The Lix and Kix Poetry Extravaganza and PoetryElyria are pleased to participate in The Love Initiative's Music for Meals Food Drive this month.  We encourage you to bring non-perishable food items to our 11/14 PoetryElyria show (featuring J.E. Stanley & dan smith) at Jim's Coffeehouse and Diner in Elyria, our 11/17 Lix and Kix show (featuring Maj Ragain, Christopher Franke and Blaire Bommer) at Bela Dubby in Lakewood, and/or the 11/20 Saturday Night with the Poet's Haven show (featuring Steve Brightman and Eric Odum) at Angel Falls in Akron to help the cause.

From The Love Intiative:

The Love Initiative is gathering together the artistic and music communities of the region to collect food for the Cleveland and Akron Food Banks.

These organizations service over 800 angencies, feeding over 20 million meals in Cleveland, and over 179,000 people in Akron.

This multi-day event focuses on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Dozens of bands, artists, and other creatives will be working through most of the area's venues and night spots to collect canned or non-perishable food items, grocery store gift cards, and/or money.

The Food Banks currently have a need for canned fruits, vegetables and soups.

A full list of participating venues and bands will be listed on the Love Initiative group facebook page, www.theloveinitiative.com, www.akronpeaceproject.org, and many more!

As part of this project, The Love Initiative and the Poet's Haven are publishing an anthology called Vending Machine: Poetry for Change that will be given away to anyone who makes a donation to Music for Meals at the 11/20 Angel Falls event.  My new poem "Can It" is in the anthology, alongside work by dozens of others.

We hope to see you (and your cans!) at one or all of the following events:

Sun. Nov. 14th 2010 from 1 to 3 p.m.
PoetryElyria at Jim's Coffeehouse and Diner, 2 Kerstetter Way in Elyria, Ohio

Open mic emceed by John Burroughs including featured peformances by J.E. Stanley and dan smith.

J.E. Stanley is an accountant and part-time guitarist from the grayscale suburban wilderness of Northeast Ohio and a member of the deep cleveland tribe of poetry, as well as the author of Dark Intervals (vanZeno Press), Dissonance (deep cleveland press) and Ink (Gypsy Lips Press). He is also co-author, with Joshua Gage, of Intrinsic Night (Sam's Dot Publishing). Follow his blog at http://jestanley.blogspot.com/

dan smith, also a member of the deep cleveland tribe of poetry, is the neo-Beat mystic author of Crooked River (deep cleveland press) and winner of the 2009 Hessler Street Fair Anthology Poetry Contest. He has been known to come with music. See selections of his poetry at http://www.deepcleveland.com/f-mysticdansmith.html

Follow PoetryElyria on Twitter: http://twitter.com/elyriapoetry

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Wed. Nov. 17th 2010 from 7 to 10 p.m.
The Lix & Kix Poetry Extravaganza at Bela Dubby, 13321 Madison Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio

Featured performances by Blaire Bommer, Christopher Franke and Maj Ragain, followed by an open mic emceed by Dianne Borsenik and John Burroughs

Blaire Miller Bommer attacked poetry dead on in 2010 at the Women of the World Poetry Slam in Columbus, Ohio. Though she went ...to volunteer, she ended up winning a spot in the competition at their Last Chance Slam where she took second. She got herself beat up by national heavyweights, only to come home and immediately hone in on her craft. Bommer has had several features in the city of Cleveland and performed in various cities across the country including Boston and St. Paul. She has self-published two chapbooks, The Blaire of Bad News (2010) and PERIODS (2010) - a collaboration with Kisha Nicole Foster - under the guise of Blasted Nips Press. With Blasted Nips, she continues to make herself available to help fellow poets print fun chapbooks. In her lifetime she has occupied EVERY college institution in Cleveland, worked for glass blowers & rock sculptors, passed out free cigarettes, and built sets at the CSU Factory Theater. At 25, this young poet has a voice that bleeds ears and a pure heart which is felt within the frail honesty of all her poetic words. And doesn't she look great in that shirt? [bio by Kisha Nicole Foster]

Christopher Franke is an experimental poet from Charlotesville, Virginia, USA. His work includes concrete poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, and various forms of conventional poetry. He has performed as a member of the Endangered Species Trio as a reader of his poetry to harp and flute accompaniment. His poems have also been included in the paintings of other artists. Franke has performed sound poetry readings and more conventional poetry readings in Northeast Ohio for decades. His first book of poetry, Title, was published in 1969 by the Cleveland State University Press and featured a number of concrete pieces. He coined the terms "flip words" and "toe-faced words" to describe mirror reflection words and puddle reflection words respectively. He also coined the terms "typoons" to describe free-form (non-linear) emoticons he has had in print since Title, "articles" to describe visual poetry collages, and has extended the meaning of the word "versicle" to also mean microbooks of poetry, particularly concrete poetry. [bio by Wikipedia]

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....

In Ragain’s teaching statement he said, “Before I ever taught a class, I came across this sentence in Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats, a singular book about organic principles in architecture and the forms in which spirit resides. I can still see my hand writing it down in an old notebook, ‘To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action.’ In 33 years of teaching, that has remained a guiding principle. …I believe that, as a teacher, I am also an apprentice, a learner and in the poet Gary Snyder’s wonderful phrase, ‘a fellow worker in the Buddha fields.’ I often write with my students. Of all the ‘strategies,’ that seems the most fruitful. It brings certitude to the classroom a sense that the teaching is being translated into action, that the work is shared. I am teaching myself to listen." [bio by Grace Dobush and Sandra Eaglen on the Kent State University website]

Visit Lix and Kix on Myspace at www.myspace.com/lixandkix

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Sat. Nov. 20th 2010 from 6:30 to 11 p.m.
Saturday Night with the Poet's Haven at Angel Falls, 792 West Market Street in Akron, Ohio

Featured poetry by Steve Brightman and Eric Odum, open mic emceed and recorded for podcast by Vertigo X'ian Xavier, and distribution of the anthology Vending Machine: Poetry for Change to anyone who donates canned goods et cetera to Music for Meals

Steve Brightman is 1/4 cup dijon and whole grain mustard, 1/4 cup honey, 1/4 cup ground coffee, and 1/4 cup deep dark molasses. He lives in Kent, Ohio, with his pionus parrot and thinks that PNC park is the finest cathedral in North America. His poems have been featured in "Pudding House," "Kansas City Voices," "Origami Condom," "My Favorite Bullet," and he was included in the Ohio Bicentennial Anthology titled "I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems about Ohio."

Eric "Verbal Influence" Odum is a 20-year-old poet hailing from Cleveland, Ohio. He has been part of Playhouse Square's SlamU! program for the past five years. He is a peer mentor, running workshops and working on a personal level with teens on performance and writing. He was part of Cleveland's National Youth Poetry Slam team for the past three years. He also runs a poetry group called Spit Poet Spit, which performed at Urbean Joe’s Coffee this past September. Eric is the founding member of an after school poetry group called New Age Poets. He started writing at the age of nine and began performing at fifteen. He has released one chapbook, "Unspoken Declarations," and has a CD in the works called "Verbal Therapy."

Visit the Poet's Haven at poetshaven.com