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Open Mic Highlights
• In honor of our tribute to Ron Goba (the first doortender of the Boston Poetry Slam), the room was filled with many poets from BPS’ past, with some readers taking the stage again for the first time in decades!
• Tim Gager’s short poem featuring Jess as the voice in his head, John H setting the context for a poem Ron published in 1974 (!), Ed G’s anti-Nixon / schoolyard bullies poem, and former Cantab feature Mala Radhakrishna reprising her rhyming chemistry poem involving James Bond (check out their book for more!)
• Phoenix’s “I’ve consumed too much brain rot / Is AI slop brain rot?”
• John Lee’s amazing poem about how belonging is like an empty chair waiting for you, and how your relationship to the world unfolds through this lens
• Will Leonard’s “This is My Loverboy Poem” (“Can you lick it clean?”) and Winston’s poem explaining how everything they do exists in a portfolio online that contains a signed PDF that proves that they deserve to live in their house
• March’s experimental “Questions” poem that had many members of the audience gasping in surprise after each line, and Aparna’s new piece where The Boston Harbor speaks about the great molasses flood in the North End
• Before the open mic, there was also an early-bird workshop by Myles McDonough, which focused on the theme of Improv for Poets!
Feature
We had a memorial reading for Ron Goba this week, the first doortender of the Cantab Lounge from 1991 to 2005. Many of Ron’s friends, colleagues, and former co-workers came out to pay tribute to him, not only during the feature, but also on the special “Friends of Ron” section of the open mic. Many thanks to our MC and opening poet Chad Parenteau, as well as Jenny Oliensis, Michael F. Gill (aka your recapper!), Tom Daley, Judson Evans, Prabakar Thyagarajan, Jim Dunn, Alfred Zuniga, Jason DiMedio, and Joyce Cunha for making this such a special night for multiple generations of the BPS community. Ron was an incredible presence and poet in so many of the lives of people who came to the Cantab those first two decades.
Coming Up This Wednesday
OMG! It’s the long-awaited feature from staff member, 4x time BPS slam team member, and all-around amazing poet/human being Aparna Paul! Be there and make sure you get a copy of their new book, HOME FREE!
Bio: Aparna Paul (she/her) is a writer, chemical engineer, banana bread enthusiast, and amateur crossword constructor based in Cambridge, MA. Her poetry and prose has been recognized by Reckoning, DMQ Review, and Gaining Ground, among others. She edited the anthology Reflections of The Land (Literary Cleveland, 2022) and is a co-editor of GOOD SOUP (@goodsoup.mag on Instagram). She hosts the Flow State Open Mic every third Thursday at Narrative Bookstore. She performs regularly, hosts occasionally, and slams sometimes at the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge, where she was the 2023 Grand Champion and a member of the 2022 through 2026 BPS venue teams. HOME FREE (Game Over Books, 2025) is her debut full-length poetry collection.
See you later! 🐊
– MFG 🚪
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