Boston Poetry Slam Says Goodbye to the Cantab Lounge

A pre-pandemic poetry open mic at the Cantab Lounge.
PHOTO BY RICH BEAUBIEN, COURTESY OF DAWN GABRIEL

Hello, Cantabbers: this is your slam curator speaking. It has been a spring and summer of many griefs, and to this I am sad to officially add the loss of our historical home, the stage that has housed the Boston Poetry Slam since October 16, 1992. Word went out today, Sunday, July 19, that our home venue, the beloved and oft-fondly-maligned Cantab Lounge, will not reopen. The business is expected to be announced for sale.

The global pandemic, the fluctuation of official response to the health crisis, and the impossibility of guessing the shape of live art to come mean this: even before the shuttering of our home venue, I could not predict what the future of the Boston Poetry Slam might be. I want to extend gratitude to everyone who has offered us support and joy and attended our Extremely Online readings, curated spontaneously and lovingly by Lip Manegio and Myles Taylor. With respect to all of our staff’s need to refresh and regroup, the EO readings and BPS operations will be on hiatus until further notice, irrespective of any further developments at the Cantab Lounge itself. If you aren’t already connected to other opportunities for online poetry community, please email me for suggestions.

For those here for further details, or with heartache to process over missing the space, you already know: the Boston Poetry Slam is not a place. It’s not a loss of a person, or the way a poet you just met thinks about language: we’ll only be missing a half-dozen sticky barstools, a cold cement floor where pub glasses go to die, a certain slant of light that confounds would-be videographers and shakes that fourth stanza you thought you memorized right out of your pockets. Our bar is closed, and closing, but our community remains whole.

So, of course, the Boston Poetry Slam is not the Cantab Lounge: and yet, you know it also always will be. The bar hosted the weekly show longer than most of our current regulars have walked this earth, and the name is nationally synonymous with the scene, community, and sound that have come from the stage over the years. If you ever mentioned you were from Boston at a slam event, you were likely to hear (among other things): “Are you Cantab?” I hear from poets all the time (secretly, generously) who promise me there is no place in the world like the place. Regulars from five, ten, twenty years ago return on a whim, on a Wednesday, to re-introduce themselves to poetry in the same basement, under the same pounding blues and leaking pipes. And poets leave knowing that when they need to come back, Cantab will be waiting.

If Cantab has ever been home for you: I’m sorry that it won’t wait for us still. I’ve spent tonight reaching out to our founders, our hosting and support staff, our bartenders, our old guard slam and modern era teams, our champs and national reps, and anyone I could think of who felt ownership of this not-big-enough-for-its-hearts space. I missed some of you; the people I can’t connect to directly are countless and impossible, and so I hope this message reaches you. If you ever thought: I’ll go down there and read someday. Or: I’ll get back there and read someday. Or: I’ll take someone else who needs it there someday. I hope and wait for that wish to come true, wherever the next there happens to be.

Thank you for all the years so far. Don’t forget that you’re Cantab, wherever you are.

–simone

Simone Beaubien

Slam Curator, Boston Poetry Slamasds

"Over and Over" by Michael R. Brown

"Over and Over"
By Michael R. Brown

An aging poet and teacher born in 1940,
who fought against Vietnam at home
and for civil rights in the cities,
have I increased my chances next life
of coming back as a holy man, a woman, a gazelle?

That is progress on this wheel—
although most of us are stuck in millennial rounds
as mud-carrying coolies, mastodon bait,
spinning mill spindle girls, charcoal makers,
fast food clerks notching paper crowns for spoiled kids.

Born in 1840 I took a day and a half to die at Shiloh,
parched, blind, baked in dry rough wool, basted in my blood.

In 1740, fevered on a foul ship in foreign waters,
driven by a cutting lash to climb high spars,
I lost my grip in a yaw and fell to the wooden deck,
smashing my skull like an egg.

In Bavaria in 1640 it took me two weeks to die from blood
poisoning when an oxcart crushed my leg
and animal shit entered my blood.

In 1540 a Cossack stomped me because he was drunk and I
was not.

In 1440 large black blood-filled globules burst the skin
of my underarms and groin.

In 1340 an Asian horseman took my head for scimitar practice.

In 1240 Christians trampled me in the road.

In 1140 a fever within a week of birth.

1040 at birth.

940 at birth.

840 at birth.

740 I can't remember.

640 I can't remember.

But you can't even remember that I lived.

I was a pitch blender in the Phoenician trade,
a blood stain under a pyramid block,
scattered bones in the earth of a Yangtze dam,
torn by sharks after a typhoon,
somebody's idea of dog food.

Once in a distant historical instant, I was lifted
on murmured prayers and adored, the precious future
of a group of cousins who valued their families as much as sunlight,
but that was only in a small out-of-the-way place
before what you call civilization.

Copyright © Michael R. Brown

I met Michael R. Brown when the Save The Male Tour visited Cambridge, Mass., for a feature at the Cantab Lounge. Our feature was on par, and the slam was average, but the open mic still ranks as one of the best open mics I have ever seen.

This poem was one that I remembered specifically and in 2008, as asked Brown for a copy to show my friend Nika Levikov because I couldn't find it in any of Brown's books. He e-mailed it to me.

I worked with him at the 2003 National Poetry Slam as bout manager to one of the bouts he hosted. Incidentally, that bout was where I met Delrica Andrews and "Granma Dave" Schein from the Baltimore National Poetry Slam Team, who are wholly awesome people.

Michael R. Brown has been called the "the Jerry Garcia of performance poetry" by WBUR/NPR, "ein Dichter und Weltenbummler" by Die Welt, and a "rascal-artist-angel-wonder .. .at the same time" by Paul Stokstad of "Poets at 8." Michael R. Brown has published his poetry, fiction, travel articles and columns in wide-ranging periodicals all over the world. His fourth book of poetry, "The Confidence Man," was published by Ragged Sky in 2006.

In May 2007, Brown and his partner Valerie Lawson moved to Robbinston in Down East Maine, the easternmost point in the USA, where they have been granted the editorial and publishing privileges for Off the Coast, a poetry journal founded by Arlene and George V. Van Deventer 14 years ago.

Brown has returned to teaching, now at Shead High School in Eastport. As a correspondent for the local paper, The Quoddy Tides, his beat is the Passamaquoddy reservation at Pleasant Point. He has also returned to the theater, acting in the Stage East production of It's a Wonderful Life and directing the Magnificent Liars Company in Mafia on Prozac.

Brown holds a Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan. His dissertation was a literary history of the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance directed by Robert Hayden. For 45 years he taught in high schools and universities from the South Side of Chicago to South Korea.

In 1999, he won the first Ronald J. Lettieri Award for Teaching Excellence at Mount Ida College. Brown was a finalist in the 1991 individual competition of the US National Poetry Slam.

In 1991 he held the first poetry slam in Stockholm, Sweden, and lectured on African American Literature at Stockholm University.

In 1992 he organized the US national slam, and he was on the Boston slam teams that won the US Championship in 1993 and finished third in 1995. In 1998 he won the 6th International Slam in Amsterdam. Brown won the open slam at the 2000 Provincetown Poetry Festival, and he was the hit of the 2001 Rockland Jazz and Blues Festival in New York. He has performed his poems from Jerusalem to Taipeh, Republic of China, and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to Key West, Fla. For 13 years he hosted the Boston poetry slam at the Cantab Lounge, Cambridge.

Brown was co-producer of The Culture of Peace, an international exhibit of art and poetry organized under the UN mandate for a decade of the Culture of Peace. This project has created an art and poetry exhibit and resulted in four exchanges of poets between Ireland and Massachusetts. He is general secretary of the Poetry Olympics, first held in Stockholm in 1998.

Brown's first published poem appeared in the first issue of Beyond Baroque (1969). Recently published poems have appeared in "Sensations, 100 Poets Against the War," and "Spoken Word Revolution Redux." Forthcoming will be poems in the Sacred Fools anthology "Legendary" and a biker anthology to be published by Archer Books in San Francisco. Brown conducts workshops in writing and performance. He has several times performed his poem "Chorus" as part of Beat Cafe, an original ballet choreographed by former Joffrey dancer Anthony Williams. He appeared in the documentary film SlamNation.

In the past five years he produced and directed shows by the Off-Broadway Poets and Dr. Brown's Traveling Poetry Show, an ensemble who perform their own poetry in theaters. His full-length play, The Duchess of York,was a finalist in the Cape Cod Playwrights' Competition.

Itinerary

July 22: Fly from Phoenix, Arizona to Dublin, Ireland, with Alun Wile and meet up with Karl Jones.
Aug. 5: Fly from Dublin, Ireland, to Newark, N.J., meet up with Sarrah Wile and Danielle Gervasio.
Aug. 7: Take bus to Boston. Meet up with Jeff Berger.
Aug. 9: Take bus from Boston to New York City, then take train from New York City down the shore of New Jersey to Gervasio's grandmother's bungalow.
Aug. 11: Take train from down the shore to West Orange, N.J.
Aug. 12: Take train from Newark, N.J. to Philadelphia.
Aug. 14: Take train from Philadelphia to Chicago. Meet up with Katie Smith.
Aug. 17: Take train from Chicago to Flagstaff, Ariz., then home to Sedona, Ariz.
Aug. 18: Return home.

May the road rise up to meet you,
may the wind be ever at your back,
may the sun shine warm upon your face
and the rain fall softly on your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of his hand
and may you be in heaven a full half hour
before the devil knows you're dead

My Five of Five

Five things that 2002 taught me:
1. I can survive for 4 months on $300. Pretty well in fact.
2. My poetry doesn't suck. I am actually good at what I love to do.
3. By selling it all, choosing homelessness, and going on tour, I've done more at my young age to follow my heart than most people will do in their entire life. I'm braver than I thought I was.
4. I have to make my own destiny. Fate doesn't exist.
5. Life sucks without a car.

Five personally significant events of 2002:
1. Disowning my father. This was his second chance to be my dad in any way and it went worse than the first. Now I know how not to treat my children.
2. Finally telling Daniela to put up or shut up. She's been a cock-tease and a love-vampire for the last three years and I let her use me because I'm a coward. But I've finally stood up. I'm almost certain I've lost her but I'm free.
3. Getting arrested. It was stupid, I was guilty beyond doubt, and I don't want to commit the same crime ever again.
4. The Save the Male Poetry Tour. 39 shows, 26 states, four men, three months, two countries, and one van. Wow, what a ride.
5. Leaving Flagstaff. It's a good place if you can stand small towns and intrusive personalities, but I'm a city boy and need the diversity of 4 million people. I'd rather be a little fish in a big pond than a big fish in a soup.

Five things I want to do in 2003:
1. Make a National Slam Team and do the thing in Chicago.
2. Be satisfied with my poetry. The kind of poetry that isn't just selfless mental masturbation.
3. Have a meaningful relationship with someone who isn't 18, or in high school, or recently divorced, or my boss. A punk rock art chick who'll break me.
4. Make enough money to buy a car, get a computer, and start publishing the chapbooks of poets across the country.
5. Plan my next national poetry tour.

Five things I don't want to do in 2003:
1. Procrastinate.
2. Let fear or fear of loneliness paralyze my better judgment.
3. Settle.
4. Write crap poetry and try to pass it off as art.
5. Blame writer's block.

Five (groups of) people who I'd like to know better in 2003:
1. My three step sisters, Jessica 19, Danielle 17, and Kristina 11. Jessica got engaged over the weekend, Danielle has a secret artistic side I think I could coax out of her shell, and Kristina is more like me now than anyone else I know.
2. Corbet Dean. He's been the most supportive of all the poets I know, but I don't really know him like I should. He could also help me improve my performance.
3. Klute. He and I could have one of the great friendships that art scholars will debate for decades.
4. Trish JusTrish. I like her and her art more and more I hear it.
5. Scott Creney and Mathew Moon, the two Guerrilla poets from Boston moving to Prescott this month.