365 Days of Writing at Writing Knights

Azriel Johnson, at Writing Knights, has started a year-long series of exercises for how to write poetry (but also somewhat applicable to other types of creative writing), with a post every day, starting the beginning of May. (The series is also reposted at NEOpoets.org).  So far, the series has gotten to week eight.
If you want to learn poetry-- or if you're already a poet, but might like some exercises as a tune-up-- or if you just like to read about poetry-- check it out.

• Introduction: a Pretentious Attempt at Instruction
• Introduction: Your Own Form
• Week One: Originality
• Week Two: Emotional Content
• Week Three: Habituation
• Week Four: Expression
• Week Five: Form Poetry
• Week Six: Free Verse Poetry
• Week Seven: Enjambment
• Week Eight: Prose Poetry
• Week Nine: Caesura
• Week Ten: Focus and Emphasis
• Week Eleven: Rhyming
• Week Twelve: Alliteration
• Week Thirteen: Assonance
• Week Fourteen: Meter
• Week Fifteen: Showing vs Telling
• Week Sixteen: Using Your Senses
• Week Seventeen: Colors
• Week Eighteen: Actions
• Week Nineteen: Details
• Week Twenty: Using Stronger Words
• Week Twenty-one: Profanity & Slang
• Week Twenty-two: Self-Censorship & Intention
• Week Twenty-three: Metaphor vs Simile
• Week Twenty-four: Academic Poetry
• Week Twenty-five: Nature
• Week Twenty-six: Intellectual Content
• Week Twenty-seven: Internal Editor
• Week Twenty-eight: Underground-Street
• Week Twenty-nine: Lyrics
• Week Thirty: Juxtaposition

Link to the entire series
alternate link (NEOpoets)

Writers and the Libraries of Northeast Ohio

Northeast Ohio has one thing to be proud of: we have one of the best library systems in the nation.  Diane Kendig loves libraries, and takes us on a tour of her Favorite Northeast Ohio Libraries for Writers:

• Introduction
• Skirball Writers Center at the Cuyahoga County Public Library
• Contemporary Poetry & Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library
• Greg L Reese Performing Arts Center and More at East Cleveland Public Library
• Teen Writing Group and other services at Canal Fulton Public Library
• Writers' Series and Writers' website at Stark County District Library

Canal Fulton Public Library

Words from Jane Hirschfield

• ABOUT
 
• INTERVIEWS

“How do we live in the great meanwhile, in which all our lives take place?”

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Interviewed By: Kaveh Akbar

Read the interview

Quotes

Language is the species’ shared quarry and cache.

Poetry’s effect on our lives resists counting, resists commodification.

You can find the true coin of the realm, if you go looking for it.

It really doesn’t matter to me why a great poem was written. I just want to read the poem.

If a poem holds only what we already understand and are comfortable with, we wouldn’t need the poem.

I don’t like using even the word ‘spiritual,’ though I know no other way to signal a certain quadrant of being.

So many people came that the campus fire department forced some to leave.

How do we live in the great meanwhile, in which all our lives take place? I think poems help with that.

We live in an outward-facing time. But not everything can happen on YouTube. Some poetry, at least, must continue to preserve the interiority that allows the heart and mind its more tentative, and more tender, experiments.

For every moment you ask of your reader’s attention, you must try to repay them with more. A good poem holds more than a gallon of water in a gallon-sized bucket. 

A poem starts with a fact, an observation, a sentence, an event that becomes the precipitating dust the raindrop then forms around. But if you want to be rained on, you need some way to bring it into life, into interconnection.

I’ve been cooking artichokes for forty years now, and for the first time, one was needed for a poem. We’ve been at war since 2003. Ten years of war, when I wrote that poem, and it still hasn’t ended.

On The Hatred of Poetry

On The Hatred of Poetry
"The thesis of The Hatred of Poetry is as clear as it is counter-intuitive: people hate poetry because they hold it in such high esteem—and poems fail to fulfill their lofty promise."

• Poetry Foundation: Excerpt from  The Hatred of Poetry
• Bomb- Artists in conversation: Ben Lerner and Ariana Reines 

RIP to Ali

Rest in peace to poet Muhammad Ali.  Possibly better known as a boxer, it is a little-known trivia that Muhammed Ali was a member of the old Poet's League of Greater Cleveland.

• "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee"

Markets Where to Submit

Markets

WHERE TO SUBMIT: JUNE + JULY:

• Entropy Mag: Where to Submit June/July
• Aerogramme Studio: opportunities for writers june and july 2016

An Erie poet visits Cleveland's Barking Spider Tavern for the first time to attend the 2016 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest and writes a poem about the experience

MY FIRST VISIT

by Chuck Joy

not my last

the same parking ramp

I made my way to the shrine

no madonna, not even a grotto

a tavern, a drinking place

named after a species of jungle arthropod

limited food options

it’s midafternoon

the joint soon to overfill

maybe only one guy without his poem included in the anthology

selling like hotcakes, a woman at the griddle

I sat at a table in the back

three of us: me, a guy like me

white tee-shirt, him with no jacket

and a poet from Erie

my turn came around halfway

I gave an honest reading

maybe that crowd would have preferred their poet

wearing a visor and hunched over the microphone

delivering his message in an antique drone

yellow glow pouring from a lamp with a metal shade

they liked me okay

the host, experienced, kept us to our agenda

the judges completed their work

winners were chosen

I might have toasted them with more porter

if I weren’t a designated driver

Chuck Joy [photo by Chandra Alderman]

Chuck Joy is the author of Said the Growling Dog (Nirala Publications). From Erie, where he frequents Poets' Hall, Chuck has brought his poetry to Mac's Backs, Mahall's 20 Lanes, and has appeared at every Snoetry. His poem "The Call of The Water" was included in the 2016 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Anthology published by Crisis Chronicles Press.

The Barking Spider Tavern is located at 11310 Juniper Road in Cleveland.