
7. Kieran Collier
8. Anna Binkovitz
9. John Pinkham
10. George Abraham
11. Neiel Israel
12. Brandon Melendez
sacrifices: Lip McDonald, Colin Killick

The top nine poets at the end of the night will advance to our March 21 Finals show; after that, the top five poets comprising the venue’s National Poetry Slam Team. The 2018 Boston Poetry Slam Team will travel to the National Poetry Slam in Chicago, Illinois.

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. A SHORTENED open mic begins at 8:00 and the slam begins at approximately 9:15. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $5; proceeds will go toward funding the team’s travel to the National Poetry Slam this August.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Happy day after Valentine’s, poets! Congratulations on closing the books on yet another February 14; we had a glorious No Romance open mic at the Cantab, during which hardly any overtures were attempted and the bingo cards cards created by Cassandra de Alba (with the assist from Michael F. Gill) made fabulous conversation pieces. Truly heartfelt thanks go to all the poets on the open mic who thought so hard about space-making and -taking before speaking, and to everyone contributing to a gloriously romance-free zone for one of the most fraught nights of the calendar year!

Of course, as much as we’d like to thank our bingo theme for the excellent turnout last night, we know the concentrated joy in the space was all about Ariana Brown, CUPSI champ and MFA candidate who dug deep into the vulnerability of learning to love herself in America; our utmost thanks to Ariana for bringing her strength and craft to bear as we continue our Black History Month celebration.

Next week: our slam series advances to semi-finals! Twelve qualified poets from the two preliminary heats will go two rounds each to see who will move on to the finals for the 2018 Boston Poetry Slam Team. Come see Brandon Melendez, Neiel Israel, George Abraham, John Pinkham, Anna Binkovitz, Kieran Collier, RebeccaLynn, Allison Truj, Meaghan Ford, Sara Mae, Myles Taylor, and Evan Cutts slam for the top nine spots! Bring along your most judgemental friend and a sawbuck, because it’ll be a $5 cover that night to help raise money to send the team to Nationals in August.