Requesting Support for Russell Atkins

Requesting Support for Russell Atkins 

M. A. Shaheed, with the support of Yaseen AsSami, Diane Kending and Robert E. McDonough, is attempting to convince the city of Cleveland and the East Cleveland Public Library to honor Cleveland poet, composer, editor, librettist, and literary and musical theorist Russell Atkins by naming the street on which he lived (in Cleveland) and perhaps a room in the East Cleveland Public Library after him. We are asking you to assist this effort by making a signed statement about the importance of his achievement; because this statement will be showed to more than one person, it is probably best not to make it a letter but instead one page or so, headed with something like “On Russell Atkins” and finishing with your signature and perhaps a brief bio indicating your position in the arts. If you would like to refresh your familiarity with Russell’s poetry, a good place is ; clicking on his name in the author list will bring you to all the poetry Russell Atkins had collected by 2000.

It will be very helpful if you can send this statement as an email attachment to M. A. Shaheed at <naamtaib@yahoo.com> as soon as possible, ideally within a week. By honoring Russell Atkins’ lifelong commitment to art and tremendous achievement, we also honor art itself.         

Robert E. McDonough                        

Love Song for Cleveland

I'm certain that all the clevelandpoetics regulars know about it already, but if you haven't taken a look at Love Song for Cleveland, the new book of poems by Ray McNiece (with Cleveland photos by Tim Lachina): you should. Or pick up a copy at any of the local independent bookstores, like Mac's Backs or Loganberry Books or Appletree Books.

Love Song for Cleveland, from Red Giant Books

Ray McNiece performs "Love Song for Cleveland" at the Barking Spider, backed up by Hillbilly Idol.

Lake Effect Poetry in the Slam semifinals

Cleveland's Lake Effect Poetry team has made their winding way to the National Poetry Slam, and have now won their second bout, making their way to the semifinals. They're competing at 8 pm tonight against San Diego, Slam New Orleans, Bowery, and Dallas.
Go, Cleveland, go! Slam those puppies, and show them how it's done!

• About the National Poetry Slam
• Lake Effect Poetry Facebook Page

Trumped

Subject: Call for Trumped Stories

Dark House Books has opened submissions today for a quick turn around anthology titled "We've Been Trumped".  They're looking for stories of 2500 to 5000 words that are "light-hearted, satirical stories envisioning life under President Trump".  Stories can be in any genre put they prefer that they aren't about Trump or that he doesn't make a major appearance in the story.  The deadline is September 15, 2016 and payment is a royalty split.  You can find the details here.

http://darkhousebooks.com/submissions/

A Honky Tonk in Cleveland Ohio

You may know Carl Sandberg (1878-1967) for his Chicago poem.  But here's his Cleveland poem:

Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio

photo by GL

It’s a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
     The cartoonists weep in their beer.
     Ship riveters talk with their feet
     To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
        “I got the blues.
        I got the blues.
        I got the blues.”
And . . . as we said earlier:
     The cartoonists weep in their beer.

---

Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio, by Carl Sandberg

What is a Chapbook?

...and, having answered your question "what is a literary magazine," poet and editor E. Kristin Anderson goes on to ask the question ‘What Is a Chapbook?‘

What is a chapbook, anyway?  From looking at chapbooks, you'd think it's just a shorthand for a "cheap book"-- and they are, usually; at least, usually a lot lower in cost (and production values) than more highly polished perfect-bound books (although some chapbooks can be quite impressive handmade works of art).  That's not what the word actually means, though: chapbooks were originally the books sold by a chapman, the itinerant pedlers that used to take carts from town to town in the middle ages, and would sell-- after the printing press was invented-- broadsides and cheaply-printed books alongside pots and pans and razors and nostrums.  So, poetry chapbooks have a long history.
Today poets are their own chapmen, sell their own chapbooks, the itinerant peddlers of the middle ages, going from  reading to reading, town to town, with their wagons filled with goods.

What Is a Literary Journal? And How Do I Get Into One?

Poet and editor E. Kristin Anderson answers the question 'What Is a Literary Journal? And How Do I Get Into One?'


--And Aerogramme Writer's Studio (source of a lot of good writing information) gives you guidance: How to Submit Your Writing to Literary Magazines.

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?

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.

Ekphrastacy: Join us Thursday, May 19 at 7pm

Ekphrastacy: Artists Talk + Poets Respond about Things That Fly Join us Thursday, May 19 at 7 p.m.

"We live in a world of gravity, gravity our constant companion from the instant we wake to the moment we fall asleep..."  Share an evening with us and Things That Fly exhibition artists Stephanie Craig, Maggie Denk-Leigh, Lori Kella, Peter Larson, Lynne Norwood Lofton, Lynn O’Brien and Christopher Owen Smith, who will speak about their work and its evolution. Cleveland Heights poet laureate Christine Howey has invited local poets Geoffrey Landis, Erin Gay, Azriel Johnson, Skylark Bruce, and Terry Provost to respond to the works on view with original verse, which is always a thought-provoking and entertaining experience. Come a bit early to get a seat and enjoy refreshments! Kita Vista (detail), Lori Kella; Dwelling (detail), Stephanie Craig; IED (detail), Christopher Owen Smith; Falling 10 (Andy) detail, Peter Larson. Gravity (opening line) Geoffrey Landis.

Share Tweet Forward Copyright © 2016 HEIGHTS ARTS, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Heights Arts 2175 Lee Road Cleveland Heights, OH  44118 Add us to your address book

---

Links

• Things that Fly exhibition
• Ekphrastacy
• Heights Arts home page