Announcing: Pudding House Salon

Poetry Workshop in Cleveland

Pudding House Salon now brings its dynamic workshop to Cleveland, where intermediate and advanced poets find mutual support, critique and development. Following the longstanding Columbus Pudding House Salon, once a month we will do read-around, share poetry news, hone mic skills and scout publication opportunities. Afternoon intensive critique focuses on strengths and weaknesses of each poem and asks, has the poet dropped down into the deepest level to which the poem calls?

Pudding House is the largest literary small press in the U.S. with over 1,000 titles in print. Beginning this September, Cleveland Salon runs every second Saturday of the month at the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Coventry Village Library in Cleveland Heights, from 9:30 a.m. till 4 p.m., facilitated by longtime Columbus Salon member Sammy Greenspan*. Fee for the eleven-month series, $50 (some need-based partial scholarships available). No required degrees or publication list. To determine if this workshop is a good fit, please submit three of your best poems and any questions to:

216 371-1844

*Sammy’s poems and stories have appeared in Heartlands: A Magazine of Midwest Art and Writing, Del Sol Review and various anthologies. Her chapbook Step Back from the Closing Doors (Pudding House Press, 2009) is a Pushcart nominee. She can be found online at northcoastpoet.com .

                       Driving to Columbus

Ohio, Ohio, you heart of black-splotched cows

grazing, your cornfields, your soy fields, your

eggplant and butternut squash.

I wanted to despise your bakeries oozing

jelly donuts and white bread, your anxious

inner ring suburbs, your liberal white parents

with kids in parochial schools, your festering cities,

hidden homeless shelters, your twelve

step meetings in every church basement.

Your wreckage of fifties factories crumpling,

your air injected,

your waters, your waters,

your Shaker Lakes strung with carp,

your highways corseting the map.

I never wanted to love you, Ohio,

with your legs spread to the Cuyahoga,

you north coast licking, Great Lakes embalming

burnout whore of a Midwest state. I never asked

for your statuesque heron, ruthlessly stripping koi

from your backyard ponds, your

outraged suburbanites protesting the deer cull, your

bulldozers eviscerating the last green corners, 

your fungus of upscale McMalls.

I intended to return to somewhere

from your aging oak and blighted elm, your

kamikaze squirrels, your jays screeching at dawn.

I pined for pigeons, for Flatbush subway platforms

reeking of urine and hope.

But oh, Ohio, you crooked heartbeat,

your endless Route 71, your ponies

grazing by the berm, your skies blown wild

with early snow, your stooped trees loosing their leaves

all at once, your red-tail hawks

circling overhead so small,

your eagle, enormous

atop the streetlamp by Dead Man’s Curve.

I never wanted to love your oboist baristas,

your creationist fundamentalists,

crack-whore senators, graft-bleeding statehouse,

your red, red cheeks

turning blue from sheer desperation,

shaved of vision, starved for money,

empty of haven for your dark-eyed teenagers

clutching drooping pants in one hand

and cell phones in the other,

your existential ennui, decades out of fashion.

I hate you for making me love you,

your stubborn neighborhood cafes,

your ridiculous academic snobbery,

your losing teams every season of the year.

Your hawks circling the highway, circling the highway,

your undulant wheat fields hugging the berm.

~  Sammy Greenspan

                              Driving to Columbus first appeared in Heartlands: A Magazine of Midwestern Life and Art, Volume 5, 2007 and is included in the chapbook, Step Back from the Closing Doors (Pudding House, 2009) as well as the 2009 anthology The Pudding House Gang.