Free Verse

×

Expand

Leo Costello

Big Honey cast members.

Big Honey cast members.

media release: Celebrate National Poetry Month in April with Free Verse, the poetry-and-improv-comedy show from Madison-based improv team Big Honey. The show will feature three world-class poets reading their work to inspire Big Honey's bighearted, sweet-and-sticky comedy, culminating in the writers and performers improvising poems together, inspired by audience suggestions!

Great poetry and improv share the same creative backbones: Transcendent surprise! Intense focus! Joyful expression! They cut reality with a sharp blade one minute and melt you into bliss the next. Part epiphany, part ephemera, improv and poetry weave unexpected connections to unveil revelation and truth. Watch these two art forms build, brawl, and bloom together.

The April 22 Free Verse poets features these lyrical geniuses:

Matthew Guenette, author of Doomscroll, Vasectomania, and American Busboy, is a poet-teacher whose work has been described as "vividly rendered,” "gorgeously expansive, and “a gift.”

Chessy Normile is poet-in-residence at Ripon College and author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, which The New York Times named in its list of Best Poetry of 2020, saying its mix of “gorgeous strangeness” and “near-silliness” will “trick you into feeling more than you were quite prepared to feel.” 

Richard Vargas is a California native and longtime Wisconsinite whose latest book, The Screw City Poems, takes inspiration from his current home, Rockford, IL. Reviewing that work, poet Dan Denton called Richard “a modern day lion of the literary underground, and one of the best working class poets to ever hold a college degree.”

The show is at Forward Club (917 E Mifflin St, Gate 5) starting promptly at 7:00pm. Doors open at 6:45. This show is geared for adult ears, though we won’t purposefully be vulgar.

Big Honey is:

Casem AbuLughod (Forward Theater, Children's Theater of Madison)

Megan Baker Detloff (The PIT NYC, Annoyance NYC)

Michael Hartwell (Baltimore Improv Group, PBS)

Kelly Maxwell (Mercury Players Theatre)

Tara Ptasnik (Broom Street Theatre, Lucid Dreaming Sketch Comedy)

Ben Rush (Amalgam Improv)

Zoe Schirmer (iO Chicago, Comedy Clubhouse Chicago) 

Ben Seidensticker (Lucid Dreaming Sketch Comedy creative director)