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$1.00 of each purchase of Spoken Live! is donated to the Cambridge Public Library.

Various Artists

Spoken Live!

A compilation of live spoken word performances from the Boston poetry scene. From a stage of dusk and whiskey in the open throat of Boston, catch the holy stream and rush of poetry, live.

Here be charm, street charm. Here be poets and broken lights and broken tongues in the street language of divinity, in the splatter and dash of words rising out of the underground as words always did and always will. All is language, all is buried, all is the primal urban street speaking now and again and always. In all ways. We are whispering and screaming the ancient holy names of the City. All of them. Or they scream through us and our tongues catch them as they can. Four thousand years back from now we are chanting out of the fire and mud temples of the beginning, when the spoken word made the first City happen and the underground staked its claim on history. Indo-European into Greek into Roman into American into whatever is next. And now from a stage of dusk and whiskey in the open throat of Boston we catch the language again as it moves here and out into the next energy space of the next millenium. It was the Word that said "let there be light" and so the Word was God. From Sumeria 4000 BCE to Boston 1998, the Word continues in the holy stream and rush of poetry, the rushlight of words that here, now, o my brothers and sisters, burns like another heaven insistently into ours. Includes performances by Karen Michalson, Leah Hughes, Elaine Maria Shelton Speller (aka E), Michelle O'Connor, Jonathan Ellis, C.D. Collins, Gary Hicks, Florencio A. Yllana, Sam Libby, David A. Boucher (aka Da Butcha; aka Art Fluff; aka SASPoet), Christina Liu, Jeff Paris, Thomas Grimes, Carolyn Stonewell, Iyeoka Okoawa, and Omoizele Okoawa.

"Spoken Live! is a good example of the sustained underground of poetry from the Boston area."
--Rev. Keith W. Harris, Northeast Performer, May 1999

16 spoken word performances. Playing time: 57:49

Track 1 "Track" by Karen Michalson - (Entire spoken word performance in RealAudio format)

Track 2 "Mockingbirds and Thrashers" by Leah Hughes - (Entire spoken word performance in RealAudio format)

Track 10 "The Great Swamp Blues" by David A. Boucher - (Entire spoken word performance in RealAudio format)

Available Format: CD - $11.95 (AR99022)