Mix

I have a friend who, in lieu of sending Christmas cards, burns mix CDs of new music that he’s discovered throughout the year, and mails them to all of his friends.

Although not particularly adept at the art of the mix CD myself, I’m a strong believer in the mix CD. I think it’s a great way to cheer up a friend, celebrate occasions large or small, or convey a sense of your personality to a potential romantic interest. (I even have a friend who teaches high school and told one of her students that he could earn extra credit by making her a really good mix CD.) But even more importantly, the mix CD gives you the chance to share new music with someone who would otherwise not have been aware of that artist. I’ve discovered many a “favorite” singer or band through friends who have passed along mix CDs.

I mention all this because a few days ago, I found myself wishing for a poetry-equivalent of the mix CD. I often find poems that I want to share with friends, and I usually just end up typing out the poem in an email or sending a text message with a few lines. (For “Poem in Your Pocket Day,” I texted a haiku to about two dozen friends, mostly non-poets.) But I’m wondering if anyone has a better suggestion for sharing new poetry discoveries. Short of buying a book to give to someone, how do you share a new poet or a specific poem or two with friends? In the spirit of National Poetry Month and turning more people on to the poetic craft, how do you spread the appreciation of poetry? Do we have a poetry equivalent of the mix CD?

Bringing Out Your Big Guns

On the Beatnik trail in Mexico City

Excerpts from Letters of Sylvia Beach include the pioneering Paris bookseller’s correspondence with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Richard Wright, William Carlos Williams, and others.

Every librarian is caught between "two mythical places—the Perfect Library of God and the Infinite Library of Babel, the one transcribed by Jerome, the other by Borges.”

New Directions Publishing offers an "exclusive brand-new, never-before-published poem" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti Entitled "At Sea," - inscribed for Paublo Neurada - the poem begins: "The sea through the trees / distant / shining. . ."

As the first president of the EU, Herman Van Rompuy has struggled to make his voice heard on the world stage. But as "Haiku Herman", the writer of poetry covering topics from mating toads to birdsong, the understated Belgian's voice finally emerged yesterday with the launch of his first body of work to an expectant audience.

For three years, Paul Harding’s unpublished novel, “Tinkers,’’ sat in a drawer. The writer, a former Boston rock drummer who grew up in Wenham, had tried selling it, but nobody was interested.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be a writer who doesn’t publish,’ ’’ Harding, 42, said this week, a day after “Tinkers’’ earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction — the first book by a small publisher to do so in nearly three decades.

The Tattooed Poets Project

Bad Translator! - Funny Free Translation Tool

Sometimes it is a wonder that we can communicate at all...

Bad Translator! - Funny Free Translation Tool

Kay Ryan reads "Is It Modest?" in Cleveland

U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan reads her poem "Is It Modest?" during the Cleveland Public Library's Writers & Readers Series at the Louis Stokes Wing auditorium on Sunday 18 April 2010 in Cleveland, Ohio. This amateur video by John Burroughs, a.k.a. Jesus Crisis, is posted for educational purposes only. "Is It Modest?" comes from Kay Ryan's 2010 book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (published by Grove Press).

For a schedule of upcoming Writers & Readers events hosted by the Cleveland Public Library, please visit http://writersandreaders.cpl.org.

* * *

What Not to Do When You Get a Rejection Letter

What Not to Do When You Get a Rejection Letter: insults and sarcasm.

Poetry Reading at Joseph-Beth, Lyndhurst

Bottom Dog Press Poetry Anthology will be celebrated at the April 21st National Poetry Reading held at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lyndhurst at 7 pm. Come and hear a variety of poets read. Support the art of poetry in our area. You're invited...Larry Smith

Pudding House: call for submissions, Ohio Childhood Poems

Call for Submissions: Ohio Childhood Poems

Children are shaped by the places they live and the events they experience. This collection will gather work that documents how poets were shaped or influenced by growing up in one particular Midwest state. On its north coast, Ohio is a Great Lakes state where it shares a border with Canada; on the east and south, it is Appalachian mountains and foothills, forests and rivers; to its west, it flattens into the beginning of the plains, squared with farms. Demographically, Ohio has its rich cosmopolitan centers, its suburbs surrounding its cities, its bounty of small towns, its agricultural diversity from truck farms to family farms. Yet it also has cultural diversity and rich heritages that decorate the quilt that is Ohio. Poems of place and on characters might be especially welcomed for this collection. Name the people, places, brands, businesses, landmarks, institutions, locations that impacted your life as a child and your life as a poet. The collection will be edited by Robert Miltner of Kent State University and published by Pudding House Publications in Columbus, Ohio.

Guidelines:

Poets should have spent at least five years of their childhood in Ohio.

Beginning, emerging and established poets are equally invited.

Submit no more than four poems.

Include author contact information-- name, address, phone number, email-- on each submission.

Include a short contributor's note (under 150 words) about your Ohio connection; keep publication comments brief.

No simultaneous submissions.

Previously published poems considered if poet holds copyright and publication information (journal, issue, year, page or website) is provided. No fees will be paid for reprinting.

Rights revert back to author upon publication.

Electronic submissions only.

Send submissions to ohiochildhood@gmail.com. Put your last name first in the subject line, followed by "submission." Attach your poem(s) in a word file AND paste the poem(s) in 12 point font in the body of the email. Only submissions that follow the guidelines will be considered.

Deadline for submissions is EXTENDED to August1, 2010.

For questions, contact editor at ohiochildhood@gmail.com Put "Question" in the subject line.

-----

(I should note that I am not affiliated with this anthology, or with Pudding House, in any way-- I'm just passing this along because I thought some of the poets here might be interested in submitting.)

America Scores – Poetry and Soccer

WEST SIDE 5TH-GRADE STUDENTS SET TO TRAVEL TO NYC FOR NATIONAL POETRY COMPETITION

Two Cleveland students will represent the city on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at America SCORES National Poetry SLAM!

CLEVELAND, OH – Two students from Walton K-8 School on Cleveland’s near West Side will represent America SCORES Cleveland on Monday, April 19 at the Fourth Annual National Poetry SLAM! in New York City. Gonzalo Villafan and Amairani Valerio, both age 11 and Cleveland Metropolitan School District fifth-graders, will perform their original works of poetry on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange along with 26 poet-athletes from the other 13 America SCORES affiliate cities.

Gonzalo and Amairani were chosen to represent America SCORES Cleveland (ASC) last November at ASC’s 2009 Poetry SLAM! held at John Hay High School. Judges selected the two from 16 individual poet-athletes who shared their original works before an audience of over 500.

“I am excited to show what I feel inside of me. Poetry allows me to do that,” shared Gonzalo when asked about his upcoming performance.

This freedom of expression has helped Gonzalo conquer his fears in the classroom, on stage and even in the doctor’s office. Gonzalo translates for his parents, who speak little English. Although it is difficult for Gonzalo to translate medical terms he does not even understand, he does it because he loves to help his mother, Maria, while at his 6-month-old sister’s doctor appointments. SCORES has empowered Gonzalo to speak for those who sometimes cannot. Gonzalo plans to capture the audience with his topical poem “Balloon Boy”, based on the balloon hoax pulled by Colorado parents last October.

Amairani has benefited from ASC in a similar way. She joined SCORES a year ago, when, at the time, she spoke very little English. However, Walton K-8 School’s dual language program in which students are immersed in both Spanish and English instruction paired with SCORES writing curriculum has helped Amairani master English in a very short period of time. Her dedication to her education is apparent. Despite moving to Cleveland’s East Side this fall, Amairani catches several buses to attend fifth-grade at Walton K-8 in Ohio City every morning.

Her progress is astounding and the SCORES program has aided her progress, allowing her to explore words and language. Today, Amairani speaks and writes with nearly flawless English, as evidenced by her inspirational poem “Poetry” that she will perform in New York City.
This year, the National Poetry SLAM! will honor Sunil Gulati, president of the US Soccer Federation as it celebrates the accomplishments of poet-athletes from around the country.

ABOUT AMERICA SCORES CLEVELAND

America SCORES Cleveland is an affiliate of America SCORES, a national model for sports-based youth development targeting girls and boys in urban neighborhoods. America SCORES Cleveland serves 384-students ages 8-12 in eight Cleveland Metropolitan Schools located within the Glenville, Hough, Fairfax, North Broadway/Slavic Village, Puritas-Longmead, and Ohio City neighborhoods. This five-day per week after-school program works to enrich the lives of inner-city youth through regular participation and skill building in soccer, creative writing, and service-learning. Teamwork – the key to success in both education and sports -- is the common denominator.

For more information, visit www.AmericaSCORESCleveland.org.

April releases from Burning River

Hey folks-

Burning River is releasing two books, a chapbook and journal, this month. More information can be found at the website by clicking the right-side banner or title of this entry. And for those attending the AWP this month, please stop by the Open Thread table to view these new releases as well as a couple from last year. Anyone near Pittsburgh or Kingston, PA, we've readings the third week of April as features.

Enjoy the Spring!

~c

Comprehensive Cleveland Poetry Calendar

Here's a bigger copy of the Cleveland poetry calendar that is embedded at the top of this blog. I'm adding every northeast Ohio poetry event I know about to it. If anything in the coming month is missing, please either leave a comment below with details, send me an invitation to your event on Facebook, or send me an e-mail at jc@crisischronicles.com. If you've already sent me an invitation, there's no need to do so again (I will get to it ASAP). Let's try to make this calendar as comprehensive as possible.

World's Longest Poetry Reading in Progress

Broadcasting Live with Ustream.TV

A Brief Guide to National Poetry Month

National Poetry Month at Huffington Post


It's National Poetry Month, an event the Academy of American Poets began sponsoring in 1996 to help call more attention to poetry in America. As has become tradition, the Academy encourages you to spend each day in April with a new poem, which you can sign up to receive, daily, in your inbox from poets.org. This year, the website kicked off the month with "A Story" by Phillip Levine. You follow Levine as he creates the story of a house, which grows to hold a family with a quirky and intensely spiritual father. Take a look. Levine draws you in before reminding of what's beyond what you've created, which could be nothing, or could be the very real world:

Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.

25 Years of Bottom Dog Press

65 poets and 91 books  later Bottom Dog Press celebrated 25 years of publishing with a silver anniversary anthology.  A healthy dozen contributors to the collection gathered for a reading at the Barking Spider. Here are some pics from the event. Congratulations and thanks to Clevelandpoetics contributor and grand poohbah of Bottom Dog Larry Smith!

View Full Album

CSU 4-1-10 – McDaniel and Dougherty

michael dumanis, director of the csu poetry center introduces jeffrey mcdaniel and sean thomas dougherty

Okay – so even the academic readings don’t start on time in Cleveland. The McDaniel – Dougherty reading was advertised as starting @7:30 and true to Poetic Standard Time things got rolling with Dumanis introducing the readers at around ten ‘til eight. Dougherty kicked things off launching into a rustbelt cinched treatise. Paisley flowered shirt rolled to his elbows showing tattooed forearms a cap that looks like it was plucked from a black and white photo of Ellis Island immigration line dwellers he reminded me more of an eastern bloc uncle than a professor from Case.

His work carried the same sort of unapologetic sensibility as his wardrobe. He himself later said that the pieces he was reading (from a forthcoming manuscript) were an attempt to just say things. “Sometimes things just need to be, said.” Dougherty’s reading style falls somewhere between a beat jazz sing song reminiscent of kinescopes of Kerouac on the Steve Allen show and the hip hop influenced delivery of contemporary slammers.

“this is going to be one of those readings where i really f*** myself up”

Dougherty finished his twenty-five minute set with a couple list poems – one titles Ex and finally a love poem with the refrain “you are…” I enjoyed his set and hope to see more of this  local writer.

McDaniel began his set with an excerpt from a longer piece of fiction, possibly a novel – something he has been working on for a couple years and not quite sure what to do with yet. He clutched the lectern and lowered his head looking as if he was reading in a wind tunnel and there was no warning when the fan might be turned on.

The five minute excerpt  started out with a hilarious rendering of a family cat in heat  swerved into a road trip to Niagra Falls with his father and brothers engaged in close quarter conflict and ending with a drug dependant mom vegetating back at home. McDaniel's work borders on the absurd at times and he uses humor like a knitting needle at a birthday party popping  balloons. I’ve always liked his work and was somewhat disappointed when he confessed that he has probably only written four new poems in the last couple years.  Let’s hope he rectifies this situation.

Poet Laureate in Cleveland

Kay Ryan will speak at Cleveland Public Library as part of the Writers and Readers author series on Sunday, April 18, at 2:00 p.m. in the Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium, East Sixth and Superior Avenue.

Kay Ryan is the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry appointed by the Library of Congress and just the fourth woman to hold that position. Appointed by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in July, 2008, she succeeds a long line of distinguished poets including Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, and Ted Kooser.

The author of several books of poems, Kay Ryan has won the 2004 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Union League Poetry Prize, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared in all the major literary magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Several of them been selected for the annual editions of the Best American Poetry and have been anthologized in collections around the world.

Her works include The Niagara River (2005), Say Uncle (2000), Elephant Rocks (1996), Flamingo Watching (1994), Strangely Marked Metal (1985) and Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983). Her most recent book, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove), gathers poems from several of those volumes.

Poet J.D. McClatchy noted that her “poems are compact, exhilarating,  strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes.” He also said that her work is “as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”

Kay Ryan has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2006 and has taught at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California, for more than 30 years.

All programs are FREE and open to the public. The doors of the library open at 1:00 p.m. For more information, please call (216) 623-2955 or visit Writers and Readers at www.cpl.org

George Bilgere – Macs Backs 3-30-10

Most academic poets can be dropped into a few convenient categories. You’ve got your inscrutable scribblers who scratch out “experimental” work of obtuse meanings – political militants lecturing to folks who already agree with them – and the subsection of AWP folks whose very existence seems to be to publish each other’s work.

George Bilgere falls into another category – the dangerously clever. Like Billy Collins, Jeffery McDaniel, Marge Piercy and Ted Kooser, Bilgere’s work is deceptively simple. The accessibility that is so often frowned upon by “serious” poetry instructors invites readers into Georges world of cafes where everyday observations take on archetypal importance.


Most of the reading's fodder was plucked from Bilgere’s new collection The White Museum from Pittsburgh's Autumn House Press. George set up his pieces with fairly long introductions. These prologues though, didn’t take away from the works by over explaining but served well as a vehicle of background knowledge that helped the reader enjoy the forthcoming piece. This is a talent that is well appreciated by this listener when it is done well as it was here.




Subject matter ranged from family – a mother who loved crossword puzzles, an aunt who introduced the poet to Europe, a father’s key ring  – amusement parks, laundry chutes, and the ubiquitous appearance of cafes. I think this is where Bilgere is most comfortable and where his work shines – at a small round table with a strong cup of coffee surrounded by well read folks with nothing to prove.




Like the sage fixture of a cafe who has become part of the ambiance, always good for an opinion or good hearted argument over art or baseball - Bilgere’s work (often making appearances on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac) satisfies the way some desserts do. At first glance it seems a little small but with each bite one realizes the richness of the icing and the complexity of the flavors combine to leave one surprisingly sated – with a cup of coffee on the side of course.

Dallas Wiebe & other Stuff

As you probably already know, Plato would have allowed no poets in his utopian Republic. He had his reasons for keeping them out. I should say that he had his wrong reasons for keeping them out. I think about things like that, you see, because I’m a famous poet and I’m in the Republic. Not only am I in the Republic, I am the Republic. I’ve become a “national treasure.”

from The Light of the Republic by Dallas Wiebe

Reading all of Dallas Wiebe’s writings, at least the short stories which are the bulk of it, can bring you to a place in which the variety in these fictions is experienced as chapters in one long novel (albeit one in which there are occasional digressions). Characters come and go over time. They mature, grow older and die. They speak in catalogues; of family connections; of towns and streets with those curiously comic Dallas Wiebe names, real places and invented ones, a geography in which most of these stories take place; of a great variety of political and social issues, and what emerges, even in the most disparate tales, is a kind of world view. It’s the literal view of Skyblue...

from Dallas Wiebe's Long Novel by Toby Olson

A Saudi woman received a death threat last week after she appeared on “Poet of Millions,” Abu Dhabi’s version of the game show “American Idol” — which features aspiring poets instead of singers — and recited a poem attacking clerics for “terrorizing people and preying on everyone seeking peace.”


Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race.

Kafka's Midrash on Jonah -Norman Weinstein

The sole way to avoid being swallowed up by the world is to render yourself indigestible.

Of course by doing so you end up with a worse fate since when the earth refuses to swallow you, heaven must.

& since heaven, by definition, can digest nothing still resisting its stranglehold

you end up at the merciless world's mercy & will only note be digested by concentrating every waking thought heavenward

So the faithless find faith by turning away from all exit signs

The More Things Change: Images of Cleveland in the 1940s/1950s

Explore 1940s/50s Cleveland: the Jasper Wood Collection

Jasper Wood Collection: Cuban Cigar Co.

A regular at the jazz spots on Scovill Avenue (Central/Woodland area) in the early 1940s, Jasper Wood was intimately familiar with the neighborhood's residents by the time he started taking their photographs in 1946. Click here to view Wood's extraordinary collection of photographs of this vanished neighborhood, including a rare photograph of noted American boogie-woogie pianist Arthur ‘Montana' Taylor, perhaps Scovill's most famous resident.

The collection also includes images of West 25^th Street and Ohio Amish Country. Wood's 1953 poetic film, Streetcar (viewable here: Part 1, Part 2), documents Cleveland streetcars just before service ended in 1954. Click here to read about Jasper Wood and the Scovill Avenue area. Click on any of the following subjects to browse other collections of images of Cleveland's Flats, Euclid Avenue, Edgewater Park, University Circle and the ClevelandFire Department.

From the Cleveland Public Library Home Page.

Bottom Dog Press Silver Anniversary Reading

Saturday April 3rd...5 pm-7pm

Mac's Backs Books and Bottom Dog Press invite you to a celebration of 25 year of independent publishing. The event will be held at Barking Spider Tavern in University Circle...5-7 pm...with pizza and poetry and music. Poets from the new Bottom Dog Press Poetry Anthology will read from their work...The book has a poem from each of its 91 books of publication.

Poets who will be on hand include: Karen St. John-Vincent, Mary E. Weems, Ray McNiece, Meredith Holmes, Terry Hermsen, Marci Janas, David Shevin, Jennifer Burd, Michael Salinger, Maj Ragain, Rob Smith, Loren Weiss, Ken Meisel, editor Larry Smith...and Jim Lang reading for Daniel Thompson, and Michael McMahon reading for Russell Salamon.

This is a major event. Join us.

Making it

I've heard a few comments lately about "making it". It made me think about what exactly it is we're making when we "make it". And what it means to "make it".

I think we most often hear this term applied to those in the arts--musicians, painters, writers, etc--in reference to being able to make a sustainable living at what they love. Becoming a household name, getting a song played on mainstream radio, making an appearance on Jeopardy!--whatever the specifics are, it usually means achieving a certain amount of fame and wealth. Maybe a modest amount, but certain amount nonetheless.

But poets, well, we're a special breed, aren't we? Or at least, we like to paint ourselves as such. But few can argue that poetry is as mainstream an art form as pop music. Very few--if any--poets achieve the rock star status enjoyed by some of those in other creative fields. Very few are even able to make a modest living at poetry. So does that mean that fewer poets "make it", or is our definition of "making it" different for poetry? Yet, we can probably spot those who definitely HAVE "made it". We probably agree that a Billy Collins or a Maya Angelou have "made it". But can you "make it" without reaching quite that high a status? Say, someone who received a Pushcart nomination? And is it even important to "make it"?

If you've spent any amount of time around poets in general, you've probably met at least one or two who don't believe in making money off of their art--maybe you're even someone who believes that yourself. Is there a way to "make it" in that case? Is "making it" even a goal? Do any of us ever expect to "make it" and work toward that goal, or is poetry just something we do for fun, community, socialization, release, art for art's sake?

Let me know your thoughts on what "making it" means to you, whether you're a poet, novelist, graphic designer, musician, teacher, data entry analyst....I'm curious. Humor me.

Shove off, Green Boy!

For those of you battling the insecurity monster, artist Karen Sandstrom has some choice words to tell it.

(So, now I know what the insecurity monster looks like! Or, at least, what Karen Sandstrom's insecurity monster looks like. Say, isn't it good to know that it's really only six inches high?

nb- click the images for a larger view of the artwork)

Cleveland Poets Help "Feed the Gays" March 27th

The Gay, Lesbian & Straight Alliance (GLASA) is a student group at Cleveland State University. On Saturday March 27th, GLASA will be hosting its second annual art show, Feed the Gays, to raise money for GLBT & Allied scholarships on campus (undergraduate, graduate law).

From 5pm to 10pm at Union Station and Bounce Nightclub (2814 Detroit Avenue in Cleveland), local artists will exhibit their work, donating 50% of all sales to the GLASA scholarship fund, while a host of performing artists entertain on the Union Station and Bounce stages. Among the scheduled performers: Cleveland poets Lady K & Steven B. Smith at 5 p.m., with Dianne Borsenik & John "Jesus Crisis" Burroughs (accompanied by 10-string guitar master JJ Haaz) at 6 p.m.

The cost to get in is $5, with all proceeds donated to the scholarship fund.

Peace, love and poetry,
John

Joy Harjo Coming to Firelands College

Native American poet and musician Joy Harjo will be at BGSU Firelands College Thursday March 25th...Come and hear her play and read her poems. She's a beautiful and engaged poet with a voice that speaks true. Free and open to the public...Firelands College is in Huron, Ohio...about 1 hour from downtown Cleveland...due West on Rte. 2...Then Rye Beach Road south half a mile. She'll be at the new Cedar Point Center on campus. Join us for an experience.

Writing prompts, part 2

Last week I posted about writing prompts. As a comparison, here are some "prompts" suggested by the literary magazine Hawk and Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability:

1. Consider these words: imagine, create, sustain. Stir well: create able, sustain image. Add ask, learn, try. Then heart, worth, good.

2. Post Thoreau’s reminder: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

3. Ask, what’s real? The problem, limits, available energies?

4. Ask, what matters? What do we need? What is worth wanting?

5. Toss the rules. If you need them, they’ll show up again.

6. Wander. Dream. Mull. Unfocus. Take walks in places where you don’t have to pay attention—but where moments of attention reward you with surprise or pleasure. Collect insights, both blinding and fleeting. Let them grow.

7. Use your left brain. Then your right. Left. Right. Left, right.

8. Ask, what will feed my energy, mind, heart, imagination, play?

9. Assemble a team of doers. Talk, eat and drink together, have fun.

10. "Do something. Take a break. Do something more.”
-SueEllen Campbell, author of Bringing the Mountain Home.

Any of these ring your bells? Well, if they do, Hawk and Handsaw opens for submissions on August 1. Get to it!