ORGANIZER: Russell Jaffe Russell Jaffe
CONTACT: russell.jaffe@gmail.com
Are you an Iowa poet? We need you! Myself and the editors of Strange Cage, the small poetry press I’m just getting off the ground, are honored to be sponsoring the Iowa City leg of the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event!
We’re looking for poets from in and around Iowa to:
-Come read at Fair Grounds cafe in Iowa City on the 24th!
-Submit poems for our first-ever compilation, a collection of poets with Iowa connections.
The poetry needn’t be themed, however. Please send 3 poems and a bio to strangecage@gmail.com
DEADLINE: SEPTEMBER 15. It’ll be available at the reading and shortly after to all. So please do hurry along.
That’s right. A reading. A book. Join us, won’t you?
Iowa City is known as a UNESCO City of Literature and home of the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but this event transcends both boundaries of national identity and institutional education. That’s why I’m excited to announce that myself (editor of O Sweet Flowery Roses online poetry journal, English instructor at Kirkwood Community College) and Lesley Wheeler (Poetry Writer’s Workshop graduate student) will be teaming up to not only curate a reading at Fair Grounds, Iowa City’s best coffee shop and bakery, but we’ll be creating a chapbook based on submissions of poetry from anyone in the Iowa City community! Send your work to me for consideration in the journal, which will be the first chapbook produced by a press we’re starting. And please let me know if you want to read. We look forward to posting the event online and hopefully showing it on local cable access, too!
XOXO,
Russell Jaffe
Ah Russell …
… were I still in Iowa City, I’d be an ecstatic moth
bumping into the two walls creating that corner,
fluttering circles within circles
till dizziness dropped me
quick to the floor.
Upon the carpet oriental close to thread-bare
and lying there
newly aware
before my quick passing,
that the poets
FINALLY have theirs….
A place to read;
to all-embracing
Be.
~ C.E. Hamel 091511
*This poem was quickly writ in this moment of contacting thee.
Thanks for giving the sweet twisters of verse, in oh so lovely Iowa City, a place to
congregate. Ah how I loved writing when in that town: 1970 – 1974 high school
1974 – Dec. of 1978 U. of Iowa where creative writing, and later the visual arts were the weavers of my IA shadow,
before I chose to depart.