What was a staple of early modernists like Pound — the focus on impressionistic imagery in poetry — will be the underlying theme of this year's Cleveland Poetry Festival, which runs April 12 through 14.
Hosted in a partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art, Literary Cleveland's third annual festival will explore, via a series of workshops and readings, "the play between image and text, the use of type in art, the ways poetry and visual art inspire each other."
"It's like 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,'" Matt Weinkam, Literary Cleveland's executive director said, referring to writer John Keats' most famous poem. (A meditation on an old piece of Greek pottery.) "It's looking at poetry that takes influence from other art forms not poetry."
Fourteen local poets and four out-of-towners will present their takes on influences on written word, from Cleveland-based Siaara Freeman workshopping on "Ekphrastic Poetry" (that is, poems fueled by art, like 'Grecian Urn'), to artist couple Ali and Donald Black Jr. riffing on the intimate ties between poetry and photography.
Literary Cleveland's festival, its second in-person event since the pandemic, comes at a trying and interesting time in the city's public exploration of local arts.
In February, the FRONT International arts festival, which had been showcasing hundreds of paintings, sculptures and installations in Cleveland since 2016, had announced it was folding operations. And last week, CAN Journal, the city's visual arts almanac, opted to close its triennial, as well.
Literary Cleveland
This year's festival fills a growing festival gap left by the FRONT and CAN triennials.
Such a creative gap will allow CMA and Literary Cleveland to step up, and produce something glittering for Northeast Ohio's arts milieu. And both will do so at relative high points: Literary Cleveland ended its 2023 fiscal year with glowing numbers, its annual report stated, with double the members it had in 2019, its founding year, and more than triple the attendees of their events. (And quadruple the revenue.)
The festival also aims to explore the unique relationship visiting poets—like Lauren Haldeman and Diana Khoi Nguyen—have in common with others in the Midwestern class.
Kevin Latimer, a 30-year-old poet from Cleveland's Stockyards, and co-founder of indie press GRIEVELAND, believes the April fest will help further crystallize a very Cleveland school of poetry, a style seen in fellow readers Stephanie Ginese and Brendan Joyce, one that often toys with lowercase styling and emotional fragments.
Just as it does, Latimer said, the personal politics of those lodged in the Instagram Generation. (And our addiction to images that come with it.)
"I'm going to have to agree with Matt on this one," Kevin Latimer said, referring to Weinkam. "There are elements of [social media] that are good, elements that are bad. In the end, it's good that poets are posting, and having their work being read."
Besides the aforementioned poets and artists, the three days of poetry will include participation from Mansa L. Bey, Danny Caine, Carrie George, J.P. Hernandez, Michael Loderstedt, Phillip Metres, Wendy Patridge, Alyssa Perry and Zach Savich. We'll also see panels and work read by visiting poets Joyelle McSweeney and Cindy Juyoung Ok.
Tickets to the festival range from $15 to $100, which can be purchased on Literary Cleveland's website.
The poetry begins with a 7 p.m. kickoff reading at CMA's Community Arts Center, on Friday, April 12, and closes on Sunday evening with a special version of Con Tú, a new literary variety show hosted by Ginese.
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