LOS LORCAS: Poetry in Concert

In the spirit of Federico Garcia Lorca—gifted musician, legendary poet/playwright and ebullient performer—poets Partridge Boswell and Peter Money, along with guitarist Nat Williams, fuse poetry and music in a passionate and surprising mash-up. Los Lorcas blurs boundaries between spoken word and song, weaving poetry with Andalusian ballads, blues, rock, folk, reggae, hip hop, Americana and jazz in pursuit of the cante jondo (deep song) Lorca so ardently championed.

Exploring common roots and synergies of poetry and music, Los Lorcas celebrate the poetry of song lyrics and music of lyrical poetry in soulful original compositions and arrangements of poems by Lorca, Yeats, Marley, Dylan, Dickinson, Cohen, Merwin and Millay, among others. Troubadouring widely in the US and abroad (Ireland and Slovenia), Los Lorcas have performed in diverse venues [Poetry Center San Jose, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Burlington Book Festival, Tucson Book Festival, Bookstock Literary Festival (w/ Robert Pinsky’s PoemJazz), Chandler Music Hall, Vermont College of Fine Arts, KGB Reading Series, Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poetry Café and Caffe Lena], attesting to the broad appeal of their innovative vision of how poetry and music might exist together in a world less preoccupied with taxonomy and boundaries.

“Los Lorcas in unity is a marvel that would silence any creative individual to awe, inspiring the quietest observer to reach for each word as if they were Federico Lorca himself, meditating on song and poetry mid-stage, arms outstretched.”—Bianca Viñas, PoemCity 2018

Partridge Boswell is the author of Some Far Country (Grolier Poetry Prize). “Such desperate beauty in these poems,” remarks Marie Howe, “such rendered and willed surviving. Read this book if you want to remember what poetry can do to us, how it can find words for what can’t be said and shake us by our shoulders until we feel achingly alive again.” His poems have recently received the Edna St. Vincent Millay, Red Wheelbarrow, Gemini and Lascaux Poetry Prizes, and surfaced in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Poetry Ireland Review, The Moth, Southword and Forklift, Ohio. His poems and essays have been anthologized in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry and Vermont Poets and Their Craft. Co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival, Boswell is the recipient of fellowships from Vermont College of Fine Arts, the University of New Orleans, and the Vermont Studio Center. He teaches at Burlington Writers Workshop and ArtisTree Community Arts Center, and lives with his family in Vermont.

Peter Money’s books of poetry include hybrid works such as the prose-poem sequence with Saadi Youssef, To day – minutes only (2004); the poetry/music collaboration Blue Square (2007); Che: A Novella In Three Parts(2010); and a book of translations, with Sinan Antoon, of the Arab Modernist Saadi Youssef (2012). His most recent book of poems is American Drone: New and Select Poems (2013). Money’s other books include These Are My Shoes (1991), A Big Yellow (1996), Between Ourselves (1997), Instruments (1998), and Finding It: Selected Poems (2000). A co-founder of the literary journal Writers’ Bloc, Money also founded the journals Lame Duckand Across Borders. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Sun, the Berkeley Review, the Hawaii Review and Solo, among others, and in the City Lights anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound, as well as on Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac.” His work has been translated into Spanish in Ultramar Literatura. In addition to his collaborative CD Blue Square, Money has collaborated with cartoonist Rick Veitch in “Beat Panels/Top Down.” He is the director of Harbor Mountain Press, and has taught at Lebanon College, where he guided the Associates in Creative Writing program. He was among the first faculty members at the pioneering Center For Cartoon Studies. A past poet-teacher for WritersCorps, the poetry-in-schools programme modelled on AmeriCorps, and a state judge for Poetry Out Loud, Money received a grassroots nomination for the position of Vermont State Poet Laureate in 2011. Money’s debut novel Oh When the Saints—a coming of age story set in Ireland—was released in May 2019 to critical acclaim on both sides of the pond.