a new thing

Cleave together at The Cleave Poetry Workshop. Come join me.

stop

“I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

I have lived long enough to know that holding onto something may lead to it rotting in my hands.

Poetry is no different.

I have learnt to hold those things I treasure with an open hand; I know there will always be someone greater who can pry them from me if they so wish.

The Cleave has been dormant for a while, mainly due to my inability to focus enough to edit it to the level I would like. So?

It is time for me to stop.

The road leads on. Where it leads to is dependent on those who have a heart to travel this narrow road of cleave poetry, amongst other roads.

I will be here: Cleave Poetry (facebook)

and on my blog here: ptdiep

Phuoc-Tan

UPDATE:

25/5/2020

Cleave poetry thinking in science and medicine.

Oxytocin, a possible treatment for COVID-19? EVERYTHING TO GAIN, NOTHING TO LOSE. Letter to the editor. From the editor’desk. Commentary.

Phuoc-Tan

 

 

 

 

pause

we are on pause

Cleave of The Month August 2009

A year since The Cleave began is a good time to resume Cleave of The Month.

As stated before we will be awarding GBP25 to the cleave of the month from now on, and it will be chosen by the Editor.

It is hard choosing between the great cleaves especially these 3:

• The New Tree by Dennis Kelly

• Down by the Lake by Ashley Bovan

• In Such a Place as This, by Jessica Lafortune

in the end the decision was:

Down by the Lake by Ashley Bovan

Under a nearby weeping willow	a flock of geese pad and poke
a push-chair rattles along	Alice wipes mud from an off-green park bench
two bedlam kids squawking	then she rests
Vicious seagulls hunt for sandwich fragments	Exhaust fumes, and hums and grinds, from the morning motor-rush waft over
Alice fidgets and then heads off to the rose gardens	a discarded sheet of kitchen roll sticks to her shoe
The flowers sway like nodding dogs in the backs of cars	She listens to echoing Greensleeves again and again piping out from the ice cream van over on the promenade
Up-wind an old boy fires up his acrid briar	it’s time to move on
She takes the tarmac path around and up to the rockery tasting the hint of salt blown in from the bay	A brittle crisp packet rattles, trapped in an exclamation-mark-like tree
She wanders through the patterns of rocks	Her arms droop by her side
and she catches her hand on a clump of nettles	Reluctantly, she prepares herself for the long walk home

Ashley Bovan lives and writes in Cardiff and starts studying for an MA

in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in October 2009.

His website is www.ashley-bovan.co.uk

Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival

First Annual Literary and Performance Festival

September 12^th and 13^th 2009

Free and Open to One and All

Two Days of poetry, prose, spoken word, performance and jelly fish in Coney Island

Free for one & all

Saturday September 12^{th, @ 6:30pm}

Sunday September 13^{th@ 6:30pm}

At the New York Aquarium

Alien Stingers Exhibit (after hours)

In Coney Island

Surf Avenue at West 8^th Street

By Subway:

F, Q to West 8th Street stop

F, Q, N, D to Stillwell Avenue stop

Featuring:

Saturday

Hosted by visual artist and performer, Africasso

Cara Benson

Charles Denson, author of Coney Island: Lost and Found

Jibade Khalil Huffman, author of 19 Names for our Band

Dennis Nurkse, former Brooklyn Poet Laureate

Akilah Oliver

Patricia Spears Jones

Sunday

Hosted by the illustrious burlesque dancer, Angie Pontani (a.k.a. Miss Cyclone)

Edmund Berrigan, poet and member of the band, I Feel Tractor

Michael Cirelli, poet and founder of Urban Word

Eileen Myles, poet, author, ran for president as a write-in candidate.

Edwin Torres

John Ventimiglia (“Artie Bucco” from the Sopranos) reading Henry Miller’s words on Coney Island

Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival is the first of an annual literary and performance festival in historic Coney Island. It is a community based festival focusing on Brooklyn artists. The Coney Island Performance Festival takes place the second weekend in September—Saturday and Sunday, September 12th and 13th.

Since its inception, Coney Island has played host to a magnificent array of theatre, performance, poetry, dance, and literature. A naked Walt Whitman read Shakespeare to the Atlantic Ocean; Cary Grant was a stilt walker at Steeplechase Park; Woody Guthrie strummed his guitar on Mermaid Avenue; Bread and Puppet Theatre was in residence in the 1970’s and Coney Island USA has been a theatrical presence and Coney Island fixture for nearly thirty years.

The essential aspects to the Coney Island Performance Festival are a literary and performance stage, and an afternoon of free poetry workshops held at the Coney Island branch of the New York Public Library led by artists participating in the festival.  The literary stage will be located in the Aquarium, in front of the jelly fish tank.  Readings will begin at 6:30pm both nights and feature a wide array of established and up-and-coming Brooklyn based poets and writers. Highlights include performance poet, Patricia Spears Jones, John Ventimiglia from the Sopranos reading Henry Miller, post-punk poet Eileen Myles and the former Brooklyn Poet Laureate, Dennis Nurkse.

Saturday evening’s reading will be hosted by the legendary local artist, Africasso. Sunday evening’s reading will be hosted by the illustrious burlesque performer, Angie Pontani (a.k.a. Miss Cyclone.) A festival program with a map will highlight local history and architecture and draw people to local businesses.

Free poetry workshops Saturday, September 12^th will be led by Urban Word, Patricia Spears Jones and Cara Benson at the Coney Island Public Library on Mermaid

Avenue and 19^th Street.

Goals:

Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival brings literary and theatre arts to the Coney Island neighborhood that aren’t otherwise accessible to residents, while also drawing an arts audience to Coney Island from the greater New York area to see exciting new productions. Participating artists will offer workshops, free of charge, to all who would like to attend. Additionally, the festival aims to highlight the history of Coney Island, while simultaneously bringing people to discover what the present Coney Island has to offer.  The goal is to create something new and create a bridge over the whole neighborhood—east and west. Festival goers can come, spend the day, walk around Coney Island, see a theatre piece, eat lunch at a local restaurant, ride the Cyclone and enjoy a poetry reading.

Locations:

The New York Aquarium

Coney Island Public Library

www.ciparachutefestival.com (ready in late August)

parachutefestival@gmail.com

Payment for Cleave Poem of the Month

To celebrate The Cleave‘s anniversary I will be changing how the Cleave of the Month will be run:

• Payment of GBP25 for the Cleave of the Month
• I will choose my favourite poem each month
• The usual submission guidelines apply
• The changes will start from this month (the cleaves already published this month will be considered).

Oxford Alum and HBO Def Poet Taylor Mali Releases New Book

Please join us for the book release party of Taylor Mali’s “The Last Time as We Are” on Wednesday, September 9th 8-9:30 p.m. at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, (Between Houston and Bleecker). Admission of $8 includes a discount on your purchase of the book. Special guests & rare appearances. For more info please call 212-614-0505 or bowerypoetry.com.

Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement. After studying drama at Oxford with members of The Royal Shakespeare Company, Mali was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russel Simmons Presents Def Poetry and was the “Armani-clad villain” of Paul Devlin’s 1997 documentary film SlamNation. He is a vocal advocate of teachers and the nobility of teaching, having himself spent nine years as a teacher. His New Teacher Project has a goal of creating 1,000 new teachers through “poetry, persuasion, and perseverance”. He is the author of two books of poetry, “The Last Time As We Are” (2009) and “What Learning Leaves” (2002), as well as four CDs of spoken word. He received a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2001 to develop Teacher! Teacher! a one-man show about poetry, teaching, and math which won the jury prize for best solo performance at the 2001 Comedy Arts Festival. Formerly president of Poetry Slam, Inc., the non-profit organization that oversees all poetry slams in North America, Taylor Mali makes his living entirely as a spoken-word and voiceover artist these days, traveling around the country performing and teaching workshops as well as doing occasional commercial voiceover work. He has narrated several books on tape, including The Great Fire (for which he won the Golden Earphones Award for children’s narration).

Horace said the “task of the poet is to instruct or entertain,” and it would be difficult to find a poet who more fully embodies this vision than Taylor Mali. In this latest collection, Mali’s work buzzes, hums, snaps and zaps, the tour-de-force of Mali on stage having been properly captured and catalogued on the page. You don’t need a classroom to be a teacher, and you don’t need to be a teacher to help someone learn a lesson. Taylor Mali’s poetry explores this truth in entertaining and plainspoken ways, giving readers “what they need before they knew they needed it” (“Miracle Workers”). The poems contained in “The Last Time As We Are” prove that “He who seeks to teach must never cease to learn.”

Billy Collins, United States Poet Laureate, says, “Not since Taylor Mali, has there been a poet of the likes of Taylor Mali, which is to say he is a man of unique properties. He is tagged as a performance poet, but his performances, rather than being frontal assaults, are leavened by charm and wit and could survive happily on the page.”

Bowery Poetry Club

Bowery Poetry Club Live Performance

Collaborations
Spoken Word and Music
Janet Hamill and Bryan Hamill, music, performing together from “Body Of Water”

Join them and their special guests,
Diana Manister with music by Steve Cialino

and Larissa Shmailo with music by Brant Lyon
Saturday, July 25, 4 p.m.
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, NYC
212-614-0505
$5

Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics featuring Patricia Smith at the Bowery Poetry Club

Please join us for an evening of poetry with Patricia Smith, 2008 National Book Award Finalist and champion slam poet, on Saturday, July, 8th 6-7:30 p.m., at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, (Between Houston and Bleecker). For more info please call 212-614-0505 or bowerypoetry.com.

The Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics is a free seven week workshop for New York City teens. Contact Urban Word NYC for more information at info@urbanwordnyc.org.

Patricia Smith’s fifth book of poetry, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press) chronicles the human, physical and emotional toll exacted by Hurricane Katrina. Patricia is also the author of Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press), a National Poetry Series winner, and the Best Poetry Book of 2006 on About.com. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and other journals. Recognized as one of the world’s most formidable performers, Patricia has read her work at venues round the world. In the U.S., she’s performed at places such as Carnegie Hall and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and has previously shared the stage with noted writers such as Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and “Lord of the Rings” star Viggo Morgensen. Patricia is a four-time national individual champion of the notorious and wildly popular Poetry Slam, the most successful competitor in slam history. She was featured in the nationally-released film “Slamnation,” and appeared on the award-winning HBO series “Def Poetry Jam.”

The Summer Institute of Social Justice and Applied Poetics is designed for young leaders, activists, poets, writers, emcees and scholars to engage the intersection between art, academics and activism. Students will explore and assess ways that critical social dialogue, the poetry of resistance, and social activism can ignite and incite change in their communities. By examining social movements from the past, and uncovering the issues that directly affect our communities, students will develop theories, poems and responses that will affect social change for today. The Summer Institute is produced by Urban Word NYC and Bowery Arts and Science.

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.