Arshagra is an autodidact raised in his grandfather Arshag’s garden. Arshag, an Armenian genocide survivor, taught him profound attitudes of benevolence: no hate, no enemy, no blame and no vengeance. He spent many years in Boston and Cambridge – urban areas that nourish the voices of emerging poets and encourage free speech as a common language, free of social and cultural dichotomies. His journey of transcendence drew strength from the improvisational movement and healing arts, and constantly renews itself with profound commitment to indivisible love. In more recent years, his writing has been complemented by work on websites that serve free speech and humanitarian goals. Recognized as one of the most dedicated poets on the open microphone circuit, C.C. Arshagra received a Boston award for participating in the most open mikes in 2000. He is the author of Emotional Geography, Poems, Scared Sacred, Death of an Ego, What Manner of Character, and without returning to publishing he has not stopped writing for 20 years, including lyrics, YA and works for children. He founded the poetry art band Funk Physics, and is a veteran of both the improvisational movement arts and improvising live to jazz with the Jeff Robinson Trio with bassist Blake Newman, Ken Field’s Board of Education and Michael Caglianone’s Zen Bastards. His live improvisations include ID Poems, “inkless dialogue” work that exists in sound form only. He also has produced many radio and video shows for broadcast, including Stone Soup Poetry,
The I Do Not Know Show and other eclectic A/V art projects. Arshagra walks the walk, speaks soul to soul and is humbled by life as an artist. His canvas of creativity is expansive and his favorite mantra is
“Love is not afraid.”

As for his newest publication: the open microphone Arshagra delicately dances across dichotomies of time and space, as he explores the soul on its journey. His wild and wonderful ontology is expressed in both dark and light registers, at times searing, then tender. With the help of his implacable honesty, he traces how free speech develops character, and how the act of expression nurtures our deepest creative capacities. The work uncovers the naked, vulnerable depths of the open microphone, showing humans in search of a place to breathe freely. Underpinning the beauty of the poetry, is a philosophy of life and ethics, making this volume an innovative teaching tool for exploring issues of human rights and the deep potential of democracy. Beyond genres, using words sharper than knives and lighter than clouds, Arshagra seeks to reveal the universal meanings that shadow our faltering steps towards fulfillment and participation in the human drama.

When asked how do you correlate the many pathways of your creative life? The poetry, publishing and performing; the healing arts, the visual arts, the music, singing, and producing in the media arts? He answer the diversity is really a single focus upon the soul passage of life. By learning to how best face death alone in harmony with every exhales leaving. By choosing love indivisible. By allowing the path of artist both explore as if to live is to make art an act of love that lives beyond surviving the ends of the mind.

To let what other have said speak here, as it appears on the back cover of the open microphone poems / human rights, free speech and the word.
“... not simply heard–it is received. It resonates ... a ritual sharing, a moment of profound community that only the bare truth, masked in the vessel of artful lyrics, can ignite ...”
–Cate McQuaid, veteran Boston Globe Art Critic, writer and performer

“C.C. Arshagra is my kind of scholar”
–David Amram, musician, conductor and composer across classical, jazz and folk genres, Beat Generation Jazz/Poetry legend

“Arshagra delivers bold, razor-sharp observations of poets and poetry ... he shares the open-hearted truth ... the open microphone is one for the ages.”
–Ron Whitehead, Beat Poet Laureate of the United States, writer, editor, publisher, scholar, activist

“He reminds us that we are human... He makes the reader feel eternal, communal, and an essential ingredient ... in the multi-voiced story of the human tribe.”
–melissa christine goodrum, award-winning poet, author, editor

“a poetic ethnography ... captures this growing poetic renaissance ...
These venues also had their class, gender and racial dynamics that made this period more interesting.”
–Tony Menelik Van Der Meer, PhD, Africana Studies Department,
University of Massachusetts Boston

“When it comes to the open microphone, C.C. Arshagra wrote the Bible
... The hardest working man in poetry.”
–Jeff Robinson, saxophonist, actor, playwright, composer, legendary host of The Jeff Robinson Trio Poetry Jam

“A meta experience, akin to the layered recursions of songs about singers.”
--Ken Field, musician and composer