Madtown Poetry Open Mic - Featured Reader: Martha Kaplan

Art in the cafe...

Laurel Statz


"The Spectator"


December 2025



Laurel Statz is a painter and Madison area native. Her work, while figurative, is influenced by abstraction and minimalism. The paintings often have a quick and instinctual nature, capturing just what’s needed. While she often times herself to eliminate extra details and over-precision, she has ventured into more detailed works as well. Laurel does not attach narrative to her pieces. Rather, she thinks of them like a journaling process for her scatter-brained psyche. The figures in the pieces are meant to be processing tools for the artist and the viewer. She hopes that seeing these figures helps the...
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Friday, March 2, 2018
8:00 pm

Martha Jackson Kaplan is a Pushcart nominated poet who writes from a love of words and a curiosity about how they speak to us of history, sense of place, and the personal. What do we see? What don’t we see? What and how do we say, or not say? Is it dangerous?

She has awards from Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and from Möbius The Poetry Magazine. Poems of hers have been included in exhibits at the Monona Terrace, MMoCA, and the Chazen. Among those publishing her work are Blue Unicorn; Branch Redd Review; Hummingbird; Verse Wisconsin; New Verse News; Hospital Drive Anthology; Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar; Turn Up the Volume: Poems About the States of Wisconsin, and Möbius The Poetry Magazine, Burdock, and Ecolocations—A Poet’s Map Madison, as well as An Ariel Anthology; Driftfish. Most recently she has work in 56 Days of August; Unlikely Stories Mark V, and B(Oink) Voice.

The edition of the MadTown Poetry Open Mic will be hosted by Frandu.

Sign up starts at 7:30 / Show starts at 8

Martha Kaplan Poet
Open Mic