June 29th: M.J. Arcangelini & Friends and Ground & Sky Poetry

I'll have the pleasure of being a small part of this very special event on Saturday, June 29th, 2024 from 5:00pm to 7:30pm at Mac's Backs Books on Coventry. Joe Arcangelini is a fine poet and friend.

From the press release:

Mac's will host a gathering of poets with readings by MJ Arcangelini and Joel Lesses on Saturday, June 29th at 5 p.m. The event is also a book release celebration for Journeys of Sacred Community: A Collection Anthology of Ground and Sky Poetry

MJ Arcangelini, born in Pennsylvania in 1952, has resided in northern California since 1979. He has published in many magazines, online journals & over a dozen anthologies.  He is the author of six published collections, including  Pawning My Sins publlished in 2022 by Luchador Press.

Ground and Sky Poetry is a reading series in Buffalo and Rochester, NY and was inspired by the late poet Maj Ragain from Kent. 

Joel David Lesses is a counselor and the founder of Education Training Center in Buffalo, dedicated to reframing mental health distress as a potential spiritual marker and existential opportunity. He also does the Unraveling Religion podcast which focuses on spirituality, world religion, meditation and poetry.

Other poets scheduled to read include Dianne Borsenik, Chris Franke, Russ Vidrick, Steven Smith, Kathy “Lady” Smith, John Burroughs, Shelley Chernin, Ben Gulyas, Adam Brodsky, Steve Goldberg, Steve Thomas, Scott Silsbe and  Chandra "Peggy Honeydew" Alderman.

Mac's Backs
1820 Coventry Rd.
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
https://www.macsbacks.com

Three Poems in the New Issue of Tinfoildresses

I'm happy that three of my poems ("Critical Condition," "A Superior Stimulant" and "Bilateral Heart Moon Resolution") appear in the new 2024 issue of tinfoildresses, alongside work by Marissa Prada, Rosa Jamali, Steven Smith, Kathy Smith, and Adam Schmidt. So many thanks to editor Heather Ann Shepard!

Download the issue for free at https://tinfoildresses.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/tinfoildresses-2024-2.pdf. 

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes The Law of Almosts by Mindi Kirchner

We are extremely happy to announce the publication of The Law of Almosts, the latest poetry collection by Mindi Kirchner, one of our favorite writers. Now available for only $10 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA.

Where are you?

United States $10.00 USD Elsewhere $13.00 USD

The Law of Almosts is 46 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 8.5". Contents include "The Law of Almosts"; "Globe-Spinning"; "X by X"; "Prize"; "Love Sonnet for a Perfectionist"; "High School Yearbook"; "Ray Ann Walker, Saint Rita Church Festival, 1971"; "The Good, The Bad, and The Ocean" "Remove Sunglasses"; "Desultory"; "The Duration of Events"; "Solving for Feeling"; "Dear Loneliness"; "Christmas Communion"; "The Last In-Flight Supper"; "Naming the Baby"; "Nomenclature"; "Not My Art"; "Split Ends" "The Sweet Spot" and "Fernweh." ISBN: 978-1-64092-976-0. Front cover image created by Steven B. Smith, who used Kathy Smith's Old Comb sculpture as his subject.

Mindi Kirchner’s first chapbook, Song of the Rest of Us, won The Wick Poetry Prize, judged by Jim Daniels, and was published in 2009. The chapbook was nominated for a Lantern Award and featured in an art exhibit, Penned by Penn Staters: Books by Alumni Authors, in University Park, Pennsylvania. Kirchner has also been a finalist in the Best of Ohio Writers contest and for the Whiskey Island Poetry Prize and the Robert Hare Award. Her poems can be found in the Wick Poetry Series anthology, The Next of Us is About to Be Born. Her work has also appeared in numerous independent journals. She spent 10 years teaching composition and developmental writing at Youngstown State University. She now lives with her husband and very delightful daughter in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Albright College in Reading. 

An Evening of Poetry with M. J. Arcangelini and Friends at the Happy Dog East

Poetry! California and Ohio converge at a legendary locale on Wednesday 2 September 2015 at 7 p.m.

M.J. Arcangelini was born 1952 in western Pennsylvania, grew up there & in Cleveland. He’s resided on the west coast since 1973. He began writing poetry at age 11, stories in his teens and memoirs in his late 40s. His work has been published in a lot of little magazines, small newspapers and anthologies. I especially love his collection of poems With Fingers at the Tips of My Words.

Co-features including Jim Lang, Steven Smith, Dianne Borsenik, Kathy Smith, Christopher Franke and me will read short sets first, followed by the main event, Mr. Arcangelini's reading. An open mic where all friends and strangers and strangests are encouraged to participate will follow.

Happy Dog at the Euclid Tavern
11625 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

No wonder the Dog is so Happy. 

Note on parking: A lot across the street from the Euclid Tavern is free after 6pm for people coming to the Tavern.

Colliding with Cinema3956 in Detroit on 18 April

Poets Dianne Borsenik, Steven Smith, Kathy Smith and I will be reading in the Detroit area Saturday 18 April.  This is only my second Detroit area performance ever, the first being way back in 2009.  Here are more details, courtesy of the Farmington Voice:

"The Soul Collective of Collaborative Arts will host some of the area’s most talented poets and artists at an April 18 benefit for S.O.U.L. Source of Universal Love, a Farmington area charity.

The premiere Art and Poetry Event, held from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. at 23023 Orchard Lake Rd., Building C in Farmington, will feature Cleveland poets Dianne Borsenik, Kathy Smith, John Burroughs, and Steven Smith, and the artistic talents of Michigan artists Adam Klimek and Anthony Callis, creators of Cinema 3956 and flagship character 'Space Yeti.'

Callis and Klimek will display a gallery of their artistic works, along with video, and other multimedia creations. The poets will & read from their latest works and discuss their most recent projects.

Admission is free; voluntary donations will be accepted."

Thanks to William B. Burkholder for inviting us!

The event will take place at
23023 Orchard Lake Road, Building C
Farmington, Michigan 48336

RSVP to Cinema 3956 and Cleveland Collide on Facebook or just show up.

Crisis Chronicles Press Publishes City of Tents: Poems About the Occupy Movement and Other Items Taken From the News (CC#57)

Cover photo by Steven B. Smith

Crisis Chronicles Press is thrilled to publish Martin Willitts, Jr.'s latest chapbook, City of Tents: Poems About the Occupy Movement and Other Items Taken From the News, in October 2014.  According to the author, "This is a collection of poems based on protest and social issue concerns. The poems start with the Occupy Movement, and include forced slavery, forced migrations, disenfranchised people, and other subjects. I question a lot in this book. As a Quaker, I find many things troubling in this world. I scold my own generation who had protested war, for women and minorities. Where are they? They should have joined Occupy, not the Tea Party."

City of Tents is a 38 page, handmade, 8.5 x 5.5", saddle-stapled chapbook featuring 22 poems including "Occupy This," "Hell for Plants," "If Pull Down the Empty Sky, "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" and much more.  ISBN 978-1-940996-10-3.  Available for only $7 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3344 W. 105th Street #4, Cleveland, Ohio 44111 USA.

"Willitts calls out the irrationality of the put-on soundbite, of cruelty and greed. He asks of us and society to do the uncomfortable work of self-examination.

"At times he's in anguish at the scale, ledgers a litany of injustice with the grief of an exhausted exhale. Some of Willitts's lines are like skipping ahead steps in a math problem: 'smoking cigarettes of last chances.' He recognizes the nebulous: 'the type of nothingness nobody understands.'

"After we're wrung wet, he offers sparing notes like plates of sunlight: 'joy as temperamental as a geyser' and 'a cautionary song of Amazing Grace.'"
— Kathy Smith, co-author of Oct Tongue -1 and founding editor at The City Poetry

"There are two pervading themes braided throughout City of Tents: 'He could have been any of us' and 'Words can…be an unlit match.' Willitts confronts oppression and imprisonment in its many varied guises, including poverty, bullying, ignorance, and war.  He also offers hope:  'I open envelopes of promises—heritage seeds…small changes begin.' City of Tents is a demand for political and socio-economic awareness.  Heed its call!"
—Dianne Borsenik, author of Blue Graffiti and founding editor at NightBallet Press 

“'Like many things it had no beginning'—yet, even a trauma, a seeking, a quest with no beginning can be brought to some wholesome end. However, this Picardy-third-like sound alighting the grid, causing fractals to sing across Indra’s net, would only ever take place by way of the body. 'Where is the body going?' ('sinkholes of a woman’s sorrow,' into 'the disquieted spirit')—

"This is a grief book, a human emotions book, a book-length rhetorical question capable of leading the body into an activist martial stance in the street, among a gathering of tents. Willitts gives us a long hard look at 'the type of nothingness nobody understands.' As the 'floating world' sink[s] it is an excess of belief that keeps us afloat. Will we be able to tow its weight? Can we adjust these norms by taking the sinking weight of a world on our shoulders?

"What is being modeled for us—what it is that we inherit: 'to take things apart and not necessarily put them back together.' Yet, through these poems, these proposals, the pulse being pumped into a desire for peace and rightness, he (we) are willing to stand up for this! We are actually how the things get put back together."
— j/j hastain, author of xyr and secret letters

Martin Willitts, Jr. receiving the Dylan Thomas
International Poetry Award in Swansea, Wales

Martin Willitts, Jr. is a retired librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He currently evaluates Prior Learning for SUNY Empire State College. He is a Quaker. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. He was nominated for 5 Pushcart and 4 Best of the Net awards. He provided his hands-on workshop “How to Make Origami Haiku Jumping Frogs” at the 2012 Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Martin has 5 full-length books and over 20 chapbooks including Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees (Edgar and Lenore's Publishing House) and Swimming In the Ladle of Stars (Kattywompus Press).  He is the winner of the inaugural Wild Earth Poetry Contest for his full length collection Searching for What is Not There (Hiraeth Press).  He won the William K. Hathaway Award for Poem of the Year 2012 and he won the Dylan Thomas International Poetry Award in 2014.

Remaining August in August

This has been an extremely busy month for me - but I guess that's par for the course.  I've had to run my grandson to appointments with his pediatrician, neurologist, neurosurgeon, occupational therapy, GI specialist and ENT specialist (I may be leaving something out) on top of his having to spend 24 hours in the hospital for multiple procedures at one point.  The good news is we now have a clearer idea what's causing his issues, and it seems these can be treated non-invasively.  I've also had several readings: 8/4 I hosted Monday at Mahall's in Lakewood. 8/5 I featured at Your Vine or Mine in Painesville.  8/15 I read at Voices from the Viaduct in Erie.  8/25 I attended Crisis Chronicles Press author Leah Mueller's reading in Canton.  And 8/27 we had our Oct Tongue -1 book launch at Mac's Backs in Cleveland Heights.  It's Crisis Chronicles' biggest book to date (by seven authors: Mary Weems, John Swain, Steven Smith, Lady, Shelley Chernin, Steve Brightman and myself), and getting it published in time for the event took up a lot of the first half of the month for me.  I've also been preparing for future events, including 9/1's Monday at Mahall's featuring Ray McNiece and Mary Weems.  I finally have the Mahall's lineup finalized through the end of December, and I'm really excited about it (more on that in a later post).

August also saw the official release of another big Crisis Chronicles Press book: The Night Market (poetry by D.R. Wagner with art by ReBecca Gozion).  I'm really proud of both of these books.  The Night Market took about a year and a half to publish. Oct Tongue -1 took nearly a year.  But both are well worth the wait.  I'm currently working on half a dozen other great books that are behind schedule (more on those in a future post).  And then I've had some minor car trouble.  I took my car in for an oil change and found out I had a nail in my tire and needed some kind of air filter replaced.  Then somebody walking down the street bashed my windshield with a hunk of black top.  Altogether, there went another $300.  I've only had the car slightly over a year and I've already had to invest nearly $2000 in repairs - something I had hoped to avoid when I got rid of my 1993 Buick for a 2013 Mustang.  And then, back to August, there's my on again off again job search, assorted other family needs, and I could go on and on.

The good news is I keep plugging away.  I owe you work or an email I will get to it as soon as I can.  Don't give up on me.

Much love....

New Book! Oct Tongue -1 by Weems, Swain, Smith, Lady, Chernin, Burroughs and Brightman to Be Released August 27th at Mac's Backs in Cleveland Heights

cover foto by Smith

Like seven 31-page chapbooks in one!

Published August 27th by Crisis Chronicles Press, Oct Tongue -1 is a collaborative book by Mary Weems, John Swain, Steven Smith, Lady [Kathy] Smith, Shelley Chernin, John Burroughs and Steve Brightman.  This book is our biggest yet, 300+ pages, featuring 217 poems (31 by each author), all written in response to the editor's October 2013 poem-a-day challenge.  [He borrowed the idea from a poem-a-day book called February 03 by Todd Colby, Alex Gildzen, Thurston Moore and Matthew Wascovich (published in 2003 by Slow Toe in Cleveland).]  Oct Tongue -1 is  a 6x9" paperback, ISBN 978-1-940996-08-0, available for $15 (now only $10) from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3344 W. 105th Street #4, Cleveland, Ohio 44111.  See October through the eyes of seven fine and quite different poets!

Please join us at these special launch events!

8/27/2014: Official Oct Tongue -1 Book Release at Mac's Backs in Cleveland Heights, Ohio
9/1/2014: Monday at Mahall's featuring Ray McNiece and Mary Weems in Lakewood, Ohio
...and perhaps more to be announced soon

About the authors:

Dr. Mary Weems is a poet, playwright, imagination-intellect theorist, social/cultural foundations scholar and former Poet Laureate of Cleveland Heights. Weems is the author and/or editor of twelve books and five chapbooks, most notably white (Wick Poetry Chapbook Series) and Tampon Class (Pavement Saw Press). Two of her books were full collections of poetry: An Unmistakable Shade of Red and the Obama Chronicles (Bottom Dog Press, 2008) and For(e)closure (Main Street Rag Press, 2012), both finalists for Ohioana Book awards.

John Swain of Louisville, Kentucky, is the author of several acclaimed books including Rain and Gravestones (2013, Crisis Chronicles), White Vases (2012, Crisis Chronicles) and Prominences (2011, Flutter Press). His latest, Ring the Sycamore Sky, is forthcoming in the summer of 2014 from Red Paint Hill Publishing.

Steven B. Smith was born, is living, will die. He's been a poet 50 years, artist 49 years, the publisher of ArtCrimes, editor of AgentOfChaos.com, he blogs on WalkingThinIce.com, and sings at ReverbNation.com/MutantSmith. Smith & Lady published his bio Stations of the Lost & Found, a True Tale of Armed Robbery, Stolen Cars, Outsider Art, Mutant Poetry, Underground Publishing, Robbing the Cradle, and Leaving the Country in 2012 via The City Poetry Press.

Lady, a.k.a. Kathy Ireland Smith, is a poet, publisher, artist and surreal photographer from northeast Ohio. She and her husband Smith spent 31 months of traveling in 10 countries on 3 continents from 2006-9, and you can follow their ongoing adventures at WalkingThinIce.com. Kathy is also founder and editor of The City Poetry (thecitypoetry.com), a cutting edge art and poetry zine based in Cleveland.

Shelley Chernin is a freelance researcher, writer and editor of legal reference books and a ukulele enthusiast. Her poems have appeared in places like Great Lakes Review, Scrivener Creative Review, Rhapsoidia, Durable Goods, Big Bridge, and the Heights Observer. She was awarded 2nd Place in the 2011 Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest.  Her chapbook, The Vigil, was published in 2012 by Crisis Chronicles.

Steve Brightman lives in Kent, Ohio. He firmly believes in two seasons: winter and baseball. His most recent chapbooks include 13 Ways of Looking at Lou Reed (2013, Crisis Chronicles Press), In Brilliant Explosions Alone (2013, NightBallet Press); Like Michelangelo Sorta Said (2013, The Poet’s Haven), Absent The (2013, Writing Knights Press) and Sometimes, Illinois (2011, NightBallet).

John Burroughs is the founding editor of Crisis Chronicles Press and hosts the Monday at Mahall’s Poetry and Prose Series in Lakewood, Ohio.  He is the author of It Takes More Than Chance to Make Change (2013, The Poet’s Haven), The Eater of the Absurd (2012, NightBallet Press), Barry Merry Baloney (2012, Spare Change Press), Water Works (2012, recycled karma press), Electric Company (2011, Writing Knights) and more.

Spider / Words & Wine / Voices from the Viaduct / Oct Tongue -1 Book Release

In my last blog entry, I told you about the Monday at Mahall's event I'm hosting August 4th at 7:30 p.m. with featured poets Sean Thomas Dougherty, John Dorsey and John Swain.  Now I'd like to tell you about three more readings in the coming month:

Sat. August 2nd 2014 at 3 p.m.: Green Panda Press presents a plethora of poets including Michael Salinger, Sara Holbrook, Bree, Krystal Sierra, John Swain, Russell Vidrick, Steve Goldberg, Adam Brodsky and John Burroughs at the Barking Spider Tavern on Juniper Road in Cleveland.

Tues. August 5th 2014 at 6:30 p.m.: Words and Wine featuring John Burroughs at Your Vine or Mine, 154 Main Street in Painesville, Ohio.

Fri. August 15th 2014 at 7:30 p.m.: Voices from the Viaduct featuring Ron Androla, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Ron Hayes, John Burroughs, Dianne Borsenik, Veronica Hopkins, Greg Brown, Kim Noyes, Michael Bennett, Marisa Moks-Unger, Tracie Morell and Keith Moses, hosted by Cee Williams at the McBride Viaduct, 12th Street and East Avenue in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Wed. August 27th 2014 at 7 p.m.:  The official Crisis Chronicles Press book release for Oct Tongue -1 (by Mary Weems, John Swain, Steven Smith, Lady [Kathy] Smith, Shelley Chernin, John Burroughs and Steve Brightman) will happen at Mac's Backs, 1820 Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Oct Tongue -1 cover photo by Smith