Boston Poetry Slam

"the best open mic in the English-speaking world," every Wednesday at the Cantab Lounge since 1992

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they said forget your grandma these american letters don’t need no more grandma poems but i said the grandmas are our first poetic forms the first haiku was a grandma & so too the first sonnet the first blues the first praise song therefore every poem is a grandmother

Yolanda Wisher, “no more grandma poems,” via the Academy of American Poets

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Some works of writing are such beautiful encounters with feeling enacted into language that to simply be within them rather than done with them is the most wonderful thing.

Devin Kelly, from Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse

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Pleasure is our only chosen future. You are the home I briefly make, the country I can return to.

Paisley Rekdal, “何日/What Day,” via the Academy of American Poets

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To love anyone means to admit extinction. I tell myself this so I never fall in love, so that the fire lights just me.

Victoria Chang, from Obit

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This is what we get. This is the penance for extending and extending the human lifespan— now some people live a hundred and twenty years, but those years are increasingly spent being bombarded with adorable profiles of the oldest people, interviews about what keeps them ticking. The secret is always some toxin, like bacon or vodka, and the joke that ensues is always the same: THE CHEMICALS PRESERVE HIM. That's all fine, but just once I would like to uncrumple the Metro section and find that the key to long life is rage and trauma, that bitterness girds the organs in equal measure.

Natalie Shapero, “Some Toxin,” from Popular Longing

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I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding; I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.

Mary Oliver, “Members of the Tribe,” from Dream Work

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i'm not going to think about anything ever again. i'm going to find a field of people holding hands and hold your hand in it gently feeling everything.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, from I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It.

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Language is one of the ways we breach the barrier between one person’s body and another’s. It’s one of the ways we connect one mind with another. It also helps us understand ourselves and make solid what often exists as air. Sometimes, I think of language as cartography for thoughts. But like all maps, no language can represent the world exactly.

Benjamin Garcia, interviewed by Mag Gabbert for Underblong

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my name is female my name is freedom my name is the one the bible despised my name is the one astrology cannot predict my name is the name I am learning to preach to the world my name is the name that the law cannot invalidate my name is the one who loves

June Jordan, “Kissing God Goodbye,” from The Essential June Jordan

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Kayleb Rae Candrilli, from Water I Won’t Touch

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Some poems have life, and some just don’t. Sometimes it’s an ostrich, and sometimes it’s a cinder block, and no matter what I do I can’t make a cinder block be an ostrich.

Heather Christle on revising a poem, as told to Ben Purkert for Guernica

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Part of the beauty of writing is that you have the power to slow down, or even stop time.

Devin Kelly, from Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse

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let me tell you about water it feeds you as it feeds without it you die without you it's fine

sam sax, “Hydrophobia,” from bury it

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Like mistaking death for what's finally just proof of death— the latest stubbornly unvanished body beside the road that the wide, now sightless eye unstares across— to rewrite what's been given is not refusal is no one walking away.

Carl Phillips, “Yet No Less Grateful,” from Pale Colors in a Tall Field

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I often liken a first draft to trying a bunch of keys in a lock. And finding a lock that fits, and opening the door. And I think editing is finding the light switch in the room.

Hanif Abdurraqib, interviewed by Sylvia Gindick for Columbia Journal

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It’s as important to infuse my poetry with joy as it is to infuse my life with joy. They are the same thing.

Ada Limón, interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc for BOMB Magazine

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Dalton Day, from Lil’ Ghost Poems