How poetry meets its people ‘every Wednesday’ in the basement of a Cambridge dive
- kateyanulis
- Mar 19
- 4 min read
Myles Taylor recites their piece in front of an attentive audience at the 2025 Team Selection Preliminary Slam. The Cantab Lounge hosts the event every Wednesday from 8 to 11 p.m. Photo courtesy Jarvis Subia.
Just a foot from the audience stands a mic and Myles Taylor, the host and president of the Boston Poetry Slam, welcoming new and old artists to the dimly lit Cantab Lounge basement. Wasting not a second more, Taylor booms, “Welcome to the Boston Poetry Slam! We are here every Wednesday.”
Like clockwork, the audience of eager regulars and supportive friends shout back, “Every Wednesday!” and a community of spoken word lovers is reunited once more.
“It keeps us in the moment and reminds us to come back next week,” said regular Theodore Jones, a preschool teacher living in Brockton. “I make the trek to come up to the Cantab every Wednesday because I don't know what [I’d do with] myself [otherwise].”
Every Wednesday night from 8 to 11 p.m. in the basement of the Cantab Lounge, poetry fills the hearts of patrons. For just $4 each, it’s not hard to see what keeps them coming back.
“A certain type of people will come to a show in the basement of a dive bar and sit there for four hours and listen to poetry. Those are your people if you love poetry,” said Boston Poetry Slam, or BPS, treasurer Michael Gill.
Split up into three hour and a half sections, the night begins with an open mic where anyone can sign up to read their work so long as it’s under three minutes. Then comes the “smoking section,” where staff have the opportunity to share their work as a segue into the main event of the night.
On Feb. 25, the slam decided which four of the first eight poets move on to the Team Selection Finals March 25. From there, they will decide who from BPS will make up the team to compete in three tournaments: Midwest Mash-Up Apr. 30 to May 2, the Bigfoot Regional Slam June 25 to 28, and the NorthBeast Regional Slam Festival Aug. 8 to 9.
During both the open mic and “smoking section” sets, poems revolve around nature and humor. Sharing several shorter poems, these sets are practice for poets to get better at writing and performing.
With more than eight decorated and known poets in the scene, the slam section takes a serious turn, focusing on themes of religion, identity and familial relationships. From the declining bee population to arguments with parents, each poet reads their work like a sonnet to their former self. Memorized and recited with passion, their moment on stage is filled with minutes and decades of emotion.
With a three to four hour run time every week, it’s an easy, joyful way to get to know creatives from all walks of life.
“You're experiencing a complete range of people you would not get anywhere else … people from different backgrounds, different worlds we might never be friends with,” Gill said, watching the open mic from the ticket booth. “And now you've actually experienced what they've experienced for three minutes at that time.”
A small but tangible representation of the thoughts and feelings of the Greater Boston community shines through during this four-hour window, evolving with the years but remaining an open-armed safe space.
With a rich history of artistic disruption, BPS has always kept its community members at the core of its mission.
“We try to do weird s**t — a lot of incorporation of humor, pushing the boundaries — but the people themselves, the community, has changed over the years very significantly,” Taylor said. “I think it really sort of matches whoever runs it. I think that you could say that about any community space. Ever since I took it over, it's always been like, pretty queer, but like, it's pretty overwhelmingly queer at this point.”
For Zeke Russell, a Brighton‐based case manager who’s been on staff at BPS since 2015, Wednesdays at the Cantab serve as a return home.
“As an artist, my parents were part of an intentional artist community in Central Maine, and I've sort of found that for myself here … it's just been kind of the fabric of my adult life.”
For many participants and regulars, the big draw is the desire for artistic connection.
“This is an amazing space that is super hard to find," Gill said. "We are very dedicated to being a community.”
As a nonprofit, all the cash that flows into BPS through the inexpensive ticket cost flows back into the organization to help sustain its work — "the least capitalistic thing you can do," Gill said.
For 35 years, the basement of the Cantab Lounge has housed extraordinary creative light and will continue to do so as long as patrons and poets continue to show up.
“We're all in it for the love of the game,” Gill said. “And we’re all in it to make ourselves better.”
Read the piece here on the Huntington News Website:
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