Get your mingle on at Howling Wolf! Rub elbows and wax poetic with poets and festival organizers, including Executive Director January O’Neil, Program Director Sara Siegel, and Festival Cofounder Michael Ansara, among others.
What’s more hilariously cringe-worthy than angsty/angry/adorable/atrocious teen love poems? Watching grown-ups share them with an audience of strangers. Mortified is thrilled to bring our carnival of teen angst to the 2016 Massachusetts Poetry Festival! One by one, brave men and women will take the stage to relive their tortured adolescence by sharing their very raw, very real, very funny teenage poetry. Prom drama! First kisses! Awkward flirting! Mortified tackles it all, one hilarious performer at a time.
Hailed a "cultural phenomenon" by Newsweek, and celebrated for years by the likes of The Today Show, The Onion AV Club, This American Life, and Entertainment Weekly, Mortified is a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids.
This session will showcase translators (and their authors, where possible) exploring meaning across languages and cultures. Themes of intimacy, loss, temptation, unexpected pleasures, and subversive declamations form the nucleus of multiple bodies of poetic work across the globe. Works in Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, English, Korean, and Spanish will be read, where possible, with accompanying music as composed or identified by the poets of origin. Certain poems have been published as part of a series of broadsides or in anthologies that pair poetry with visual image.
This program reveals insights into and celebrations of human feeling across cultures and languages. Bilingual readings punctuated by music composed or identified by the poets of origin and/or by visual works of art offer yet another dimension to the expression of life.
Join Ben Berman as he leads festival attendees in innovative, fun, and stimulating poetry exercises. These unique exercises have been used in Grub Street’s multiweek poetry courses, and generated numerous published poems. The goal is to complete 2-4 exercises in an hour, leaving time for attendees to share their work aloud if they wish. You will receive supportive feedback, and suggestions for how to make the poems better, helping writers with common mistakes. Any critique will be given in a gentle and encouraging way. Even if you are not a published or practicing poet, this session will inspire you to want to create poems of your own.
Join multidisciplinary artist, Sandra Adams for this drop -in opportunity to learn the art of Dada poetry, a practice that focusses on chance as a means to find profound meaning in the seemingly absurd. Working from a random selection of words cut out from print media, participants will assemble phrases or short poems that are bound to surprise and delight. No prior writing or art-making experience is necessary.
Back with us again in the Boston Typewriter Orchestra (BTO)!
The BTO is a collective endeavor which engages in rhythmic typewriter manipulation combined with elements of performance, comedy and satire. BTO will entertain the masses while providing an outlet for the creative urges of its members. *BTO promises to protect customer confidentiality with the utmost vigilance while remaining irreverent at all times.
Check out this one-of-a-kind of performance.