Dwarf Stars at Mac's!

Mac's at night
photo by Geoffrey A. Landis

One of the longest-running poetry reading series in Cleveland is the Second-Wednesday poetry reading at Mac's Backs on Coventry.

The August show of the Second-Wednesday poetry reading-- coming up this Wednesday!--will feature the poets of Dwarf Stars, including me, not to mention local poets and Dwarf Stars contributors Holly Jensen, dan smith,  J.E. Stanley and Mary A. Turzillo.

We will celebrate haiku, scifaiku, cinquains, ghazals, and other forms of short-short poetry. Come on over and join us-- you are encouraged to bring your own dwarf poetry to read during open mic!

Silly, serious, manic, inspired, poignant-- short poems can hit hard!

Dwarf Stars 2012.  Cover Art: "Once Beyond a Time" by overseer.deviantart.com

Dwarf Stars 2013. Cover Art: "Elephant"
by neisbeis.deviantart.com

The Professor of Horror and Haiku

a rare photograph of Professor Gage
not wearing his trademark purple bathrobe

Cleveland's Joshua Gage, haiku-master and MC of the long-running Deep Cleveland Poetry Hour, will be presenting "Vampires, Zombies and Cannibals, Oh My!: An Exploration of Horror in Haiku Based on Intervals of Fear" at the Haiku North America conference this month. HNA is the largest and oldest gathering of haiku poets in the United States and Canada.

"Horror is directly related to the idea of time, either stretching out time, condensing time, containing time, etc.  Gage will discuss this, and then show clips from horror movies, and explore how directors use these images and condense or expand time. Once it is established that the manipulation of time can create moments of horror, participants will mine these clips for imagery that could then be used to develop strong horrorku.  The conference theme describes intervals as "where humanity slows, observes, absorbs"--and Gage's premise is that haiku can manipulate time to create a more haunting and/or horrorific experience."

Congrats, Josh!

---

Manipulating time:

moments of horror

moments of haiku

---

• Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse by Joshua Gage

Clevelanders in the Eye's Body

You wouldn't know it, but Cleveland is seriously a hotbed of speculative poetry.  The Science Fiction Poetry Association has just came out with issue 9 of their online journal of speculative poetry, Eye to the Telescope. Each issue is a theme issue, and the latest, with guest editor Catherynne Valente, has a theme of "bodies:"

In science fiction and fantasy, the body is a battleground, a liminal space, a canvas, a friend, an enemy, an object, a subject, a transitory state, something to be left behind, something to be embraced, something to be denied, something to alter. All our experience begins in the body, and poetry, with its vivid, deep language, has always been uniquely situated to express the complicated relationship between the possessor of the body and the body itself. 

The issue has poetry by two local poets, with two poems by Marie Vibbert, and two more by Joshua Gage. Congrats to Marie and Josh!

The SFPA also publishes the anthology Dwarf Stars once a year, with the best short-short speculative poetry of the year (full disclosure: I edited it last year), where "short short" includes haiku, senryu, cinquains, scifaiku, and other miscellaneous poems of ten lines and under.  I just received this year's Dwarf Stars volume yesterday, and see poems by Mary A. Turzillo, dan smith, and me.

You want to hear what short-short speculative poetry is about?  You're in luck: next month five of the Dwarf-star poets will be doing a reading from Dwarf Stars (both the last issue, and this one) at the Second Wednesday Poetry Reading, August 14 at 7pm at Mac's Backs.  Come at 7 for the feature; but stay for the round-robin poetry that follows!

Or, if you can't wait, you can buy a copy for $5.00 (plus two dollars postage) from SFPA.

Dwarf Stars. Cover Art: "Elephant" by neisbeis.deviantart.com

Poetry of Witness

"Probing and powerful, Chernin's work digs deep"

On the Poetry Matters blog, Barbara Sabol reviews Shelley Chernin's chapbook The Vigil (from Crisis Chronicles press), and interviews Shelley:

"Some of the most powerful and memorable poetry reveals truths about the world—facts, figures, compass points on the map of human struggle, natural and man-made calamity, tyranny, war. The lyric impulse inherent in a poem pulls the reader, line by line, into a given sensibility; more effective, I believe, than any manifesto...  Such is also true of Shelley Chernin’s chapbook, The Vigil, which chronicles coal mining disasters in West Virginia and India, and the environmental and human toll of mining.  This is a poem of witness, a narrative sequence depicting coal mining in tangible and riveting lines. "

• Poetry of Witness: Review of The Vigil, by Shelley Chernin, and Interview with the Poet, by Barbara Sabol

What's poetry, anyway? Sara answers

Sara Holbrook writes,

Poetry can take a lot of different forms, but it is definitely not a cupcake.

Poetry is the water and flour.

Welcome to a New Blogger

A few weeks back, I'd posted a note asking for new bloggers, to add some fresh voices to clevelandpoetics.

 I'd like to welcome a new blogger to the team, Brandon Stroud.

Brandon is an Experimental Artist (Actor, Director, Poet, Event Planner, Entrepreneur) and Educator from Mentor, Ohio.

He writes:

As an artist, my primary medium is ‘Thought.’ My work allows me to be an explorer of the unknown depths of the human mind, traveling uncharted territories. My journey is never-ending [like ideas]. My discoveries are rich - often new forms of art or new modes of thinking.

I wish to be a pioneer  - probing the Last Frontier (The Imagination) - "adding to the stock of available reality," [R. P. Blackmur].

I am guided by the spirit of play and a sense of community. The essence of all my work is Simpleand Youthful,  Primitive and Ritualistic, Interactive and Multi-Sensory, Innovative and Experimental.

Don't think inside the box, don't think outside the box, think, there is no box.
 

Welcome, Brandon!

--and check out his site, experimental poetry, and his facebook page. 

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Crackerjack...

Let's talk about team sports for a minute. Let's set aside the Indians' tugging of our playoff hopes back and forth. Let's forget about the Browns' draft picks. NEO's Lake Effect Poetry Slam Team is heading to Boston for Nationals in a few weeks, and they need our full attention.

When I first started dipping my toes into the poetry reading scene, I didn't know anything about slam other than what I could glean from the comments of other poets and snippets of Def Poetry Jam I might have caught once or twice. I filled in the blanks with a lot of misconceptions.  Such as:

Poetry slam is for teenagers. Slam is like hip-hop. Slam is for street poets. Slam is not for little, Catholic, white girls. Slam poets need to rhyme their poems. Slam poets need to improv their poems. Slam poets need to memorize their poems. Slam poets...need to...recite their...poems...like this... Poetry slam is about pitting one artist against another in a mean-spirited fight. Poetry slam isn't "real" poetry.

I quickly learned that slam was none of those things I used to think it was.

Slam is a poetry performance competition. Some poems lend themselves more readily to performance competition than others, but there is no defined genre for slam. Slam showcases a skill that every poet in every venue needs:  the ability to not only write an effective poem, but to then read/perform it in an engaging manner. Yes, there are some bad slam poems, but there are also some bad academic poems. And some of the best slam poems I've heard were on page.

Fast forward six years from those first open mics, and I found myself in Charlotte, NC for the 2012 National Poetry Slam, as Northeast Ohio's Grand Slam Champion. It was thrilling, terrifying, and inspiring to be around so many poets, to hear so many different voices, to be in front of so many different people.  Writing is a solitary activity, but slam is a team sport--a team sport with a national community.

National Poetry Slam is a chance for poets to stand in front of people from across the country and show off what we're doing here at home. And with this year's team--AKeemjamal Rollins, Caira Lee, Ariana Cheree, and Christine Howey--Boston's going to be buzzing about Cleveland.

But Lake Effect is still short of funds needed to get to Boston. The good news is that they have a handful of fundraiser events coming up in the next couple weeks before they leave. The better news is that you still have a chance to hear their poetry before they leave. Check out the schedule of Lake Effect fundraisers and readings, wish them well on their trip, and root root root for the home team!

Help Wanted! You Wanna Be a Blogger?

Help Wanted!

You wanna be a blogger?
We need you! Yes, you!
 You could be famous in the neighborhood! 

The clevelandpoetics blog needs new contributors.  This blog is not a one-person show, it's a collaborative effort of a raft of volunteers, and we're short on help.  We rely on you-- the poetic community of Cleveland-- to contribute.   Every year I see new voices beginning to speak in the Cleveland poetry community, and we need to hear what you have to say.  Join us!

You got something to say?  We're waiting to hear it!  You go to poetry readings, want to make comments on the local poetry scene, want to share your opinions on contemporary poetry?  Join us!  You think that the blog sucks rocks, and think you could do better?  We'd like to see you try!

We want you! We need you!   We can't live without you!

Tell us about the Cleveland poetry scene, about your muse, about trying to write in a cold-blooded city, about asphalt and poetry; tell us about our sports-obsessed, poetry-infested, hot-blooded city,

Do I need to say it again? Well, we want you! Yes, you!  You know who you are.

If you'd like to join the blogging team here at clevelandpoetics, we're open: leave a note in the comments, or drop me an email and say so!

No pay, just glory, and the chance to express yourself. Join the team!

Haiku at Haiku

... Three Views of Love in 5-7-5

Last weekend we went to Haiku ("poetic food and art) in Columbus, a restaurant featuring (among other things) a box filled with pieces of colored scratch paper on each table, for the people in the restaurant to write their own haiku as they ate.  The restaurant had a stacks of the writings people had left behind pinned with clothes-pins to pillars.

Most of the contributions, of course, weren't haiku, but just little memos with the date and names of the people, or notes saying "I love this place," or doodles of cats or fish.  A few, though, were rather charming.  A Valentine request asking a multiple-choice response in 5-7-5 form:

 

Or a somewhat scarier vision of love:

 

But then, this one seems to gets more directly to the point:

Cowper the damned

Robert Pinsky asks, "Why are William Cowper's poems so witty?"

and answers himself: because Cowper was convinced he was already damned.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him "the best modern poet", although he seems rather quaint and forgotten today.

Still, in these days when so many people seem to speak for God, it seems to me that Cowper's admonition in "Abuse of The Gospel" is as cogent as ever:

  Too many, Lord, abuse Thy grace
  In this licentious day,
  And while they boast they see Thy face,
  They turn their own away.

• Poems of William Cowper
• William Cowper bio
• William Cowper

Contest Opens Monday

Details here...

Happy summer, everyone.

Experimental Poetics Manifesto!

Artist/poet B.M. Stroud first came to my attention when his performance of his experimental visual/audio poem won the Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest in 2012.

Now he's published a manifesto: "Experimental Poetics: Where are the Poetic Pioneers?"

Sound interesting?  To keep up with what he's up to, check his page Stroud: experimental artist.

A Fiery Flying Roule

 http://www.z2ogalleria.it/opere-ekaterina-panikanova

Poems Retrieved by Frank O’Hara

 

 Sherman Alexie Versus Grammar Cops

 

 Posted  to the tumblr A Fiery Flying Roule is a new poem from Tom Raworth in response to the U.S. security breach; he calls it “Just a quick doodle with some of the trigger-words in the Department of Homeland Security ‘Analyst Desktop Binder.’”


Carlos Fuentes' FBI file

Inside Coach House Press

 

Mystery book sculptures still sprouting across Scotland

 

 Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

 Some Realms I Owned: Elizabeth Bishop in Manhattan

POET ON NEW YORK

A newly translated interview with Federico García Lorca by Luis Méndez Domínguez from 1933.

Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He's Always Been

The Public Life of Poetry: An Interview with Natasha Trethewey

Support the Lake Effect!

Lake Effect Poetry is the Cleveland Akron and Canton slam poetry team.

The new Lake Effect Poetry 2013 Team Anthology has been printed -- spread the word! This anthology features poetry from your 2013 Lake Effect Poetry slam team: AKeemjamal Rollins, Christine Howey, Caira Lee, and Arianna Cheree, and also poems from the local greats such as Redd's, Eris Zion Venia, Theresa Göttl, Carla Thompson, Skylark Bruce, Joshua Gage, and Azriel Johnson, not to mention a cover by, uh, that would be me. And, the money raised by sales of the book goes towards a good cause-- getting our team to National Poetry Slam in August!  Boston, look out: the Lake Effect is coming!
Only ten dollars, including shipping-- order it now.

(and, for the full set-- order the 2012 Lake Effect anthology for only $6.00, or buy 'em both for $15!)

Harper's asks: Why is Modern Poetry so Bad?

Why is Modern Poetry so Bad?

According to Ron Charles in the Washington Post's style blog,  Harper's magazine just hit the stands with a 6,000 word essay by Mark Edmondson, "Poetry Slam, or, The Decline of American Verse" asking that very question.

“oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning . . . timid, small, in retreat . . . ever more private, idiosyncratic, and withdrawn.”

Hit 'em, Professor Mark!  “They simply aren’t good enough. They don’t slake a reader’s thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common.”

“'You must play the game that is there to be played,' Edmundson writes. To get the fellowship, the first book, the teaching job, the new poet 'had best play it safe, offend none.'”

I don't think he's been to Cleveland, but hey, can't be everywhere.

With their insistence on the impermeable barriers of race, gender and class, these liberal post-modernists keep anyone from saying anything about anything but his own private world. “How dare a white male poet speak for anyone but himself. . . . How can he raise his voice above a self-subverting whisper?” 

So, are modern poets bad?  Or just the ones published in the reviews that Edmondson reads?

-and, ha!  Barely has the Charles article hit the web, then the huff responds with an article by Seth Abramson,  "Why Is Contemporary Poetry So Good?"

Olbviously he must read different poets than Edmundson!

Let's fight!

• The Style blog: Why is Modern Poetry so Bad?
• Huffington Post: Why Is Contemporary Poetry So Good?

Third Thursday Poetry in Cuyahoga Falls

Poetry Video

With a personal video revolution that's been ongoing for years now, there is a heck of a lot of video of cleveland poetry out in the world, and being loaded up on the web.

The Literary Cafe in Tremont has held a reading series for years (now they're the host for one of the Writing Knights events).  They have whole pages full of videos, including a page of older videos of readings and slams dating back to the '90s. 

Poet's Haven has also taken a lot of video, and check out John Burroughs' Crisis Chronicles for yet more, or John Burroughs' youtube channel.

And the Lake Effect Poetry slam team has some video on the web-- check out their videos of the slam team qualifiers on Ustream, or watch the Lake Effect team perform at the Rustbelt Poetry Slam in Columbus.

It's not the same as being there, but there sure is a heck of a lot of video of Cleveland poetry out there.

Savage Chickens!

"Savage Chickens" by Doug Savage

www.savagechickens.com/2008/10/poetry-blog.html

Can a Robot tell whether a Poet's a Pro?

Man, I doubt it.  But when I saw this, I had to try it out:

Poetry Assessor
The application is designed to determine whether a poem has the characteristics of a professional poem or, alternatively, an amateur poem... To score your poem, copy and paste the poem into the text box and click the Calculate button. Positive scores indicate that a poem has characteristics of a professional poem while negative scores indicate that the poem has the characteristics of an amateur poem. 

First one I tried pasting in, a rhyming poem about Leprechauns, got a +0.12 -- barely on the "pro" side of neutral.  I tried a non-rhyming poem, and got a 2.2 (almost as pro as Sylvia Plath!), then another rhyming poem (about death), getting a -1.5.  One more, not rhyming, and I beat Sylvia with a 2.5.

So I gave up.

Give it a click and try it yourself!

The method the computer program uses to analyze whether a poem "has the characteristics of a professional poem" is described in a pdf here. (Actually, if you're interested in linguistic analysis, their discussion of how they did their analysis to determine what characteristics successful poems had compared to amateur poems is quite fascinating.  Even if the "Analyze my Poem" application is more of a party game for poets than a real tool for telling good from bad.)

One Mic Open: An Imitation of Live

An Open Mic Session for youth across Cleveland and surrounding areas.

Participants: 13-19 years old
Audience: 0-Eternity

$3.00 for Students
$5.00 for adults

Friday, June 7th @ Negative Space Art Gallery (3820 Superior Avenue. Cleveland, Ohio, 44114)

Doors Open @ 6pm
Performances: 7:00pm-9:30pm
After party: 9:30pm-11:00pm

One Mic Open: An Imitation of Live is a 45-minute choreopoem and Open Mic. session presented by the Concrete OrKids, a performance poetry group from the Cleveland School of the Arts Creative Writing Department.

One Mic Open is one of the only events of its kind in Northeast Ohio because it is written, produced, hosted, marketed, and promoted BY youth FOR youth ages 13-19.

For more information visit the Concrete OrKids Facebook page.

Leave us a message if you or someone you know would like to sign up early for the Open Mic.

YOUTH SPEAK!!!

The Epic of d.a. levy

Vertigo commented, of the "underground" style of poets, that "They are inspired by the beat generation, Ginsberg, etc. Most of these poets here in Cleveland worship at the altar of d.a. levy."

Well, it's true-- despite all the poetry activity in Cleveland, the poet whose name is most closely associated with the city is still d.a. levy.  It's worth reposting a link to Cleveland Magazine's "The Epic of d.a. levy".

Levy: epic rabblerouser, or self-centered jerk?  You decide.

More?  Try:

• Cleveland Magazine's list of d.a. levy links.
• d.a. levy collection at Cleveland Memory Project 
• d.a. levy home page at thing.net

 & everyone knows
sleeping with the muse
is only for young poets
after you've been kept impotent
by style & form & words like "art"
after being published by the RIGHT publishers
and having all the right answers
after youve earned the right to call yrself
a poet      yr dead & lying on yr back
drinking ceremonial wine, while
the muse, who is always a young girl
with old eyes into the universe
suddenly remembers necrophilia
is an experience shes had before
& shes not interrested
in straddling corpses anymore

--d.a. levy

The hardest working man in poetry?

Vertigo XX
photo by GL

I just ran across Carla Thompson's post in vatic muse, saying our friend Vertigo Xi'an Xavier is "the hardest working man in poetry."  Yeah, I can believe that-- the guy started the poet's haven website back when he was in high school (it's now the second-oldest poetry site on the web)-- and only took of from there.  Horray for Vertigo.

"Vertigo Xavier just finished publishing a chapbook, copy editing for a second chapbook, making a promotional poster, organizing a fundraiser, and updating his website. All while you were sleeping last night...."

Some Amazing reviews

A couple of Cleveland poets who write poetry toward the speculative direction in the geography of poetry have recently gotten reviews from Diane Severson in Amazing Stories.

Cleveland's haiku master Joshua Gage's new chapbook, Inhuman: Haiku from the Zombie Apocalypse (OR Inhuman: Zombie Haiku in Four Acts) (just out from The Poet’s Haven, as No. 18 in the Poet’s Haven Author Series) was reviewed in the most recent issue.  Diane writes:
"This is a volume to enjoy as a brief diversion on a stormy night and also to pull out each October in preparation for Hallowe’en."

At six dollars for a copy, it's a bargain for any poetry fans with an interest in haiku, or in horror.  And it's not too early to start thinking of gifts to give your friends and family for World Zombie day!

And Mary Turzillo's book Lovers and Killers (which has been mentioned here before) also rated a good review from Diane in the April Amazing: 
"I really like Mary Turzillo’s writing style. It’s less formal than many poets in her syntax and word choices, which makes it easy to read.  It’s a book that could be ripped through, it’s so easy to read, but its many-layered nature benefits from a bit more leisure."

Ten bad poems for every good one.

Kathleen Flenniken says, "ten bad poems for every good one."

Sounds right.

What's Your Day Job?

On NPR, David Orr points out that, since (mostly) poetry doesn't pay the bills, poets have day jobs. 

"No man but a blockhead," Samuel Johnson famously observed, "ever wrote, except for money." This is tough news for poets, since the writing they do is often less immediately profitable than a second-grader's math homework (the kid gets a cookie or a hug; the poet gets a rejection letter from The Kenyon Review). Poetry itself is tremendously valuable, of course, but that value is often realized many years after a poem's composition, and sometimes long after the end of its author's life.
In the meantime, everyone has to eat. So unless you win the lottery, being a poet means finding a job that can support the writing of poems.

From banker (T.S. Eliot) to undertaker (Thomas Lynch), working at a job has in one way or another influenced their poetry, for some quite obviously, and for others more subtly.

• David Orr, "From Dissections To Depositions, Poets' Second Jobs."

"Day Jobs of the Poets"
from Incidental Comics:
words and pictures by
Grant Snider