Call for submissions: collaborative cleave poems in the Cleave Matrix

We are looking for poets to collaborate and create cleave poems together online, for anyone to watch.

For many the thought goes against the grain – creating something that is not entirely their own.

There is a level of vulnerability also.

There is also the possibility of doing something new, catching the edge of a new wave.

There are other collaborative poetry projects such as likestarlings, mygorgeoussomwhere, poetrycollaborative.

For those willing to get involved please email cleavepoetry @ gmail dot com with Cleave Matrix in the email title line.

I will then pair you up with another poet.

The poems that pass muster will be published here in The Cleave.

Bowery Poetry Club Records Live!!!

Bowery Poetry Club Records Live!!!

Featuring: Gary Glazner, John Giorno, Tahani Salah, Marjorie Tesser, Kristin Prevallet, and Cynthia Kraman

On Sunday, May 24 Bowery Poetry Club Records will be recording a group of some of the most talented poets in New York as they perform at the Bowery Poetry Club. The show will be from 4-7pm, and will include readings by Gary Glazner, John Giorno, Tahani Salah, Marjorie Tesser, Kristin Prevallet, and Cynthia Kraman.

Gary Glazner produced the first National Poetry Slam in San Francisco. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, periodicals, on CD, radio, television, and underwater on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. His poems have been translated into Chinese, Moldavian, Nepali, and Vietnamese. Glazner is the Minister of Fun for Poetry Slam Incorporated. He is currently the managing director of the Bowery Poetry Club.

In 1968, John Giorno founded Giorno Poetry Systems in order to connect poetry to new audiences, using innovative technology. Some of the poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were William Burroughs, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1982 he made the album Who Are You Staring At? with Glenn Branca^[1] and is prominently featured in Ron Mann‘s 1982 film Poetry in Motion. In addition to his collaborations with William Burroughs, Giorno has produced a number of albums, tapes, videos and books. In 2007 he appeared in Nine Poems in Basilicata, a film directed by Antonello Faretta based on his poems and his performances.

Tahani Salah was a member of the 2007 Nuyorican National Slam Team, has worked with Urban World NYC for the last 8 years and is now the Youth Outreach Coordinator for Urban World NYC, and has performed across the world, including at the Apollo and on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. As a Palestinian-American Muslim woman, Tahani is committed to bringing light and solutions to problems faced by people from communities and experiences whose voices are silenced.

Marjorie Tesser is the editor of Bowery Books, an independent poetry press, as well as the publisher for the journal The Mom Egg. She has won the inaugural Firewheel Chapbook Award for her manuscript The Important Thing Is…, she produced Bowery Women: Shoot the Poem! Video-poetry Festival, and has been featured at the Howl Festival of East Village Art.

Kristin Prevallet is a poet, essayist, performer, and educator whose literary focus is to integrate political and personal consciousness into radical poetic forms. She has taught poetry and poetics, critical thinking and close reading at NYU, The New School, Bard College, and Naropa University. She is currently teaching in the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. She has received a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Poetry and a 2004 PEN translation fund award.

Cynthia Kraman’s new book of poetry is The Touch (Bowery Books 2009). Her previous collections are Taking on the Local Color (Wesleyan University Press 1977), Club 82 (1979) and The Mexican Murals (eg press, 1986). She formed the band Chinas Comidas with Rich Riggins in Seattle in the late seventies, and a CD of their live and studio recordings was released in 2006. She has a doctorate in medieval literature from the University of London, Queen Mary, and lives in New York City.

Bowery Poetry Club Records has already released two compilation albums comprised of some of the best poets and bands that perform at the Bowery Poetry Club. All of Bowery Poetry Club Records materials can be downloaded from i-Tunes. Be sure to check out www.bowerypoetryclubrecords.com for more information about Bowery Poetry Club Records, as well as the artists on the label.

Lunatic by Jessica Lafortune

driving	on empty
aimlessly	restless
crazy	as the full moon
shadowing	reflecting
all that	I pass
is	meaningless
temporal	vanity
like	a lunatic in the land of
midnight	sun
I am	alone
vanishing	in depravity

A cleave by any other name…Part 5: Orchestrations in Perceptionalism by RH Peat

I wrote a form very similar to this back 1996, In fact it was a complete book called “Thin Shadows” But it had a third part as well of a small topic poem attached to what you are calling a cleave poem. There were 80 full page poems in the book dealing on all kinds of subject, I’d be happy to share some of them with you if you would like to see some of them. I only self published 50 books at the time I compiled the book out here in California. I only have one copy left now. Interesting that you were doing the same thing back there around the same time. RH Peat

Preface “Thin Shadows”
To help the reader with my Orchestrations in Perceptionalism, I might say that syntax has been surrendered completely for the benefit of a type of free flowing parameter of consciousness, for there are several poems interlaced together with one poem-structure. There are at least four different poems intersecting upon one-another in different ways throughout any of the simplest of these poem -structures. There is a basic concept of reading from left to right and from top to bottom that is still carried throughout the poem-structures.

Because each phrase or word-grouping is to be read in more than one direction (either horizontally or vertically within columns downward or through continuous lines across he page). Syntax was somewhat bypassed for multiple kinds of meanings and uses within these groupings and phrases upon the field of a particular poem -structure’s particular subject matter. Although the writing may appear quite similar to stream of consciousness, I do believe I have managed to maintain a parameter of understanding upon a specific subject or topic of concern.

It is quite true this type of fracturing tends to appeal more to the connotative of the quantum experience rather than the denotative found within the overall scene flow of a narrative story-line, but I do believe that there are beginnings, middles (turnings), and endings throughout the poem-structures. My overall concern whoever was to appeal to the subconscious mind more directly rather than the conscious mind.

Abstractly speaking it is kind of like looking through a magazine quickly until you snag yourself upon something that identifies to your inner concerns—Then you delve into the subject matter more deeply; the diversity is still all contained or maintained in the parameters of the book-binding of the magazine. Unlike a magazine however I do fell that I have put a much tighter and more specific concern upon subject matter and/or top identification.

I must state that this is all terribly experimental within its written structural sense but actually more closely related to the common thinking process involved in and found inside light conversation or an informal letter: Personal letter writing where things tend to drift around a bit.

So at first you might have the feeling that you have walked into the middle of a conversation; it may sometimes be a bit disorienting at first glance until you get the gist of the conversation. I do believe this poetry itself is a bit more fractured in appearance than these other forms of consciousness by the breaking-up of the verses into various short picturesque imagery, and its quick motion-picture like movement of sudden changes like movie vignettes; In another way, it is also more condensed by the use of this picturesque imagery compressed into a static compacted-completeness as a single painting or photograph might appeal to the senses. Nevertheless the lines within the poem-structures are like stepping stones that lead you around and throughout the same walled garden. Stepping stones leading you toward more of an illumination of the experience rather than an understanding of the experience within any particular wall of the garden: i. e.

Morning rock-wall laughs silently/     A smoking man coughs
A steamy glass rises in ferns/     Cigarette shaded night into ashes
Sunlight unveils it’s burnt curtain/    Torn pack and opened book
A silky ghost gown takes flight/    A sky scratched blue flair
Yawn into transparent dove wings/     A quick match struck dawn
(a) side                                                      (b) side

(c ) construction
A Thin Shadow— coughed echo leaves
he stops to draw-up a sudden light
A moments rest from his worked earth
Awe unveils a silent laugh of delight
flashed match touched to cigarette tip
His flame bitten breath into ash will ignite
As smoke and steam curtains curl-up
Pulled root from the slow garden night
Outstretched fern arm into the lit dawn
Just as the rock-wall turns into sunlight
Dew and exhaled lugs become phantoms
Ghost wings opened into morning flight

One poem-structure is made up of several internal poems including the “A Thin Shadow” poem which can act as a prologue or an epilogue to any or the poems: 1(a ) side is a poem, 2. (b) side is a poem,  3. the lines of both poems  (a+b) read together horizontally into a single combined line are yet another poem. 4. Or yet another poem is the combined poems (a+b) read as two columns one read after the other. 5. The (A Thin Shadow) poem is a spin off of the overall umbrella of all the other poems: a shadow of some of the overall concept that is scattered throughout the total poem-structure.

Hopefully this is enough to get the reader started upon the adventure within my book. The voyage into what I would like to call my “Orchestrations in Perceptualism.” Perceptualism being the presentation of many perceptions simultaneously as all the instruments of an Orchestra combine their efforts together to play an opus in concert. Not that words don’t offer this concept within an individual poem, but here it is separate poems rather than words that are orchestrated in concert rather than single words.

Call for submissions of video cleave poems

We are looking for videos of poets performing/reading their cleave poems, either in private or to an audience.

Either email me a clip or a youtube link.

To begin with here are youtube links of Diana Manister reading at The Bowery Club and Phuoc-Tan Diep reading at The Poetry Society Cafe.

Tree Dream by Dennis Kelly

Tree Dream

—for Phuoc-Tan, Diana, Jennifer & Laurie

last night—i dreamed of yggdrasil

the world tree—over on the coast

there I was—in the hoh river rain forest

by a secluded cabin—deep in the woode

i was standing—on this open porch

there with this tree—a huge thick tree

it was a douglas fir—a sky-high tree

it had crevices—with cleaves going up

thru its dark bark—heavy primitive veins

the giant douglas fir look—the world tree

unlike tall cedars—its skin corrugated

and around this fir—flying birds

crows eagles—woodpeckers seagulls

all of them feasting—engorging themselves

in the crevices and—in the old bark cleaves

I looked closer—what were they eating

thousands of slithering—singing cicadas

cicadas crawling—inching their way

up the sides—up the giant douglas fir tree

flocks of hungry birds—thousands of them

feasting themselves—all the singing bugs

the whole forest—full of wings & loudness

singing cicadas—almost deafening

and there i was—in the middle of it

the tree—the birds, the cicadas…

so that’s how—yggdrasil is me

I said to myself—slowly waking up

(First here).

Floating Hope by Jessica Lafortune

between	living for them and
carving out a niche of	my own
lies	elusive balance
between	birth and death
past and future	lies
living	in the present now
I struggle	to find joy
in the mundane	tame the angst within
running around	the paddle wheel
maintaining	serene, clean
days decaying	hours trapped
like a fish	behind glass
a dead man	floating hope
martyred	for the pleasure of others

Jessica Lafortune lives in Florida, loved by humans and canines who (barely) tolerate her obsessive reading and writing habits. Her current fantasy involves living on an island in the Pacific Northwest, reading and writing to her heart’s content, supported by lottery winnings. Until then, she can be found substitute teaching, writing poetry, playing blackjack, and loving well those who know her best and keep coming back for more. Her poems can be found in Amaze, Simply Haiku and Babel Fruit.

The cintanquainka poetic form by Michael Williams

A Whole New Form

this verse

bright as a diamond

introduces

a brand-new combination

the cintanquainka form

made for all my friends

two classic forms combined in one

as a twist of something new

spin out a cintanquainka

try it

***

This idea was sparked by a mistaken comment in a Cinquain thread about using Tanka form. It triggered a thought and I was off. This is a combination of a Cinquain and a Tanka, mixing the two syllable requirements. I’ve juggled the mixing of the lines just a bit, so it begins and ends with a two syllable line in order to make a poetry game using it work better. This also happens to keep the classic tanka pair of 7-syllable lines together.

The syllable count by line is:

2 / 5 / 4 / 7 / 6 / 5 / 8 / 7 / 7 / 2

Just because I have a twisted mind, I made my first two posts a Cleave Poem of sorts: the Cinquain lines can be read as one verse and the Tanka lines as another or the whole can be read as one verse. Michael Williams.

There are voices by Chris Bryan

there are voices	in hidden places
that are whispering	across the world
of all these things	i have seen
so i listen and wait for	the beginning
the revolution	of love

First published here.

Chris Bryan is a 26-year old American living in the UK.  I am a ‘cellist, composer and stay-at-home dad, and I write poems, short stories and song lyrics when I feel inspired.

The editor reading a cleave poem: migration

The Editor (Phuoc-Tan Diep) reading a cleave poem “Migration” at Premieres and Poetry: Migration