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Jawbone 2013

Full weekend of poetry and music . . . this Friday-Sunday May 3-5 is the 28th Annual Jawbone Open Mic Poetry event in Kent, Ohio, and Saturday May 4 is the 3rd Annual Blue SKy Folk Festival in Kirtland, Ohio.

We’re going to both.

Blue Sky is hosted by the East Shore Unitarian Universalist Church (I’m more of a pedestrian universalist myself), and my Ma-in-Law is part of the festival committee, so I was volunteered to write up short articles on four of the performing groups for the press. I’ll post those next.

Jawbone was begun and is still hosted by Maj Ragain, one of the good people on this earth, and a top-shelf poet as well.

Stolen from Facebook:
“Dr. Major D. Ragain, an instructor of English at Kent State since 1981, teaches courses such as Creative Writing (introductory and advanced poetry writing workshops), Survey of American Literature 1800 to Present, and Survey of American Literature, and Introduction to Poetry, among others. He previously taught in Illinois at Frontier College, Olney Community College and Southern Illinois University and in North Carolina at Winston-Salem State College. He earned his Ph.D. at Kent State in 1990, his master’s at the University of Illinois in 1963 and his bachelor’s from Eastern Illinois University in 1962. Today, Ragain is a successful poet with both written and audio publications.”

Jawbone, as well as Maj’s monthly open mics, are a friendly, stress-free reading venue. 30 or 40 of us sit in a circle and whomever wants to reads a poem, then someone else jumps in with an answer poem or starts a new vector. There is no feature, sign-up sheet, or order . . . no rules except be polite and don’t hog tongue time. It’s a mixture of young and old, and the yearly Jawbone attracts out-of-state poets as well, so it’s a heady ambiance.


Kent monthly open mic readings + 28th annual Jawbone – foto Smith

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