Poets & artists everywhere – foto Smith

Putting on a poetry reading is always a crap shoot, especially in this town where there’s always multiple worthy cultural events going on any day you schedule.

People joke about Cleveland but in our 31 months of travel and reading in cities like London England and Krakow Poland and Oaxaca Mexico we never found a scene as edgy and vital as here . . . of course that could simply be because we know this scene intimately; but we did hit the cream of London’s poetry scene thanks to meeting poet John Clarke who’s also known as the Jazzman for his predilection to the Beats.

There are a lot of ways of weighing the success of a poetry reading: quality of audience, quantity of audience, quality of performers, quality of poems read, quality of the open mic sign-up sheet, quality and quantity of comments afterward.

By all those standards, yesterday was magic, amazing, perhaps the best reading I’ve attended. I am honored, grateful, and relieved . . . especially since it was only my third time in 49 years of poetry being the MC. My cheek muscles were aching from 2 hours of constant grinning.

I feel high and happy because something I planned worked well, yet this morning after am sort of down and depleted because something I looked forward to and worried about for so long is now over. Go figure.

Poets & artists everywhere – fotos Smith

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2012 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Art, Photography, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.