We Revive an Old Literary Tradition With the New
Shivering Mouse Poetry Salon
The salon returns — reimagined for poetry.
The Shawna Foundation's poetry program has a new look: the Shivering Mouse Poetry Salon, held the second Tuesday of every month at the home of our new host, Art Dubois.
Salons trace back to the 7th century Middle East, later immortalized by Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment, where modernist poets and painters gathered to reinvent avant-garde writing. Centuries and continents apart, these gatherings shared a common aim — Horace's definition of poetry: "either to please or to educate." We're no different.
October's featured poet is Eve Rifkah of Worcester, whose long career spans factory work, freelance reporting, and decades as a teacher and editor in the New England poetry community. Rifkah holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and co-founded Poetry Oasis, Inc., a nonprofit poetry association active from 1998 to 2012. She founded and edited the literary magazine DINER and received the Stanley Kunitz Medal in 2021. Her first book inspired the play Outcasts the Lepers of Penikese Island, and her sixth collection, exploring food as sustenance and subject, has just been released. She lives in Worcester, MA.
As with every Shivering Mouse Poetry Salon, the evening will open with Rifkah's feature reading, a Q&A with the featured poet, followed by an open mic segment for attendees who wish to share their own poems. The program closes with another set by the featured poet.
The Shivering Mouse Poetry Salon will take place Tuesday, October 13, with the reading starting at 6:30 PM, at 446 East St, Uxbridge, MA 01569.
Every gathering includes a featured poet, an open mic, and an audience Q&A segment.
Join us!
WHERE: 446 East St, Uxbridge, MA 01569
WHEN: Second Tuesday of the month · 6:30 PM
Why a Salon?
The word conjures something mythic — a room full of people leaning in close, listening to work that hasn't been polished for a stage or filtered through a screen.
That's the tradition we're borrowing from, and it's older than most people realize. Salons trace back to the 7th century Middle East, long before they became associated with Paris drawing rooms, cigarette smoke, and the creative vibe.
Gertrude Stein's apartment is probably the version most people picture: a gathering place where modernist poets and painters pushed each other toward something new, arguing and reading and rewriting the rules of what art could be. But the format itself — small, unstructured, built around conversation rather than performance — predates her by more than a thousand years.
What's stayed constant across all that time and geography is the purpose. Horace put it simply: poetry exists "either to please or to educate." A salon gives both room to happen in the same evening.
There's a featured poet who's put in the work, an open mic where anyone in the room is invited to read their work, and an audience Q&A that turns the evening from performance into conversation.
That's what we're bringing back with the Shivering Mouse Poetry Salon — a nod to Paris artists and writers in the 1920s, with the same basic idea: gather people in a room, let the poetry do what it's going to do, and see where the creativity goes.