Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On April 27th,we close National Poetry month with Patrick Shaughnessy, a poet who will have his first feature outside his hometown of Lowell.
A native of Lowell Mass., Patrick S. began performing poetry in spring of 2007 at the Lowell Poetry Slam. Local poets Zean Dunbar and Anthony Febo invited him on a carpool to the Cantab Lounge in August of that year; since then, the Cantab Lounge has been his main inspiration as a writer and performer of poetry. His poetry fluctuates between clever wordplay and emotional open wounds, sometimes veering too much into the former when he intends the latter. He cites as influences rock band They Might Be Giants, comic book writer Steve Gerber, multi-media writer Douglas Adams, and essayist Jorge Luis Borges (the last mostly via Penguin Press translations).
Patrick has no traditional poetic accolades to list. He won a campus-wide talent show at UMass Lowell in spring of 2008, beating orchestras, singer-songwriters, and dance crews. Ryk McIntyre occasionally covers his poems. At the first Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Regie Gibson told him to shave his back hair (Patrick's back hair, not Regie's). He has not yet been arrested for performing, but did once perform his way into a police standoff with dozens of college students watching. Patrick's next challenge as a performer is not strictly poetic, but will have poetry among its media. When he has moved out of Lowell and into the immediate Boston area, he plans to explore a series of personas in a bizarre and difficult-to-explain project mysteriously code-named 12GIM.
Patrick will be debuting a new chapbook, I Use Defense Mechanism as a Humor. He will also have his previous chapbook, Don't Laugh at My Hilarious Pain, on hand. It is likely he will be crossdressed; it is very okay to notice this.
