Cantab Workshop for Wednesday, July 11, 2018 with Lydia Havens

Join Lydia Havens, 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.

This workshop is meant to aid in the process of writing “happy poems:” poems about joy, healing, gratitude, love, friendship, and celebration, among many other things. This is a generative writing workshop and all are welcome.

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 Lyd, click here.

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, July 11, 2018: Lydia Havens

Boise poet Lydia Havens. Photo by Rylan Elias.

Boise poet Lydia Havens. Photo by Rylan Elias.

Lydia Havens is a poet, editor and community organizer currently living in Boise, Idaho. Their work has previously been published in Winter Tangerine, Cosmonauts Avenue, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Voicemail Poems, among others. They were a member of the 2017 Boise Poetry Slam team, which placed 7th at group piece finals at the National Poetry Slam, and represented Boise at the 2017 Individual World Poetry Slam, ranking 22nd out of 90 poets. Lyd’s first full-length collection, Survive Like the Water, was published by Rising Phoenix Press in January 2017.

Lyd will also offer an early-bird generative poetry writing workshop prior to the show. Click here to learn more about the workshop.

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.

Cantab for Wednesday, July 4, 2018: NO SHOW TONIGHT

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

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, June 27, 2018: NorthBEAST Regional Team 4×4 Poetry Slam

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.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, June 20, 2018

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.

Tips from the Bar: The Message and the Medium

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.

Cantab Feature for Wednesday, June 20, 2018: Sean Patrick Mulroy

Lambda Literary Fellow Sean Patrick Mulroy. Photo by Lawrence Jaime.

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.

Cantab Recap for Wednesday, June 13, 2018

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.

Tips from the Bar: Sara Brickman’s Nightmare Prompt

Guest workshopper Sara Brickman offered a two-part prompt in a workshop before her show:

FIRST: Write down your most recent nightmare. If you can’t remember it, write down an anxiety dream, or a recurring nightmare you can remember.

THEN: [Highlight this text only after you’ve completed step 1.] Imagine you are on a dinner date with the physical manifestation of this nightmare. Where are you? What is being served? Don’t end the poem before dinner is over (whether you get dessert is up to you).

[Highlight all the way to here for the complete prompt.] Good luck!

Cantab Workshop for Wednesday, June 13, 2018 with Sara Brickman: Dreaming Through Nightmare

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.