November 15th: Get Sharp! 2025 Ohio Poetry Publishing Conference

Join the Ohio Poetry Association on November 15th from 10 to 4:30 at the Cuyahoga County Public Library's South Euclid-Lyndhurst branch for an absolutely free Ohio Poetry Publishing Conference. Registration and more details at https://attend.cuyahogalibrary.org/event/13881294.

Get Sharp! will include an Ohio small press book fair and fab workshop presentations by Dianne Borsenik, Geoff Anderson, Michael Salinger, and Susan Grimm.

Creating Order

In The White Space Inside the Poem, Susan Grimm addresses the question of order: specifically, in what order should a poet arrange their poems?

• Is Order Important?

Of course, she is coming back to a subject she has addressed before: Ordering the Storm: How to put together a book of poems. And others have looked at the subject as well: the helicopter view, the mix-tape strategy.

You can order by theme, by date, by alternating long and short, or alternating serious and frivolous poems. You can put similar-themed poems next to each other, or you can sprinkle them out, or bookend a collection with poems on the same theme.

At a reading, I like to try to alternate the serious with the silly; the rhymed with the free.  But sometimes it's good to just find a theme and develop it.

In all, it's a question of whether a book of poetry is a selection of individual gems, or a single unified thing.  One thing, or many?  In the mix-tape view, is this a rock opera, or a collection of singles?

Anyone else have thoughts to add?

Troubled poems

Poet Susan Grimm writes about troublesome poems: (a partial follow-up to her earlier post, How I Thought/Think About Poems I Write):

• The poem that is there but in disguise... The poem that is not yet there...

What do you do when the poem's giving you trouble? Tough love? Let it go? Give it more attention? Try to ignore it?

"How I thought/think about poems..."

image by GL

Nice imagery in the post by Susan Grimm about writing poetry, in her blog "The White Space Inside the Poem"

"I was trying to write a poem that was solid, all of a piece, weighty as a stone that I could drop into the vast water of a reader's attention. There would be that satisfying plop noise and then the rings travelling out all the way to the invisible beyond...."

Dr. Seuss is not a Poet

I've been mulling over Susan Grimm's essay, posted last month, arguing that "roses are red" is not a poem; and neither are the works of Shel Silverstein nor Dr. Seuss.
I'm pretty sure I disagree. (Uncle Shel?  Not poetry? How can it be?)- but it's worth looking at and arguing. What is a poem, anyway?

• Roses are Sometimes Not Red or Why Dr. Seuss Doesn't Write Poems

A rare pairing of two NorthCentral Ohio poets

A rare pairing of two NorthCentral Ohio poets...Susan Grimm and Larry Smith.
Larry reading a poem from Lake Winds: Poems

Artist Talks and Ekphrastacy at Heights Arts on September 25th

 

Join us for an evening with Isabel Farnsworth, associate professor of sculpture at Kent State University, and Hui-Chu Ying, professor of printmaking at University of Akron, who will share insights about their works on view in the gallery, artistic process and vision.

Poets Dianne Borsenik, John Donoghue, Sarah Gridley, Susan Grimm, and Mary Quade will also read new works inspired by select sculptures and works on paper in the exhibition. FREE. 

Heights Arts 
2175 Lee Road
Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118
(216) 371-3457

Best Poets in Cleveland

CBS Cleveland lists their choices for the best poets in Cleveland.

Ray McNiece
www.raymcniece.com

George Bilgere
www.georgebilgere.com

Susan Grimm
www.thewhitespaceinsidethepoem.blogspot.com

Sarah Gridley
www.case.edu/artsci/engl/Gridley/Gridley.html

Phil Metres

www.philipmetres.com

Agree?  Disagree?

• Best Local Poets In Cleveland

Everett, Nichols, Roberts, Suarez & Grimm: 4/20&21/2011

Fore more information on 4/20's Lix & Kix event, click here.


For more information on 4/21's Avon Lake reading, click here.

Exhibit/Reading tonight (1/21) at Zygote Press

From Claire McMahon: "Please come to the opening of Intersections tonight. The opening begins at 7pm, and at 8pm, the poetry reading will begin. Poets will read from poems that have been chosen for the show.

Poets involved are : Eric Anderson, John Donoghue, Thomas Dukes, Sarah Gridley, Susan Grimm, Claire McMahon, Ray McNiece, Phil Metres, and Lou Suarez. Come down to see the visual/verbal displays!"

Zygote Press Fine Art Print Making

1410 East 30th Street, Cleveland, OH 44114

(216) 621-2900

Event page on Facebook

NEO Poet Field Guide

Full name: Susan Grimm

Age: 56

Habitat: Lakewood, Ohio

Range: Cleveland State University, my front porch, water (chlorinated or lake)

Diet: Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Shelley, Pablo Neruda, Jorie Graham, D.A. Powell, Theodore Roethke, too many others.

Distinguishing Markings: Lake Erie Blue (2004), Almost Home (1997), Ordering the Storm: How to Put Together a Book of Poems--editor (2007)

Predators: I don't think anything's hunting me down. Time? Inertia?


Prey: Readers?

Call:

Particle-Drop-Breath-Ray

Sea weed, flexible walleye bones, empty
shells, draggled gull feathers. Rain falls
like the color of the sun, accumulates.

Two-legged, stripped down to essentials (but
not too far), we wade into the water, reverse
ice to the drink, the waves trying to wear us

down, longing to serve us up like pips
on this margin of melted beach. The wind whistles
through our teeth, the sand grinds them down.

In the honeypot of the sun, headache-y, blasted
with thirst, we should be learning about excess,
the salt coming up to crust us as if each beach

were the ocean. We genuflect with our beads
of sweat to the salt whisper and the shelving
tongue that made us, here at the crux—the sun

like a peach above our glowing convoluted heads,
bodies of water swaying, our feet momentarily
stilled in the scratchy reactive electric fuzz.



Contact: sjgrimm@gmail.com