Before my criminal conviction, I didn't know a thing about Cleveland poetry much less living poetry. Though as a senior in the early 80s, I'd won a local writing contest and edited my high school poetry journal in the artistic vacuum of Grafton, Ohio. I wrote poetry during community college and my subsequent travels in the holy land--working in a factory and managing a gay bar. I immersed myself in poetry after my incarceration in 1993 at the hands of a well-meaning jury and through five of eleven years in the tomb of prison. I'd had several poems published by small press, but I’d never read publicly, never met other poets, and for the most part I wrote for an audience of two: myself and the congregation of boxes that inhabited first my closet, then my mom's basement, then eventually my wife's and my attic. I'd always considered myself a poet but I operated in a creative cloister.
I didn't just write poems, however. I used to devour others' poetry. Whitman, Rimbaud, Dickinson, Yeats, Shakespeare, Milton, Plath, Keats, Baudelaire, Coleridge and their ilk were my ministers and best friends. Dead Poets Society was my favorite film. The only living poets whose work I'd known enough to find holy were Allen Ginsberg and Ted Hughes.
After ten years of poetry being dead to me, how did I regain this passion for writing about it, reading and writing it, delighting in it, attending readings as often as possible, creating an online library full of it, falling asleep with it, dreaming it and waking every morning curled up next to it? The quickest answer is Cleveland Poetry Scenes–both the scenes themselves and the 2008 Bottom Dog Press book (edited by Larry Smith, Mary Weems and Nina Freelander-Gibans) got me enthusiastically involved in poetry again. I’d met Cleveland poets Steven and Kathy Smith on MySpace the previous year, and they planted a seed of poetic resurrection within me. Cleveland Poetry Scenes gave that seed a garden fertile with nutrients, sunshine, rain, room to grow and blossom, live and thrive. I acquired the book primarily because my friends were in it but I found between its covers the poetic equivalent of the biblical Bread of Life--a lasting source of nourishment for my neglected poetic soul.
Cleveland Poetry Scenes opened my eyes to the width, breadth and dynamic diversity of our area’s literary community. A brilliant confluence of black, white, university, street, old school, new school, on paper, out loud and online dimensions make our city one of the best locations in any nation for poetry. This book gives these dimensions their due, tells often fascinating true tales of our city and its finest poets, and includes a rich selection of our best poetry from Hart Crane and Langston Hughes, through d.a. levy and Daniel Thompson, to Kilgore, Holbrook, Angell, Smith, Salinger, Sparks, Kuhar, Weems, McNiece, Okantah, Provost, Bree and all points in between. It opened my eyes to living poetry every bit as excellent as the “classics” I once devoured – maybe even more excellent because this poetry is alive and thriving, sometimes seething, but always breathing and believing that it’s possible to make a positive change in our world with words. Cleveland Poetry Scenes got me uncaged and engaged. It introduced me to dozens of first-rate prophets in my own back yard, made poetry real and relevant to me again, and restored my faith that words can be much more than mere words.
Though it’s been four years since I left my tomb, I still haven’t ascended into any supernatural heaven. But I recall the original Jesus is supposed to have said “the kingdom of heaven is among you.” And I believe he’s right. Immerse yourself in Cleveland’s poetry scene(s) and see for yourself. You may find few harps and fewer angels. If you’re looking for more than metaphorical streets of gold and pearly gates you’ll be greatly disappointed. But I predict you’ll find this place to be a poetic paradise – or my name isn’t Jesus.
