I'm a last minute fill in at The Eleventh Annual Tremont Arts and Cultural Festival in Lincoln Park-Starkweather and West 14th Street this Saturday in Cleveland’s historic Tremont neighborhood. A reprise of my blockbuster performance of last year.

So come down at 11:45am tomorrow (Saturday September 15) and hear me do what I do. I promise to read new material and it's only 15 minutes of your life. Besides the weather is supposed to be good. The artists are fabulous. The food is delicious. What could hurt?

You would think that with the abuse of everyday living, I would be be smarter and not self-abuse myself with birthday hi-jinx and Lit Cafe Poetry Nite extremism, especially this time of year, every year. I always get the message too late that no matter how my head feels, how much my stomach is quesy, it is nothing compared to the heaviness of my heart on 9/11.

Again, I remember my lost friends, Glen Wall and Dennis Buckley, dear chums of my youth, companions during difficult adolescent years, teammates, and drinking buddies. I toast your memory and promise to to be better to myself and others in the coming year.

PEACE. (please)

Predictable is never used when describing the Literary Cafe Poetry Reading Series. No matter who is featured, who is hosting, what else may be going on that evening, just as you settle in for an expected poetic ride.....BAM! Something happens. Maybe audience participation in an audio tapestry, group Jager shot orgies, Tremont chicken visits, some spontaneous nudity, or a pillow fight. Who knows, except for Nostradamus. So come and see our two features, both known for their gentle demeanor, thought provoking verse, and stable behavior. Except at the Lit Cafe on Thursday September 10, who knows?

Sammy Greenspan lurks in corners of fine cafes, either surfing poetry porn or writing some. An explorer of workshops throughout Ohio, she now runs the new Cleveland contingent of the Puddinghouse Press workshop. She has been published in Whiskey Island and other on-line zines and has discovered the pleasure of reading aloud at the Jawbone Festival and Insights Cafe poetry series. This change in attitude may have precipitated the shoring of her gray braids for the shorter cool hipchick look, or the other way around.

Many times has our other feature reader, Brian Taylor been mistaken for the DC comics superhero, The Flash. What with his ever-present bicyclist cap and penchant to appear and disappear at large gatherings in a moment. Armed with a camera, he either is a secret agent for a shadow government keeping tabs on hipsters, hippies, and sub-militants; or that is actually a poorly disguised deathray that sucks the life force out by stealing bits of the soul. Long time resident of the Cleveland poetry scene, Brian is accepted at every venue, of every genre, at every geographic region. Of course, that maybe from the fear instilled by the undefeated Haiku Deathmatch Grand champion.

Nothing promised, both nothing gained unless you come to the Literary Cafe Thursday September 10 at 9:30pm. You may be surprised. The Literary Cafe is located at 1031 Literary Road in the surprising Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland.

While I was out in Kansas City for the Unregulated Word: The Holy Spectacular Poetry Festival, weather seemed to take my place in Cleveland with rumbling thunders and crashing blasts. As you can see below, a shelf in the apartment couldn't take the vibrations and dropped its load.

Look closely and you'll notice that it was my liquor shelf with broken glass everywhere, and not just from my entire wine glass collection. The rum is gone.

Yup that's what is left of my Laphroaig single malt.[sniff]. I'm gonna miss that. It was still a quarter full.[sniff]

I have just returned from an adventure. In order to find the finest poets for the Literary Café Poetry series, sometimes I must venture into the deepest, darkest recesses of our continent. Only the most exotic and talented poets can stand up to Cleveland’s standards and they have to be even more special if they are to stand side by side with one of our own in the Coliseum of words. Yes, to find a worthy partner for Lou Suarez, I battled tropical heat, slapped bugs that slapped back, had to devour wild pork ribs with a side of brisket. And then, while following the treacherous river Missouri, I found the goal of my safari. There a scantily clad native of the tribe CAN-zuhss Seetee was twirling a hula-hoop like a six foot pixie. From the tribe council I found that she was called Kateekaboom, which meant “she who can recite poetry.” She agreed to come to Cleveland this Thursday, August 13 at 9:30pm.

Katie Kaboom is like a modern day Tarzan. She goes by her aristocratic name Kathryn Erlinger when she is civilization. Katie just recently graduated from the University of Missouri Kansas City with a degree in English, but is still selling booze at a liquor store when she is not writing, reading, or making stuff. She has been published in Off Beat Pulp, Zygote In My Coffee, and has a chapbook entitled "Explosive Devices for Girls". This is her second visit to Cleveland in that she was a feature at the Zygote in my City poetry festival show last November. She was a member of the now defunct poet group, the Beards (don’t ask).

Meeting the “Kaboom” is the courageous Lou Suarez. For 30 years, until he retired in June 2006, Lou taught writing and philosophy at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. His native grounds were right here in Canton, Ohio and he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at Kent State University with further graduate work at Ohio State in linguistics and education and at Cleveland State University in philosophy. In 1995, Lou was named Ohio Poet of the Year by the Ohio Poetry Day Association and has won several poetry prizes and twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Lou has published a book, Ask (Mid-list Press, 2004) and three chapbooks, Losses of Moment (Kent State University Press, 1995), The Grape Painter (Frost Heaves Press, 2001), and On U.S. 6 to Providence (Red Mountain Review, 2006). He is currently completing a second book manuscript, tentatively titled Traveler.

Come down to the Literary Café this Thursday August 13 at 9:30pm to hear these two strikingly different examples of mid-American verse as we parade the wild and exotic and the civilized and sophisticated in a match made by a slightly insane poetry organizer. The Literary Café is located at 1031 Literary Road in the jungle neighborhood of Tremont in Cleveland.

Cleveland summers are more confusing than San Francisco's, but without the hills, Alcatraz (unless you include Mansfield), or sourdough bread in earshot of seal honking. Of course, we got Jimmy Dimora during a pasta feast. But the weather in July is a wonderful mixed bag, something for everyone. It's cold, it's hot. It's cloudy, it's sunny. It's breezy, it's sultry. And that's all in one day. Usually we bitch, but we stay because if we don't like it, it will change eventually. The summer weather reflects ourselves. We are warm and cool, man. Dig it, hipsters. For Thursday, July 9 at 9:30pm at the Literary Cafe, we have poets that represent just this. The cool, slick underground sounds of Robert Frazier and the warmhearted, let-it-out-baby voicifications of Azalea Tidwell.

Azalea Tidwell popped into my consciousness at Nick and my Lix and Kix gig last February. Her warmth and command shook me right out of my complacency and into her vision of the world. Originally from Gary, Indiana, my understanding is that she never moonwalked with Michael Jackson. I have seen her work on Poetry.com and has a style that spans traditional, hip-hop, and slam with imagery and metaphor. Azalea (AZ-U-R)published a book last year titled My Poetic Exhibition.

Robert Fraser is the lead man of the poetry/eclectic band Hobo Monk. HB played at the Zygote in My City Festival where I was feature and they blew my mind with Frasier's verbal frolic. His first Book: Poems for the Short-Term Memory was published in 2007, by Cornerstone Books. It highlights the ridiculousness of modern life in our Monetary society, and the search for something more meaningful and real. Other than writing, Robert claims he works like everyone else and studys the Native American ways of living off the land. How cool is that?

Whatever the weather, rain or shine, sun or moon, hot or cold come to the Literary Cafe for some summer spectacular changes that will thrill and calm you. The Literary Cafe is located at 1031 Literary Road in the tepid neighborhood of Tremont in Cleveland.

A case study: Establish a unique area surrounded by organically raised art. Keep it isolated from mainstream of traffic, both physical and ideological. Yet cultivate a warm welcoming cozy atmosphere where all are greeted with a smile or a handshake, or sometimes a hug. Use non-MSM means to spread the word about this unusual nexus of circumstance, and then invite poets and poetry-lovers to meet at a time and on a day that ”normal” taxpaying people would avoid. Add a small stage, a lightly amplified microphone, and reasonably priced adult beverages. Observe the chaos and succumb to the overwhelming drive to join in.

Results: The experiment is a long duration study with multiple sites and has the unusual characteristic of having started well before it was planned. It well may have stumbled in a time vortex where start and finish has not meaning. In other words, the experiment may be timeless, but that is speculation and remains to be proved by mathematical eggheads. All we have to go on are the results and the results feed into the establishment of the next round of conditions, forming a kind of feed forward loop which may contribute to the aforementioned time paradigm… but again this is the stuff that makes egg salad out of those eggheads. The two latest results of this phenomenon are Nikki Robinson of Kent, Ohio and Louis Daher of Ann Arbor, Michigan. They will set the stage (if in fact they have not already), fulfilling the next stage, by filling the stage at the three and a half year run of this ongoing experiment called the Literary Café Reading Extravaganza.

Nikki Robinson sprang forth from 10 years of endearing and nurturing experiment located in Kent, Ohio, with sprinklings of North Carolinian Smokey Mountains during various seasons. Originally from Akron, she and her partner Deb are slaves to Bill the Greyhound which is maybe why she drinks Irish whiskey. Nikki has been rewarded the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Scholarship Prize, has been published in Luna Negra and Akron Life and Leisure Magazine as part of their photo and poetry series. She has written the chapbook “The Slop of Giving In,” and her latest, “The Melt of Letting Go,” has recently been released by P2B Press. Armed with a BA is English from Kent State, she teaches at a high school on the east side of Cleveland when she isn’t kayaking on the Cuyahoga River in Kent or sitting along its banks talking with blue herons.

Louis Daher is one of the special ones. He is the mastermind and one of the originals in the design and implementation of the sociological study that has shatter accepted perception in the theater of time. He has made the annual open mic poetry reading night at Jewel Heart Summer retreats one the highlights for the spiritually motivated. He has sat down on picnic tables to talk poetry with Alan Ginsburg during these retreats and is a direct lineage in my poetic education from the old Greats. His passion is never wavering even as lightning from the heavens strikes trees to fall on his car (and only his car on a crowded parked street). He has traveled from Michigan and back in a single day, just read a couple poems for one of my organized readings. Louis, over the nearly 8 years that I have listened to him, never once failed to extract a tear from my eye. We are honored to have him at the Literary Café

The Time Warp starts, as it always does (or did or will do) at 9:30pm, this Thursday June 11. The Literary Café is located at 1031 Literary Road in the Eternal Tremont Neighborhood of Cleveland.

Spring in Cleveland is paradise unfolding. So soon after the snow, riding the wind like a bronco busting Dervish, in the calm, after the showers, we get green unfolding. Growth like the not-so-Greater Cleveland Partnership can only fantasize about. Grass pokes up from the muddy brown ground. Yellow splashes of daffodils hold hands with red tulips on the treelawn. SPRING! Ahh that wonderful rebirth we all long for, that reminds us of hope and ..… what’s that smell, so clean and fresh? Is it the stench of lilac, the dogwood stink, or magnolia smell? No, my friends, that is the perfume of love. It permeates the staleness of enclosed catacombs and when it wafts in….we look for someone to hug. Yes HUG, freely given, freely received. Giver and Receiver is confused and for an instant there is only the oneness of a couple. Lust is banished and we are all divine in that moment of embrace when we see a good friend….or a new friend. HUGS. A child can do it as well as a grandmother and at the Literary Café, where the motto is always, we emphasize and celebrate FREE HUGS. This Thursday, May 14 at 9:30pm, the HUG FEST will begin with poets, Nin Andrews and Michael McMahan, who have much to say on love and on hugs.

Nin (Natalie) Andrews has a new book, Sleeping with Houdini, out from BOA Editions and a really fun chapbook, Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum, out from Subito. Her next book, Southern Comfort, will be published by CavanKerry Press some day. She was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council grant in 1998 and again in 2004. Her work has been published in many literary reviews and anthologies, including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and Best American Poetry 1997, 2001, 2003 and The Best of the Prose Poem (2006). She has authored several collections including Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane and The Book of Orgasms and has won many chapbook contests and the Gerald Cable Award . Nin lives in Poland…Ohio and celebrates Dyngus Day with her bass playing physicist husband and two children. She also gives great hugs.

Michael McMahan is a working class poet and small press publisher. His work includes Poems for Republicans, A McDonald's Sex Poem, and Waters Edge; He's a BGSU graduate; Received the 2007 Rudinger Arts Award for Small Press Publishing. Has been published in the Literary Review, Firelands, and Green Panda Press; Served on the Board of Directors for Bottom Dog Press; Started FREEDONIA PRESS which has published Poet Russell Salamon's latest book in we all at the Lit are considerably mentioned. In 2008 he received the assistanceship for book-Arts and Paper-Making at The Morgan Conservatory; and works for Mark Kuhar's Balanced Living Magazine when he isn’t practicing his hugs with Italio-ukrainian poets. (Doesn’t even need silvowitz.)

Yup, with these two on the line-up, the hugs will be flying. If you’re shy, I’ll gleefully give private hug lessons until you feel confident. Let’s bring in the spring with hearty embraces and keep it going until winter chills our loins. The Literary Café is at 1031 Literary Road in the huggingest neighborhood called Tremont in Cleveland.

If remembering a day when someone was sitting around a garden waiting for leather clad ruffians to come and take them off to be executed makes a Friday good, then the second Thursday of National Poetry Month is a Better Thursday especially if you have two of the better poets in the city, the region, the state, and, yes, even the country, coming to the Literary Cafe to read. This Thursday, April 9 at the crooning hour of 9:30 PM, we have legendary poets Jim Lang and Maj Ragain reading and speaking, and teaching us the secrets and esoteric meaning of the pussy willow of Dyngus Day. If you had anything to do with the poetry in northeast Ohio in the last few decades, you should know these two. If you don't know them, here is your chance.

Jim Lang is a poet, photographer, potter, philosopher, publisher, and poartist who frequently accompanies his readings with multimedia visual works. He has been the open mic host for the 3rd Saturday poetry reading at The Bookstore on West 25th Street forever and gave a Bagozine of poetry, tea, pennies, incense and none-sense each month to everyone who attends. Jim, the accomplished photographer has been stealing the soul of most every poet who has passed through Cleveland as far back as d.a. levy & Charles Dickens. He gratefully edited issue #9 of ArtCrimes and coedited issues #15 and 17 and has published many chapbooks of his own and other's poetry. I personally think he is the man behind the curtain, pulling levers and yanking at strings, the svengali of Cleveland's poetry scene, head of the literary shadow government, yet hides as a cantankerous full time professional curmudgeon, but an oddly a nice guy even so.

Maj Ragain has been an "off and on" faculty member at Kent State University since 1969, where he obtained a Ph.D in 1990. An active representative of poetry in the Kent community (where he has resided permanently since 1980), he served for twenty years as host to the open poetry readings at the Brady Cafe and now at the Standing Rock Cultural Center on North Water Street. He has published quite few books and chaps over the years, not enough for one of his talent and stature. Fresh Oil, Loose Gravel appeared in (Ohio's Burning Press.) was a finalist in the 1996 Chilcote Awards of Excellence for Poetry. Some of my favorites are Twist The Axe: A Horseplayer's Story ( Bottom Dog Press 2001) and the masterful A Hungry Ghost Surrenders His Tacklebox.(Pavement Saw Press 2006). His stirring eulogy at Daniel Thompson's Memorial Service, moved me, a still closeted poet, to write an epic poem on missed opportunity around the margins of the program. I quoted him in my report for CoolCleveland.com, not knowing Maj or his name, but knowing who he is from his words. Since then, I have stolen lines from his poems and his conversation. He has introduced me to Jameson's of the brown tears, the spirit that brings spirit. We have compared picks for the Kentucky Derby after another successful Jawbone Festival, the largest open mic festival in the country and one that revolves around his presence like the planets around the bright warm sun.

Thursdays just can’t be better when these masters of the word come together and share their enthusiasm. Rumor has it that miracles will occur on this day before Good Friday. Lang may be kindly and optimistic and Maj may give him a standing ovation. Personally, I feel I can claim them both as friends for their openness, their encouragement, and their welcome to this geeked out engineer of a noobie to the wonderful world of verse. Such is their joy to come to the Literary Café that Lang has put together one of his signature flyers with word-art and both of their artful words to hand out and Maj has been quoted that he hopes that the flyer eating buffalos will come to graze.

The Literary Café is located at 1031 Literary Road in the MAJestic and LANGuishing Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland.

Faith and Beggorah! Tis only the lucky or the Irish that get to warm up to dear St. Pat with some fine brogue spoken poetry from a lovely lassie and lovable leprechaun. The beer may not yet have the green sheen, but the Literary Café is sure to have the Irish hijinx of Johnny Jameson and Sons or Bushmill’s fresh elixir on this 2nd Thursday, March 12 at 9:30pm. Never you mind the Lenten, cause only the snakes that our dear friend Patrick chased away will not be welcome. Beside, dispensation goes to all who celebrate a great saint even if his day falls during a period of Spartan restraint. So who are the players in this Irish wake?

The lass from County Portage is none other than Mary Biddinger. Born in the western foreign county Alameda, near the clan lands of Fremont, she escaped and was reared by kind folk of the central lands of Illinois and Michigan. Mary is the author of Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), and the Editor of the Akron Series in Poetry. She also serves on the Open Competition Editorial Committee for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. In 2007 she founded the independent literary magazine Barn Owl Review, which is releasing its second issue in the spring of 2009. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, Memorious, Ninth Letter, North American Review, /nor, Third Coast, and many other journals. Mary teaches literature and creative writing courses, with a focus on Modern, contemporary, and world poetry at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program, which she will begin directing in the summer of 2009.

From nearby county Lucas, banding about the Toledo heath, our other reader is known to wield a word like a shillelagh. Michael Grover is a wanderer of the land and has earned the title King of the Beards. This leprechaun has shared his pot of gold in literary underground in places like Cause & Effect, Citizen 32, Alphabeat Soup, The San Gabriel Poetry Quarterly, Mad Poets Review, Philadelphia Poets and the anthologies One Drop: To Be The Color Black, West Memphis Witchhunt, and My Time: The Lunch Break Book and online including www. saintvituspress. com, www. outsiderwriters. org, www. getunderground. com, www.dyingwriters. com, DecomP Literary Magazine, Zygote In My Coffee, Redfez. net, Whirlygig Zine, and Beat The Dust. Mike is a publisher with his Covert Press and has authored a number of chapbooks that he will indubitably pimp throughout the evening.

Heaven shines upon our little piece of Eire and sheds a wee bit of green during the gusty early Spring with the fine fealty of these bards of the old ways. Come to listen to the kyrie by these language artists and feel the sun on the potato fields back home, Thursday March 12 at 9:30 in the even. The Literary Café is at 1031 Literary Road in the Lucky neighborhood of Tremont, County Cuyahoga.