there are poetry readings with MARY WEEMS.

I'm bopping around the Pacific Northwest these few days. I stopped at an open mic in the bar of a Thai restaurant last nite. A small and slightly clichey group were there. Friendly enough, but no greeter or welcome for new faces. The poetry was okay with a few highlights. Nothing retching bad, but I decided not to read due to the extra 3 hour jet lag.

Anyway they don't touch what we have in Cleveland so don't forget to come and see Mary Weems at the Literary Cafe this Thursday nite at 9:00pm for a SPECIAL poetry nite to launch her new book, An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles: Poems. The Lit Cafe is at 1031 Literary Road in Tremont.

The Tenth Annual Tremont Arts and Cultural Festival returns to Lincoln Park-Starkweather and West 14th Street this Saturday and Sunday, September 20 and 21 in Lincoln Park – 1208 Starkweather Avenue, in Cleveland’s historic Tremont neighborhood.

The mission of the Festival is to celebrate the cultural and artistic diversity of Tremont and Greater Cleveland by encouraging the artistic and cultural endeavors of its visual and performing artists. There will be fine art, sculpture, and original jewelry, children’s activities and programs, food booths, musicians and performers.

There is a big stage for music and dance entertainment and yours truly will be performing my poetry. I'm on at 11:45 on Saturday, so come down see some art, eat some diverse food, and listen to me pontificate in verse. Admission to the Festival is free and is a trolley stop on the Sparx Gallery Hop so you can see Ginley and her art as well.

UPDATE

I goofed up the date for this. The special nite for Mary Weems is NEXT WEEK, Thursday September 25 at 9:00pm. Sorry all.

The poetry never stops at the Lit café. Right on the heels of a magnificent second Thursday Night, we smack you in the head with another special night with one of our feature alumna, Mary Weems. So come down to Tremont this Thursday September 18 at 9:00pm and hear Mary read from her new book, An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles: Poems, her first full length tome from Bottomdog Press.

Dr. Mary E. Weems is the Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights and an accomplished playwright, author, performer, and motivational speaker. Her work has been widely published in journals including the African American Review and xcp:Cultural Poetics, anthologies including Spirit & Flame: An Anthology of African American Poetry and Boomer Girls, and several books. She won the Wick Chapbook Award for her collection white in 1996, and in 1997 her play "Another Way to Dance" won the Chilcote award for The Most Innovative Play by an Ohio Playwright. Her last collection of poems, Tampon Class (Pavement Saw Press, 2005), is in its second printing. Mary Weems currently teaches in the English and Education departments at John Carroll University ands he give great hugs.

Some early comments on An Unmistakable Shade of Red:

…is the bomb. I found so many moments, so many moods, so many insights. Yours is the voice of compassion, of elegant rage. It is country but urban-wise.
-Lamont B. Steptoe

Yes, this writer is a woman, who knows that “every mouth’s its own love language, / lust’s first cousin.” And yes, she is a black woman, for whom the eyes of Barack Obama “are so deep brown / I see blue in them, / ocean water, / bones rising, / right fists raised.” And yes, like the rest of us, she’s getting older, “hair graying in places / I shouldn’t have hair.” But beyond all divisions, she is a poet, who knows that poetry is music, and music is “the first place Black and White / came together like unwritten notes / in a jazz composition.” In these poems Mary Weems both challenges and embraces America in all its turbulence and beauty.
We should be grateful.
-George Bilgere, author of Haywire

Every year with only one exception, since that fateful year 2001, I have posted my memorial to two friends that lost their lives in the World Trade Center disaster. The fifth anniversary was turned into a governmental media event to justify a war based on lies. Victim families still did not receive promised help or compensation. I wasn't going to participate in the circus and give the warmongers a chance to manipulate the memory of my friends for their Machiavellian ends. My memory of my friends, Glen and Dennis, is too precious to be commodified.

When I posted last year, after putting up the pictures published by the New York Times Portraits of Grief, I realized that these were pictures of men I never knew. They had families and careers that I heard about but never shared. They had bellies like me and had lost some hair (not like me). I didn't really know the men in those pictures.

So this year I present my friends as I remember them. The boys that I grew up with, played soccer with, discovered girls with. The friends that helped shape my view on life. Glen Wall is on the left, picture is from 1975 I think. We were 13 years old.
Dennis Buckley is on the right from recreational soccer team that he captained (I was on a different team) in 1973. He was 11.

I am dedicating tonight's Literary Cafe Poetry Reading to them. If you come, try to remember that the victims were kids once, too.

A rare thing that our regular second Thursday Poetry Night at the Literary Café actually falls on a date that has transcending significance. This month, the month of my birth, the month of Virgos gone wild, September has our not-so-humble poetry venue falling upon the date that shattered the world view, that changed the way we treat strangers, the way we travel, what we hear, what we see, what we expect. That changed the skyline of my beloved home city. Yes, this second Thurday is 9/11 and beginning at 9:30pm we will commemorate and even celebrate this day with two of the finest poets in Cleveland, Peacenik Phil Metres and Tremont homegirl Amy Bracken Sparks.

I first met Philip Metres when we sat next to each other at dinner after a reading given by Elton Glazer at John Carroll University. He was serious, obviously intelligent, and very witty in conversation. I have enjoyed his writing in the ensuing years and has hit his stride this year by winning CSU’s Book Award with To See the Earth; by getting published in this quarter’s issue of the prestigious Field magazine; and just recently been honored by The Lit Center’s Writer and Their Friends award. Phil has been very active in the local peace movement, which makes him a very appropriate part of this evening’s program. As a poet and a translator whose work has appeared in numerous journals and in Best American Poetry (2002), his publications include the chapbooks Instants (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006) and Primer for Non-Native Speakers (The Kent State University Press, 2004), the translation (with Tatiana Tulchinsky) Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), and the translation A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr Press, 2003). Recently, he published Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, Since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007). He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili, but he still responds to “Hey, Phil”.

Amy Bracken Sparks is one of the pioneers of the Lit Café poetry readings. Don’t believe me? Check out all the video on the 90’s poetry tab at the Literary Café website. I met her while I was writing for the nascent CoolCleveland.com e-newletter and Amy was pushing through with a new literary and arts magazine, Angle. The goals of CC and Angle were similar so we would bump into each other often. When I actually started to live in Tremont, I started to learn what an amazing force for the arts she is. Amy is an award-winning critic, writer and poet. She has won top honors in film criticism from the Association of Alternative Newspapers in 1995, and Best Critic in Ohio in 1998 and Best Columnist in Ohio in 2000 from the Society of Professional Journalists, as well as numerous other press awards. She is the author of two books of poetry, Serious Red (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and Queen of Cups (Burning Press) both, which I own autographed copies, and the recipient of TWO Ohio Arts Council Individual Fellowships and a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in California. She has been published in American Poetry Review, Barn Owl Review, Hobble Creek Review, DMQ Review, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Whiskey Island, ArtCrimes, kiosk, situation, mirage period(ical), Angle, Taproot, Wray, Cleveland Slam Anthology, and others she can't remember or lost track of. Poems forthcoming in Harpur Palate and Gargoyle, and is currently online at wicked alice. She used to slam with the big boys, but now lives on a great lake, held in abeyance. Amy recently completed her MFA with the NEOMFA program in Ohio. We welcome her back to the neighborhood that loves her so dearly.

It should be an uplifting evening of quality poetry, of comradery in Peace, big P. Bring your words, your ideals about the possibility of No War, No More, of peace, of the elimination of violence, of the possibility of Nirvana. We will still have fun, of course. In fact we couldn’t do what we do without the peace that exists every second Thursday, 9:30pm at 1031 Literary Road in the Peace-loving neighborhood of Tremont in Cleveland, the home of the Literary Café.

At the Literary Cafe, at least 96% of the events, speeches, and embarrassing activities that happen in the Lit, stay in the Lit. It is not quite Vegas, but then we have plenty of water and snow. It is our method of keeping a lid on things so the Feds or vigilantes don't get suspicious. It is also a way to prevent grudges from forming and its devastating repercussions. So in line with that philosophy, we maintain the open culture of forgiveness in spite of the imminent abandonment by one of our feature readers and an impersonal rejection letter for my book from the other. All this and more this Thursday August 14th at 9:30pm.

Okay, the reality is that Kent State's Wick Center sent the letter, not our reader, David Hassler. David is the program and outreach director for the Wick, where he conducts writing workshops in local schools and senior centers. He has received an Individual Artist Fellowship and an Artists and Communities grant from the Ohio Arts Council. The author of two books of poems, his most recent, Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, awarded him the Ohio Poet of the Year in 2006. With photographer Gary Harwood he is the author of the documentary book, Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community, which received the Ohioana Book Award, the Carter G. Woodson Honor Book Award, and was a Finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award. With Maggie Anderson, he is co-editor of Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School and After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School. His poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, DoubleTake/Points of Entry, Indiana Review,and other journals. And we will have to check if he, in fact, was one of the first line readers for this year's book contest. If he was......oh yeah. No grudges.

Our other reader is about to make her journey into life, by leaving us all behind....but as long she is happy (sigh), we won't hold it against her. Michelle Krivanek has been reading around the local scene at open mics and warehouse salons as she finished her BA in English from CSU. She has won the top prize in CSU's annual creative writing contest not once, but three times in a row! Michelle is abandoning Cleveland to pursue an MFA at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. We will resent not seeing her pedal about Tremont anymore and though she claims she can kick your ass, I'll be waiting for the opportunity to see if she can prove it with me, the betraying b.... Oh wait, ah no grudges.

So come to the Literary Cafe to see and hear these two talented poets, even though they don't deserve it for treating me so poorly. I'll be waving my rejection letter around while pouting in the corner. That should be entertaining. When else but the second Thursday of the month, August 14th at 9:30pm and where else but the Literary Cafe located at 1031 Literary Road in the unforgiving neighborhood of Tremont in Cleveland.

A packed house for the Lit Cafe reading with Dave Smith and Theresa Gottl included Jesus. Now I find poetry to be very uplifting and spiritual at times, but Nick sometimes says things that make some glance to heaven to check for a lightning bolt. However this time Jesus himself shlepped all the way over from Galilee Elyria to check out the scene and boy did he like it.

Yeah, it's my butt!

Of course, I am talking about relatively new myspace friend, John (Jesus Crisis) Burroughs. He did a great review of the night complete with tons of pix. He also read and sang a bit for the open mic and quickly made himself and his wife Geri a member of our Lit family. Check out his take on our hardly-ever-humble-anymore venue.

Star spangled madness continues at the Lit Café poetry extravaganza this Thursday, July 10 at 9:30pm. Never have bigger patriots been swarming around the Literary Café in anticipation of these great Americans. Yes, I speak of prophets from far West and not-so-far South. I speak of David Smith and Theresa Gottl.

Dave’s holy name in Mecca is Handsome Duke Deal and flying in on his magic carpet from the enigmatic city of Los Angeles, he feints humility by pouring Singapore Slings that will make your mother weep with joy. However, he gives away his true identity when he trumpets the first of many Truths that he is the best bartender you will ever know. Andy and Linda will reserve judgment. I, however, am a true believer ever since we met two years ago at the d. a. Levy fest, Rabbits over Clevyland, two years ago. There, he impressed me with his forceful readings and thought provoking words as well as charmed the hell out of me like any good bartender can. I should have left him a tip.

When Dave is not stirring and mixing the adult beverages that make people happy, he has written books that make peope happy such as Closer to Jesus, and co-authored with Scott Wannberg, Rocket’s Redglare the Handsome Duke Deal and Kid Mingo Letters. A limited edition broadside collaboration with visuals by S.A. Griffin of his poem, Genocide Sutra, has become something of a classic. He is most proud of his recent inclusion in the five-man anthology The Feedbag, written with S.A. Griffin, John Dorsey, Jason Neese and Jacob Johanson, released by Off Beat Pulp and Kill Poet. His next book, White Time, will be released by Off-Beat Pulp. In the 1980’s he was publisher and editor of Ouija Madness Press and Ouija Madness Magazine. Now he helps push words collaborating with Rose of Sharon Press.

T.M. Gottl (how do you get that umlaut?), which is the top secret probation name of Theresa Gottl, is a new poetic force to be reckoned with in Northeast Ohio. The first time I heard her read, my socks fell, my boxers got twisted, and my tongue rolled out to the floor. She pens some of the most beautiful and poignant verse I’ve heard in a long time and she know exactly how to recite them, without pretense nor over performance. Trust me folks, don’t be surprised if she’s the U.S. poet laureate in 30 years.

Hailing from Brunswick, the arts have always been important to T.M. Göttl, and she started writing stories almost as soon as she learned to hold a pencil. By high school, Göttl started filling notebooks with poems and journaling on any scrap of paper she could find. College graduation brought partial unemployment and a great big question mark about the future. But either by chance or fate, she eventually found herself among some inspiring people. She is a winner in the poetry category for the 2007 Wayne College Regional Writing Awards. The 2002-2003 edition of the literary magazine, The Mill, published some of her work, and she has performed at readings such as Wayne College’s Annual Poetry, Prose, and Acoustical Jam, the Erewhon Poetry Society, Deep Cleveland Poetry, and Gallery 324. Theresa’s first full-length collection is STRETCHING THE WINDOW! and is available for purchase. BRING MONEY!

In the middle of all things American, Tremont of the smoking melting pot, where the best and finest mingle with the not-so-good and sometimes ratty, we will pledge our allegiance to our country that still allows us to pay exorbitant prices for the privilege to pollute our air. Lead by two of the finest Americans to have jaywalked in burkas, David Smith (continuing our long line of Poetry Smiths) and T.M. Gottl (where the hell is that umlaut). Come to the Literary Café Thursday, July 10 at 9:30pm, located a 1031 Literary Road in the histrionic Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, land of the fierce.

I'm traveling to Kansas City, MO this weekend for a small press/ outlaw-underground-street poetry fandango. It will also be be my first out-of-town feature poetry reading. I'm going on friday night, the first of three different venues all weekend long.

Driving down with C. Allen Rearick and meeting Toledo Dorsey and the left coast contingent of SA Griffin, the Handsome Duke Deal (who is reading at the Lit Cafe July 10). Should be a great time, meeting new poets from 'round the country and getting reacquainted with friends from Clevyfest two years ago.

At the Lit Café poetry reading series, we have never run out of talented poets to be featured readers in our hardly ever humble monthly free-for-all. And in a sub category, we seemed to have attracted more than our fair share of Smith poets. Just to reminisce a moment, we have had Steven B. Smith, Kathy Ireland Smith (both a rare two times), and Dan Smith after a heart attack. That could count as 5 Smiths. To be fair we had a Jones in Anna Marie, but we can safely say that Smiths we got and Smiths we will show.

This month, Thursday June 12 at 9:30 pm, we will add yet another two Smiths, but as anybody will attest, no two Smiths are alike. From out west way in the shadow of Cedar Point roller coasters, on the quiescent shores of our fair Great Lake, Larry Smith and Rob Smith will spin their verse upon our heads like master weavers… or spiders.

I met Larry when he was promoting a book of Buddhism inspired poetry that he edited with Ray McNeice, American Zen. Then later when he toured with Monte Page and his flute, Larry enthralled me with his gentle interpretations of Wen Wei translations. I bought the CD. He was good enough to schlep into Cleveland from Sandusky to a reading I organized around a celebratory picnic for the Dalai Lama’s birthday, back when I didn’t know what I was doing and the poetry community was wondering who I was. His generosity to this nobody was a great example to this budding Buddhist and has been perpetually appreciated.

Larry has worked as a steel mill laborer, a high school teacher, a college professor, and a writer. A graduate of Muskingum College and Kent State University, he is the author of six books of poetry, a book of memoirs, two books of fiction, two literary biographies, a life biography, and a book of translations from the Chinese. The recently appointed Poet Laureate of Huron, Ohio, is the director of the Firelands Writing Center and Editor -in-Chief of Bottom Dog Press, Inc, has recently released a compendium of the Cleveland poetry scene, which we have pimped before and is working on a Russell Salomon book of impressions from his last visit.

Rob Smith’s writing was introduced to me by Larry, who published his first book of poetry, Two Hundred Fifty-six Zones of Gray. Known previously as a novelist, he won the 2006 Robert Frost Poetry Award for the poem "Catbird." A strong and lively reader, he has organized a new weekly reading series in the amphitheater of Huron and runs Drinian Press, a publisher of novels, theology, and soon a book of coffeehouse poetry. Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy from Westminster College (Pa) and master and doctoral degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary. He teaches as an adjunct instructor at both Wright State and Bowling Green State Universities in Ohio when he is not restoring an old sloop on Lake Erie.

Though they are not THE Smith brothers, they must be psychically connected at the hip, since I have never seen them apart during the last few months. So the weather is warm, no slush to wallow through, cough drops may be available from the Smith Brothers, and poetry is thriving in Tremont. Come on down to the Literary Café this Thursday June 12 at 9:30 to see what summer time fun is like. The Lit is located at 1031 Literary Road in the hacking neighborhood of Tremont in Cleveland.