Friday, December 27, 2013

Poetry of Ohio brings more poets to Ohio

The Poetry of Ohio series continues:

from Joshua Ware...
After a successful inaugural year for the Poets of Ohio course and reading series--which brought Mary Biddinger, Frank Giampietro, Sarah Gridley, Cathy Wagner, and Dana Ward to CWRU's campus--we have another wonderful line-up scheduled for the upcoming semester. I would encourage you to attend as many events as possible and spread the word to anyone in the northeast Ohio area that might have an interest in poetry, literature, or cultural events.
All readings--which are followed by lively Q-an-A sessions--will run from 6:00pm to 7:15pm on Thursday evenings (with the exception of the Lucas reading).
Please note that events will take place in one of two different locations this year: the readings on 06 Feb, 18 Mar, and 27 Mar will take place in the Guilford Hall Parlor; while the readings on 30 Jan, 13 Feb, and 10 Apr will be held in Room 206 of Clarke Hall:
  • Thursday, January 30: Catherine Wing 
  • Thursday, February 06: Matt Hart 
  • Thursday, February 13: Heather Christle
  • Tuesday, March 18: Dave Lucas 
  • Thursday, March 27: Tyrone Williams 
  • Thursday April 10: Larissa Szporluk 
A dedicated link to the reading schedule and poet bios can be found at the reading series/course website: http://ussy289eware.blogspot.com/2013/12/2014-reading-series-schedule.html


Poet Catherine Wing was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and attended Brown University before earning her MFA from the University of Washington. Her collections of poetry include Enter Invisible (2005), nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Gin & Bleach (2012). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, the Nation, and the Chicago Review and has been featured in a number of anthologies, including Best American Poetry (2010). Wing has received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and teaches poetry at Kent State.
Matt Hart is the author of five books of poems, Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006), Wolf Face (H_NGM_N Books, 2010), Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011), Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012), and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013), as well as several chapbooks. Additionally, his poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Big Bell, Cincinnati Review, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, jubilat, Lungfull!, and Post Road, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL.
Heather Christle is the author of What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. She has taught poetry at Antioch College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Dave Lucas is the author of Weather (Georgia, 2011), which received the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry, and is a co-founder and co-curator of the Brews + Prose literary series at Market Garden Brewery. Recently Rita Dove selected him to be featured on BillMoyers.com as a “young poet to watch.” A PhD candidate in English at the University of Michigan, he lives in Cleveland, where he was born and raised.
Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of five books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press, 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and Howell (Atelos Books, 2011). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including a prose eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/
Larissa Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and earned degrees at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow. Her books of poetry include Dark Sky Question (1998), which won the Barnard Poetry Prize; Isolato (2000), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind (2003); Embryos and Idiots (2007); and Traffic with Macbeth (2011). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently teaches at Bowling Green State University.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Bilgere interviewed

Cleveland Height's George Bilgere is profiled and interviewed in the January Cleveland Magazine



George Bilgere and Garrison Keillor
Issue Date: January 2014 Issue  
Free Verse
Cleveland Heights poet George Bilgere tackles aging and America in his latest collection.
Barry Goodrich 

George Bilgere describes himself as "a middle-aged, middle-class guy living in middle America."
...

Q. What can be conveyed through poetry that can't be communicated through prose?
A. It's about compression and concision. A 16-line poem can be an entire universe, an entire history. In James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," you can experience an entire town in a few lines. Making a little collection of words as powerful as you can is the magic of poetry.
...

  • Read the full article here.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

A little help...

Hey, folks. Am I the only one who thinks this site could use a massive redesign? I've had a contributor account here for years now and it's come down to only the google calendar being relevant on any given listless night or day.

I'd like to see what other subscribers, contributors and viewers think of this. The blog does little in outreach outside of Cleveland, honestly, and hasn't for a long time.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Cinquain: Three things invisible



Check out Postcard Poems and Prose-- a site that matches up poetry with images.  If you've got a color printer, you can send out poetry postcards!

We want you to find prose, poems, and art all in a 4×6 postcard format. We want you to be able to stand and look at that revolving wire rack that’s in every tourist trap on earth. We want you see it from your laptop or handheld device. Just like the postcards of yesteryear, we want you to be able to share that experience with friends. We want it to be quirky and personal. And we want it to be great.


Friday, December 13, 2013

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Hart Crane and Cleveland

At the poetry foundation blog, Harriett Staff writes:

Cleveland, Ohio, and Hart Crane
by Harriett Staff

Hart Crane, one of America’s most mythologized poets, had a lifelong love/hate relationship with Cleveland, where he was raised. The Los Angeles Review of Books’s Anne Trubek calls him “not a New York poet but a Cleveland poet: a mess of a thing, a striving wreck of promise and all too human failings:”
At seventeen he wanted out of Cleveland, and he left for New York. He would soon return. And he would repeat that pattern for another decade, coming back to Cleveland when he was broke and needed a job, or at the behest of his needy mother, or because he wanted to. He worked at a munitions plant on the waterfront, working seventeen-hour days six days a week tightening bolts. (C.A. always gave him lowly jobs to test his mettle, a test Crane always failed.) That job didn’t last long — nor did his job as a camp counselor, or as a riveter for another war-related plant. The first world war ended right when it looked like he would be drafted. He wrote a poem about the armistice that was published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who then hired him as a cub reporter. He lasted seven weeks. He went back to New York, and then came back home again.
…In Cleveland, he supervised bulk storage. He had affairs. He went out on “mad carouses” that began with “pigs’ feet and sauerkraut” and ended in his tower, where he played classical music for his arty friends. At one point someone in town found out about his penchant for sailors and truck drivers. Crane paid $10 week, out of his $25 weekly wage, to buy the man’s silence.
Read more about Crane and his hometown here.


Cited...

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau