Sat 9/19 @ 3-7PM
Get out, get a beer and settle in at the Barking Spider Tavern this Saturday, 9/19, for an afternoon and evening of Beat Poetry. National Beat Poetry Festival poets perform from 3-7PM at one of Cleveland’s iconic meeting places for music and connection. There’s no more appropriate place in Cleveland for poetry to be read than the Barking Spider Tavern at University Circle, the small bar created in an old carriage house in 1986 where people can intimately connect with musicians, and in this case, poets, and pay for the experience in tips.
The Beat Poetry tradition began with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and others who railed against conformity and complacency, capitalism, war and interference with rights. The voices of featured poets of the 2015 National Beat Poetry Festival will ascend from the cozy treed space surrounded by institutions of art and learning. You may want to stay put at a table all afternoon. Poets Theresa Gőtti Brightman, Chansonette Buck, John Burroughs, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Alex Gildzen, Ingrid Swanberg and Steven B. Smith (pictured), and music by Mad Anthony create an exciting time for all people who love words and music.
And so we have relevant poetry of today. They’re storytellers, truth sayers, diviners, celebrators, lyricists, getting the word out about what life’s all about. They’re troubadours who find places to voice their songs, their words, their poetry. They’re searchers of the perfect words to string together in a way that isn’t so story-like but leaves you with feelings you cannot quite place. If you haven’t been to a poetry event lately, this is a good place to begin.
Many of us who came of age in Northeast Ohio remember Allen Ginsberg’s appearances where he may have recited the poem “Howl,” which began “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix . . .” He made appearances at anti-war protests and May 4 observances at Kent State. Beat Poetry incited anger during the 1950s, when its poets lived a fringe existence of drug use and nightclub hopping. Jack Kerouac’s well-known second novel, On the Road, gleaned from a series of 1940s notebooks, sketched portraits of key figures in the Beat Movement.
The Beat Movement was about anti-establishment, anti-conformity and expanded experience. The National Beat Poetry Festival, a nonprofit organization, collaborates with local bookstores, organizations, universities and colleges, and publishers throughout and outside the U.S. to host poetry readings, workshops and radio shows. It seeks to expose non-traditional poetry and carry out the legacy of the original Beat poets of the 1940s and 1950s by showcasing today’s artists, building a bridge between historical free expression and the thoughts and ideas of today.
nationalbeatpoetryfestival.org
Cool Cleveland correspondent Claudia Taller spent years within the confines of Satterfield Hall and at the Kent State University Press in Kent exploring the music of poetry from Shakespeare to Daniel Hoffman and now leads programming for writers, including bi-annual Word Lovers Retreats at Lakeside. Find her at claudiajtaller.com.
Cleveland, OH 44106
One Response to “Poets Carry on the Beat Tradition at the Barking Spider”
Steven B. Smith
Thank you twice – once for promoting BeatStreet Cleveland 2015, and once for posting my mugshot. This is going to be a special reading with all the good folk involved, and I’ll likely be the first reader shortly after 3pm.
Smith