The Mad Poets Blog

…Elliot Levy, senior at Harriton High School (yes, you read that right: high school), has won the open mic contest at Milkboy Acoustic Cafe in Bryn Mawr.

Elliot Levy, winner of the Milkboy open mic contest

Elliot is a senior at Harriton High School.  He has been writing poetry since his Junior year and started performing at open mics during the beginning of this year.  He co-founded the Harriton Poetry Club and hopes to compete in the Brave New Voices national competition this summer.  Besides writing poetry, Elliot plays football and wrestles for his high school team.  He has two supportive parents and a cat named Winston who inspires him daily.

Elliot will be featured in the November reading, next week, alongside Milkboy regular Joe Roarty. In the end, it was a close contest. Our runners up were Betti Kahn and, just one vote behind, Howard Lieberman. I expect we’ll be hearing more from these poets in next years open mics!

Congratulations to Elliot! And thanks to everyone who came out & read in the Milkboy open mic this year. It is because of you that this series is so awesome each and every month. I can’t wait to see everyone next week for our last reading of the year: Thursday November 11, 7pm. Be there!!

Garrison Keillor reads Lou McKee’s “Angels” at the Writers Almanac on March 14^th.

To read and have a listen check out : http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2008/03/10/#friday

After a few missed weeks, I say we bring this back.  And not JUST because I have something to promote.  But because I want to know what everyone else is doing.

So bring it on:  What are you doing? Where are you reading?  When’s your book coming out?  Where are your pome’s being published?

Be as shameless as you need to be.  We really truly want to know.

Fiction writers: for some poets, like me, they are alien creatures who don’t break their lines into jaggedy bits, who are obsessed with making sure all their nouns and verbs go together in a certain order, and who abide by the nasty little narrative arc. *shudder*shudder*

Some writers are agile enough to not just walk the genre balance beam, but to do cartwheels and back-walkovers and flips on it. We’re lucky enough to have several such genre-gymnasts among the Mad Poets members. And Peter Baroth is one of them.

This week, the Guild of Outsider Writers posted a review of Peter’s novel Long Green, deeming it a “well-crafted, absorbing read.”

I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t read the novel yet, but Peter is an engaging poet, whose work be-bops through space and time, travelling social, political, cultural and geographical distances. So, I trust the commenter who said that Long Green “is also a story that authentically depicts the angst of a generation” because that resonates with the tenor of his poetry, which I’ve come to know and admire. I look forward to reading the novel soon.

If you’re interested, you can get Peter’s novel in paperback or Adobe eBook at iUniverse. You can also read some of his poetry online, from Off the Record: An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers.