Thirty Days of Poetry Starts on Friday!

Diane Kendig writes:

Dear Poets:

The CCPL project which you all helped me pioneer for National Poetry Month is in its third year, starting this Friday. What some said would "never go" because "no one reads poetry" registered 400 readers the first day, which came up to 600 for the first year and now is up to 1200 registered readers with an extremely high rate of email openings. A book is coming out with an article by CCPL librarian Laurie Kincer on the success of the endeavor. Here are three updates for you on the project:

1) With the new Writers Center in the South Euclid Library, there has been shuffling of the web. If you thought your page had been disappeared, take heart. The library has remounted the 2014 and 2015 sites, where you can find your poem and continue to link/share it:

http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org/Services/William-N-Skirball-Writers-Center/Poetry.aspx#30days

2) Registration is now open to receive daily emails for this year's 30 poets/poems/prompts. If you registered in previous years, you are still registered. If not, or if you have new friends, classes, or relatives who would be interested, please share the link to get registered:

• Sign up for the E-mail!
• Visit the site!

3) Finally, you are invited to attend the two live events associated with this year's project:

• Saturday, April 2nd at 2:00 p.m. - A reading by Cleveland's own Amit Majmudar, the new Poet Laureate of the State of Ohio and our April 1st email. Details for registering here: http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org/Events/Event-Results/Event-Detail.aspx?id=83562 

• Saturday, April 30 at 2:00 p.m. - An open mic to punctuate the end of National Poetry Month. Details here: http://www.cuyahogalibrary.org/Events/Event-Results/Event-Detail.aspx?id=81740&et=Writing

If you have any questions about the month's events, feel free to contact me or our terrific librarian Laurie Kincer.

Christine Howey: the New Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights!

Heights Arts has announced the news poet laureate of Cleveland Heights: Christine Howey.
Christine is quite well known in the local poetry community, participating in readings and on the Lake Effect Poetry slam team, and author and performer of the one woman play/poetry performance "Exact Change," which debuted in Akron, ran in Playhouse Square last summer, and then played in New York last fall.
Horray for Christine!

Teen Poetry Workshops in April at the Cleveland Public Library

Teen Open Mic and Writing for Change coming up at Lake Erie Ink

For more info on these and their other programs, please visit lakeerieink.org.

Lake Erie Ink
2843 Washington Blvd

Cleveland Heights, Ohio

(216) 320-4757

We also recommend following Lake Erie Ink on Facebook.

Meet Ohio Poet Laureate Amit Majmudar

Amit Majmudar

The new Ohio Poet Laureate, Amit Majmudar, will be reading in Cleveland on Saturday, April 2nd at 2:30 at the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Library. 

Local boy makes good: welcome him home.

See more here: 

• Meet Ohio Poet Laureate Amit Majmudar

2016 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest & Anthology

During the month of March 2016 Crisis Chronicles Press is accepting submissions for the 2016 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest and its corresponding anthology. Contest is free to enter and open to anyone age 14 and up. Winners will receive cash prizes and get to read their poems live at this year's Fair.

• 1st Place winning poet will receive $100
• 2nd Place winning poet will receive $50
• 3rd Place winning poet will receive $25

 

When and where:

Submissions will be accepted from March 1st to March 31st 2016. We will let you know by April 30th if your work has been accepted for the anthology. Poets will be invited to read their accepted works during the contest reading. The poetry contest reading will take place May 7th, 3 pm, at the Barking Spider Tavern, 11310 Juniper Road, near the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Shortly after the reading, our panel of judges will select three winners to receive cash prizes and read live at the Hessler Street Fair itself.

The 2016 Hessler Street Fair will take place May 21st and 22nd from 11 am to dusk, rain or shine, on Hessler Road and Hessler Court in Cleveland. The exact time of winning poets' reading will be announced soon.

 

Before you submit, please read these guidelines:

• Submit up to 5 original poems or 5 images of your own original art via email to hesslerpoetry@crisischronicles.com (no snail mail entries, please).
• Please include your name, street address, city, state, zip code, telephone number and e-mail address with your submission(s).
• Please remember the deadline is midnight on March 31st. We will not have time to consider works submitted later than that.
• Poets and artists published in the book retain all rights to their work.
• Any accepted art work will be printed in black and white.
• Unpublished work is preferred. But previously published work is acceptable if we love it (let us know who the original publisher is so we may include them in our acknowledgments).
• The contest reading will be held at the Barking Spider Tavern on Saturday May 7th, 2016 at 3pm. About 20 minutes after all participating poets have read, the winners will be announced and prizes handed out. If you have won 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Place in the Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest in the last three years, you are welcome to submit to the book and read your poem, but you will not be eligible to win a prize. Prize winners are also expected to read on the designated day during the Hessler Street Fair.

 

Contributor copies:

Contributors to the 2016 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Anthology will be able to purchase a copy of the book for half price from the Hessler Street Fair Booth during the Fair, or at Mac's Backs Books, 1820 Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights (216-321-2665 / macsbacks.com). We regret that we cannot afford to provide free contributor copies in print at this time. However, we will make a free pdf version of the book available to the public in late 2016.

 

FCC Guidelines:

Poetry has always been an integral part of the Hessler Street Fair, sometimes having its own stage on the street and sometimes combining with music on the main stage, but always doing something interesting. The top three winners will be given the opportunity to read from the stage at the Hessler Street Fair, simulcast on live radio and the web, during the Fair. Poetry read on air must not include any words designated to be obscene language by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

We welcome a diversity of styles and subject matter. Poems that don't meet the FCC guidelines can still be submitted and may be accepted for publication in the book. But they won't be eligible to win a prize since the winning poems will be read on air.

 

Special thanks to:

• Mac's Backs ~ Books on Coventry, 1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
• Barking Spider Tavern, 11310 Juniper Road, Cleveland, Ohio.
• Crisis Chronicles Press, Cleveland, Ohio.

2016 William Redding Memorial Poetry Contest

The Poetry Forum

24^th Annual

William Redding Memorial Poetry Contest

     

FIRST PLACE

$100 and a Featured Reading May 2, 2016

SECOND PLACE

1-year membership in Columbus Salon monthly poetry workshop/critique

or

$50 Gift Certificate for books

                

THIRD PLACE

$25 Gift Certificate for books

Submission Guidelines:

• · Submit 3 typewritten or Word document poems.  One poem per page.
• · Maximum 50 lines per poem.
• · Surface mail entries should have name, address, phone number, and email address on back only of each poem. Send entries postmarked by March 14 to The Poetry Forum c/o 91 E. Duncan Street, Columbus OH 43202. Poems will not be returned. No SASE required.
• · Email entries to abbott4949@gmail.com as single Word document with poems as separate pages & no identifying information, with name, address, phone, and email on separate first page.
• · Previous first-place winners, Poetry Forum featured readers since January 2014, and previously published poems are ineligible.

Deadline:  March 15, 2016

The Poetry Forum thanks the following for their support: Bossy Grrl’s Pinup Joint, 90.5 WCBE-FM, our featured poets, open mic participants, audiences, and generous patrons.

Bossy Grrl's, 2598 N. High Street in Columbus

Visit our web site columbuspoetryforum.com

Information: 614/268-5006

Cleveland: A Premier Literary Destination

Poets from all over hear (or already know) about the lively Cleveland area literary scene and look forward to coming (and coming back) as soon and as often as possible.  This week is no exception, as several well-regarded out-of-state poets will be here to share their literary wares. Two of the more notable events will happen Saturday 2/27 at Mac's Backs and Sunday 2/28 at Guide to Kulchur.  So whether you're an east-sider, a west-sider, or the more adventurous sort who enjoys the best of both, you have something to look forward to. It won't be the same reading twice, but it will be supremely worth your while both times.  The visiting poets will include: 

Jason Ryberg is the author of nine books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and an aspiring b-movie actor. His latest collections of poems are Motel, Diner, Liquor (co-authored with John Dorsey, Jason Hardung and Seth Elkins, Spartan Press, 2014) and Beauty Parlors,Train Yards and Everything In Between (co-authored with George Wallace, David Smith and Charly Fasano, Spartan Press, 2014). He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster named Little Red and a billy goat named Giuseppe.

Shawn Pavey has delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, bagged groceries, cut meat, laid sewer pipe, bussed tables, washed dishes, roofed houses, crunched numbers, rented cars, worked in hotels, worn an apron at Kinko's, and been paid to write everything from résumés to music reviews. Currently, he earns a living as a Technical Recruiter in Mission, KS where he lives with his fiancée and three worthless but adorable cats. He is the author of Talking to Shadows (Main Street Rag Press, 2008) and Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 (2015, Spartan Press), Co-founder and former Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal, and a former board member and officer of The Writers Place, a Kansas City-based literary non-profit. His poems, essays, and journalism appear in a variety of national and regional publications. He's hosted poetry readings in bars, coffee shops, haunted houses, bookstores, libraries, front porches, and abandoned warehouses. A graduate of the University of North Carolina's Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Program, he likes his Tom Waits loud, his bourbon single barrel, and his basketball Carolina Blue.

Jameson Bayles: A side effect of the military industrial complex, Jameson Bayles was born at the hospital at Forbes Field AFB just south of Topeka, KS. By the age of eighteen, Jameson had participated in a refueling mission with F-16s over the skies in South Dakota, stood atop of an active missle silo, and was the bait in a counter terrorism exercise with Air Force Special Forces at Whiteman AFB. After watching Krist Novoselic obtaining a head injury at the 1992 MTV music awards, Jameson decided to pursue the path of becoming a poet and eventually crawled into a dimly lit coffeeshop in dowtown Topeka in 1997 participating in his first open mic. Jameson Bayles is the senior editor of Asinimali Publications based in Kansas City, MO and the curator of The Cellar Poetry Series at the Weston Wine Company in Weston, MO. Jameson has been published in numerous literary journals and magazines and currently, his work can be found in three books. “The Cataman Years”, published by Mistop Publications, “The Artistic Muses” published by True Color Press and the collaborative reader "A Case For Ascension" by Asinimali Publications. Jameson resides in Kansas City, Missouri and can be reached at jamesonbayles@gmail.com.

And they will be joined by two Cleveland favorites:

Dianne Borsenik is active in the northern Ohio poetry scene and regional reading circuit. Her poems have appeared in Great Lakes Review, Slipstream, Rosebud, and many others; upcoming publications include Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Dirty Chai, and The Stars Look Very Different Today: A David Bowie Tribute (Poems-For-All). Her poem "Disco" was chosen to be printed on the 2015 Youngstown Summer Festival of the Arts tote bags and on Lit Youngstown tee shirts. In 2011 she founded NightBallet Press, and in September 2015 produced BeatStreet Cleveland as part of the International Beat Poetry Festival. She lives in Elyria with husband James and dog-sons Bodhisattva and Michel-Angelo. Find her at www.dianneborsenik.com.

John Burroughs was born in West Virginia, raised in Elyria, Ohio, and now lives and works in Cleveland. Along the way, he won the first poetry competition he entered as a high school student, served for several years as playwright-in-residence at Marion Correctional Institution, became a number one blogger on MySpace, won his first-ever poetry slam in his 40s, has hosted several esteemed reading series, and co-founded the annual Snoetry: A Winter Wordfest. John's poetry volumes include Beat Attitude [2015, NightBallet Press], It Takes More Than Chance to Make Change [2013, The Poet's Haven], The Eater of the Absurd [2012, NightBallet], Barry Merry Baloney [2012, Spare Change Press] and the collaborative book Oct Tongue -1 (with Weems, Swain, Smith, Lady, Chernin and Brightman). Since 2008, Burroughs has run Crisis Chronicles Press, publishing fine indie writers from around the world.

So please join us this weekend and give our visiting artists a warm Cleveland welcome!

February 27th at 7 pm - KC & CLE: A Case for Ascension at Mac's Backs
Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry
1820 Coventry Road
Cleveland, Heights, Ohio
(216) 321-2665

February 28th at 7 pm - Guide to Kulchur Red Room Reading Series
Guide to Kulchur: Text, Art & News
5900 Detroit Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio
(216) 314-4644

The Kozo Reading Series at the Morgan

Cleveland author Christopher Bowen and the folks at The Morgan Conservatory have set up a four event reading series for this year at the eastside facility.



More information, as well as the availability of slots for an April 8th reading, can be found at the event's webpage here.

Political Poetry - Trump and Palin

Woody Guthrie’s landlord was none other than Donald Trump’s dad! Their relationship made for some interesting lyrics, reports The New Republic. “Guthrie lived for two years in a Brooklyn apartment the elder Trump owned, but grew upset at the racist policies that the real estate developer used to exclude blacks from his property.”

Writing in Raw Story, [scholar Will] Kaufman quotes some song lyrics Guthrie wrote to denounce “old man Trump”:

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

he stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his

Eighteen hundred family project

As Kaufman notes, both Fred Trump and his son would be investigated by the government for allegedly racist leasing practices.

Gawker has more from Kaufman himself:

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”
Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because

God dont know much about any color lines.

Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps – father and son alike – might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser”? And we know what Donald Trump thinks about losers.

One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for “Old Man Trump.”

 

Palin's Song: Her Speech Endorsing Trump, Compressed Into Short Poems

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/palins-song-her-speech-en_b_9024152.html

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/27/sarah-palin-channels-her-inner-slam-poet/

• http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/01/19/sarah_palin_s_rambling_donald_trump_endorsement_was_post_apocalyptic_poetry.html

• http://www.utne.com/arts/sarah-palins-poetry.aspx

• Sarah Palin's Poetry

 The Soviet artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan hoped to subvert his government by using its own language against it in his art: “He made works on paper in which appropriated texts and images were combined and layered using transfer techniques, some utilizing official notices by Soviet administrators—the terse, usually handwritten flyers that punctuated the everyday life of Soviet citizens with warnings, admonitions, and exhortations. One such announcement scribbled on a page torn out of a logbook reads: ‘Comrade residents! On Monday the 19th there won’t be any cold or hot water. We ask you to close the taps and shut off the heating system.

We’ve known for a while that fairy tales are old, but only now have we discovered that they’re in fact really, really, really old—an important distinction. Stories like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin” originated thousands of years ago, researchers suggest, in “prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age”: “Using techniques normally employed by biologists, they studied common links between 275 Indo-European fairy tales from the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known, and ‘long before the emergence of the literary record.’ ”

A Whitman Sampler - Poetry Contest and Performance

The Singers' Club of Cleveland is a 123-year-old men's chorus.  Their concert in March ("A Whitman Sampler") will feature songs inspired by American poetry. Their guest performing group for that concert will be Distinguished Gentlemen of Spoken Word.

In conjunction with that concert, The Singers' Club is sponsoring a poetry contest with $250 cash prizes for the winners and a $100 prize for the best submission from Cuyahoga County.

For more about the Singers, please visit www.singersclub.org.

Things Not to Do at a Poetry Reading--

Diane Borsenik reads at Best Cleveland Poem (photo by Tim Misny)

• Daniel Nester lists 20 Things Not to Do at an Open Poetry Reading

The Bells of Christmas Day--

                  Christmas Bells

    I heard the bells on Christmas Day
    Their old, familiar carols play,
        And wild and sweet
        The words repeat
    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

    And thought how, as the day had come,
    The belfries of all Christendom

       Had rolled along
       The unbroken song
    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

    Till ringing, singing on its way,
    The world revolved from night to day,
        A voice, a chime,

       A chant sublime

    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

    Then from each black, accursed mouth
    The cannon thundered in the South,
        And with the sound
        The carols drowned
    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

    It was as if an earthquake rent
    The hearth-stones of a continent,
        And made forlorn
        The households born
    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

    And in despair I bowed my head;
    "There is no peace on earth," I said;
        "For hate is strong,
        And mocks the song
    Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

    Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
    "God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
        The Wrong shall fail,
        The Right prevail,
    With peace on earth, good-will to men."

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1864

---

Longfellow wrote "Christmas Bells" in the winter of the third year of the Civil War, shortly after receiving news that his son Charles Appleton had been critically wounded during the the Mine Run Campaign.
I wish you all to have a peaceful Christmas, or whatever holiday you chose to celebrate.