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Open Mic Highlights
01/21/26
• Tyrone’s short and wild ode to flying toilet paper that took a lot of detours within one minuted
• Apologies to Artemis if this does not describe their poem appropriately, but I have written down “gay sex set to the sound of protests” in my notes about their work
• Lyn’s love letter to Voyager I, and anti-love letter to large language models (“You got out just in time, Voyager”)
• Isaiah’s written-during-the-open-mic poem about the three wolves inside you: the f**k wolf, the marry wolf, and the kill wolf.
• “I confuse time for pain” – Aparna
• Shenanigans arose when the name “Enigma” was called up to the open mic and mysteriously didn’t show up….until 5 or 6 poets later when they suddenly appeared to read! A very apt moniker.
01/28/26
• River’s nostalgia filled poem about swimming in their home lake, and how they trained to swim all seven miles of it
• “I have been replaced by the harmony of dawn” – Charlie R
• First timer Rachael C’s excellent Tea Party poem, which breathed new life and fresh ideas into a popular consent metaphor
• Edie’s response to the ICE shootings in Minneapolis (“Fascist stormtroopers” / “Carnage is our bigest domestic product”) and Kaitie D’s “Home is where the bodies are buried”
• First timer Jimmy’s “Having a snow with you” that made living somewhere with a horrible windchill sound practically romantic
• Bobby Crawfrod’s “The New Me” – “There were parts of me that died before but this was the first time I had to kill it myself”
• Myles’ “Scrolling through 224 video squares during the ICE information aoom call”
• I don’t usually comment on what I (Michael F Gill) do on the open mic, but this week I spoke in remembrance of Ron Goba, the original BPS doorperson, who died this past at the age of 89. We will be having a Ron Goba tribute night this coming April!
Feature
On January 21st, we had a feature from Ally Ang! It was a sort of homecoming in that Ally read their first poem on stage at the Cantab many years ago. Ally read us a ton of poems with very little banter slow them down, so we got to hear work from both new and old manuscripts. Highlights include “A vegetarian goes to H Mart (to finger meats)”, “More Americans think they’ve seen a ghost than a trans person”, and a couple of amazing litanies (one where each line begun with “Trans day of ______”). There was also new work that skillfully tied in those annoying “Click here to verify you are human” CAPTCHAS with the idea of feeling noticed and seen in the world. Thank you Ally!
This past Wednesday on January 28th we had an open poetry slam! It was a shorter 6 person affair, but that didn’t stop our finalists Edie and Amy from delivering incredible and polished work! Shoutout to Durane West for kicking off a section of poems revolving around Boston history and lore, as Will S and Edie followed up with Boston poems of their own. At the end of the night, Amy was the winner and took home $75. There’s only one open slam left before our big 2026 team selection slams!
Coming Up This Wednesday
This week we have a feature from local and Cantab/BPS favorite JR Mahung and an early bird workshop by Stevie Subrizi! Workshop at 6:30, doors at 7:15, show starts at 8:00, and feature goes on at 10.
JR Mahung (She/They) is a Garifuna poet from Chicago. She now lives in Boston, MA with her cat, Frank Ocean.
Stevie Subrizi’s “One Prolonged Un-Understanding” workshop info:
What separates prose poems from micro-fiction, flash memoir, and other shortform literary prose? For that matter, what—besides a lack of line breaks—separates them from other poems? Here’s one answer: perhaps, to quote Dean Young’s poem “Lives of the Mind” on the topic of art itself, a prose poem is uniquely suited to serve as “one prolonged un-understanding / just as dawn is day’s un-understanding of the night.” From news articles to work emails, product descriptions to history books, prose delivers so much of our “understood” reality. Looking at prose poems by Victoria Chang, Eve Ewing, and Zachary Schomburg, we will un-understand our real-life subjects by pulling them into the dreamlike realm of poem-logic while using the familiar frame of the workaday paragraph, forming a mirror-universe portrait that can reveal more about our world than may be seen through a literal, realist lens.
See you soon!
– MFG 🚪
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