SpokenWord Paris

Monday 31st July

at the Cave Café, 134 rue Marcadet, 75018 Métro Lamarck-Caulaincourt (line 12)

Theme: Plastic

Sign up downstairs 8pm. Show begins 8.45pm

Celebrating 6 months at the Cave Café!

Diana Norma Szokolyai is a writer, teacher, and Artistic Director of Cambridge Writers’ Workshop, an organization that leads writing retreats in France, Spain, and the US. Her writing appears Critical Romani Studies, The Poetry Miscellany, The Boston Globe, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and MER VOX Quarterly. Her poetry has been anthologized in Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History, Stone to Stone: Writing by Romani Women, and Teachers as Writers, as well as translated into German for the anthology of Romani poets from around the world Die Morgendämmerung der Worte, Moderner Poesie–Atlas der Roma und Sinti.  She is author of the poetry chapbooks Parallel Sparrows and Roses in the Snow, as well as editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos & Sourcebook for Creative Writing. In 2021, she was awarded a Center for Arts and Social Justice Fellowship at Vermont College of Fine Arts for her work translating Romani poets into English. Together with Dennis Shafer, she founded ChagallPAC, an interdisciplinary arts organization. She holds an M.A. in French, an Ed.M. in Arts in Education, and an M.F.A. in Writing. She teaches writing at Salem State University. A frequenter of Spoken Word since 2006, she’s thrilled to be back!

Wave or particle, energy or matter, where are you today? Hello my name is John X.  Yes, that’s really true. It’s on my passport. I live in Paris France and play the guitar… if you are interested in Guitar Circle or Samba or Cybernetics then corner me politely… if you are looking for Dr Kalozum I can arrange an interview. Otherwise, please indulge me these quelques minutes for more Songs of a Cosmic Nature !   

Annie Peter is a Dublin-based writer and spoken word artist renowned for fusing poetry with music, rhythm, and free movement. Her performances strive to move and unsettle audiences. Her work focuses primarily on themes of female empowerment, mental health, and societal challenges. Her aim is often to bring to light the demons locked away in the recesses of the mind. Since her first performance in 2022, Annie’s performances earned her a slot at the Electric Picnic Festival in 2022 and 2023, leading to her fully sold-out headline show, “Poetry and Beats”. In early 2023, she co-founded the Poetry Kiln Collective with David Hynes and Emmet O’Brien.  Annie Peter’s work has been published online in The Void Magazine, Dodging the Rain, The Outpost Éire, The Headlight Review, and has appeared in print in Dreich Magazine and The Amphibian.

Devin Cohen Asher/Alien Architect (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a multi-instrumentalist multidisciplinary artist, working with experimental abstract visual art, painting, poetry, sound art. He has written, painted, exhibited, performed, across the U.S., Mexico, Israel, Paris, Iceland, Germany, Sweden, Lithuania, Spain, Japan, Hungary, Greece, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Argentina, Canada, Poland, India, Turkey…His poetry book is ALL PRAISES and his experimental Alien Architect trip hop post hop poetry album is Arteria .He has attended artist residings in Hungary, Lithuania, Romania…. Mekisko..His work has been selected for the Ibero Biennale de Puebla de Los Ángeles, as well as the Biennale de pintura J.A. Monroy in Mexico; Devin’s work has been exhibited in Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán MACAY, Centro Estatal de las Artes de Baja California in Tijuana, Centro Cultural Plaza Fatima in Monterrey, Museo UPAEP in Puebla, Museo de la Mujer in Mexico City, as well as the Slought Foundation and Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Devin Cohen with Rebeca Martell own and curate Liliput Gallery in Puebla, Mexico, and Philiput Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Devin´s art will be exhibited in Merida this Month. Of journey quest, It has been from Leipzig to Berlin to Frankfurt to Paris to perform at Spoken Word Paris mere moments before return´th fluttering from this air of Narnia.

https://linktr.ee/devincohen

Nancy Stohlman is the author of six books including After the Rapture (2023), Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities (2018), The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), The Monster Opera (2013), Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction (2020), winner of the 2021 Reader Views Gold Award and re-released in 2022 as an audiobook. Her work has been anthologized widely, appearing in the Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and The Best Small Fictions 2019, as well as adapted for both stage and screen. She teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder and holds workshops and retreats around the world. Find out more at http://www.nancystohlman.com

Monalisa Maione is a 2-time Pushcart Prize nominated poet and visual artist. She lives near the ocean on California’s Pacific Coast Highway and makes stained glass panels in anatomical themes and photographs of biological specimens. From her home in Paris 18e, she writes darkly humorous poetry that generally explores power dynamics between institutions and individuals. Monalisa regularly smashes the patriarchy using tiny acts of defiance including outbidding men on eBay for power tools, being very successful in business and never faking her orgasms. Her preferred mode of transportation is her Ducati motorcycle, and she only takes advice from live crows.

You can now order my corrupt press book Poets are liars who tell the truth online following this link.

Check out corrupt press and their great catalogue of poetry books here: corrupt press

David Barnes has been reading his poems aloud in Paris since 2003. This book contains the best of them, road-tested at the weekly open mic and writers’ community he fathered, Spoken Word Paris.

Here you’ll find poems that bite, such as ‘Pity le pauvre Parisien’, ‘Interesting Times for Generation Zed’, ‘The Corporate Goldfish’ and ‘Bitter Valentine’ alongside poems that are just fun, such as ‘Shrove Tuesday’, a poem about pancakes, ‘Owl’ and ‘She speaks fish’.

There are poems about Paris ‘with its cat hiss of coffee machines’, Paris ‘who dances by numbers but longs to release jazz…’, portraits of cafés and Parisians.

There are poems that dive into dark waters – the ties of love and suffering that bind him to his brother, mother and father back in England in a family story shaped by what could not be said, where everyone haunted their own lives.

And there are poems that express the sheer exhilaration of falling in love, such as ‘Dreaming, half dreaming, half asleep’ or the longing and regret when love cannot go anywhere – ‘Bric-a-brac’, ‘Inexhaustible’ – and the deep, everyday joys and struggles of sustained love – ‘Sunday morning market’.

James Baldwin’s Paris comes to mind, the foreigner’s fascination and frustration. There’s an endearing vulnerability too, frank and unpretentious.
— Craig Martin Getz, poet

With his blend of philosophy, imagery and acute observation, David Barnes conjures an eclectic series of worlds for his readers to inhabit.
— Sue Burge, poet

What is most evident in David Barnes’s mode of writing is his carnival about everything that lives, breathes and dies, or never does, houses and cities, people… a fête in the company of all that is, whereby each poem discovers itself to better express its bold narrative.
— Rethabile Masilo, poet

Cover image from a painting by Iana Sophia. Photos by Sabine Dundure.

Mark Lipman, founder of the press Vagabond, the Culver City Book Festival, the Elba Poetry Festival; winner of the 2015 Joe Hill Labor Poetry Award; the 2016 International Latino Book Awards and L’Alloro di Dante 2023 (Dante’s Laurel – Italy), a writer, poet, multi-media artist and activist, he’s the author of more than twelve books including The Role of the Revolutionary Poet in Society and a Strategic Vision for the 21st Century. Mark is currently traveling the world, using poetry to connect communities to the greater social justice issues, while building consciousness through the spoken word.