HeightsWrites is the literary committee of HeightsArts and works to bring poetry to public life in Cleveland Heights. HeightsWrites organizes poetry readings and workshops and since 2005, has facilitated the search for the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate. In November 2008, HeightsWrites and Bottom Dog Press published a collection of poems by the three Cleveland Heights Poets Laureate, entitled Awake at the End.

Heights Arts is celebrating its tenth year of arts in the city with a variety of arts programs, from visual to musical. And since April is National Poetry Month, this month’s program showcases a sample of regional poets paired with photographers in a display and book of Poetography.

Poetography is the idea of Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate Gail Bellamy* facilitated by Heights Arts. Ten poets and ten photographers were invited to work together in randomly-assigned pairs to create poems and photographs about some aspect of Coventry Village, Cleveland Heights. Their chosen subject matter ranged from the closing of Vidstar Video to back alley fire escapes to crosswalks to love and loss.

Poetography is made possible thru the generous support of the following:

• Tommy's
• Coventry Village Special Improvement District, Inc.
• Mac's Backs Paperbacks
• Herbert Ascherman, Jr.
• First Place Bank
• K & L Realty
• Big Fun

*Bellamy is a recipient of a 2010 Creative Workforce Fellowship, a program operated by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Heights Arts and the Heights Observer are reviving the tradition of publishing poetry in the newspaper. In the early twentieth century, poetry was a very popular feature in both small-town and big-city newspapers. Newspaper poems were read and reread, enclosed in letters, and saved in family bibles and photo albums. People turn to poetry in good times and bad, so we hope, no matter what the new year brings, that you are comforted, elated, inspired, and provoked by the monthly poems you can read here.

Cleveland Heights poet Gail Bellamy has been selected by Heights Arts to be the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate for 2009-2010. She is the author of Cleveland Food Memories (Gray & Co.), Design Spirits (St. Martin's Press) and the poetry chapbook, Victual Reality (Pudding House Publications) in which Arugula appears. Her chapbook Traveler's Salad is forthcoming from Pudding House. She

Heights Writes facilitates the search for a Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate every odd year.

The Laureate is appointed annually by Cleveland Heights City Council during April, National Poetry Month, and serves for two years. The principal official duty of the Laureate is to write and present poems for public events during the term of office.

Bellamy's wide-ranging interests and talents are on display in her detail-rich poems, which combine a poet's startling metaphors and associative leaps with a journalist's deadly accurate, and often very funny observations. "I love all kinds of writing," Bellamy says, "poetry, journalism, fiction, and memoir, but poetry has always been my first love."
Her sense of history is especially vivid when she imagines her own heritage, as in Papa's Violin:
Papa's strings spun Transylvanian horas
evoked oxen, pitchforks, thatched roofs
far away in incense fog

Bellamy is just as fascinated with the here and now, the hurly burly of popular culture. In If Advice Were a Vaccination, she considers what she might have missed if she'd heeded her mother's advice:
...I never would have become engaged and unengaged
to a heroin addict, owned a quarter horse, slammed
my hand in the car door or been lingering at the
anti-military ball when the first punch
was thrown.

Don't mess with Gail Bellamy; she knows the score. But in The Waxy White Berries of Fortune she lets us in on a secret:
... Mistletoe is a thin wire stretched across your path
providing the Uncle Lesters of this world
with an opportunity to kiss their nieces.

Like a good musician, Bellamy improvises; she is open to all experiences, all vocabularies. "I never know exactly what I'm going to do next", she says, "If I did, I probably wouldn't like writing so much"

As Executive Editor of Restaurant Hospitality magazine, Gail Bellamy writes about food and beverage and has interviewed chefs, mixologists, and restaurant owners all over the world. She has noticed that most people are very genial and charming when they are talking about food. "They open up and share interesting insights", Bellamy says. "And that's because they are talking about more than food. Food is something all people have in common; it's a very rich subject: There's food as metaphor, food as memory, food as history."

Heights Arts and Bottom Dog Press published Awake at the End: A Heights Arts Poet Laureate Anthology featuring poems by the first three poet laureates of Cleveland Heights: Meredith Holmes (2005), Loren Weiss (2006), and Mary E. Weems (2007-2008).

Edited by John Panza and Mary E. Weems, Awake at the End serves as both a poet laureate primer and a fine collection of poems by the Cleveland Heights Poet Laureates who found themselves awakened by their tenures as poet laureate.

Local poet and educator Ray McNiece says of Awake at the End, “This anthology shows just how poetry can matter—for a community, from a community and by a community.”
Amy Bracken Sparks says the poems in Awake at the End are “a conflation of histories, memories, and narratives whose edges are ever changing.”
And Plain Dealer Friday magazine editor Laura DeMarco says, “Awake at the End is a wonderful reminder of the impressive talent that calls the Heights home.”

cover art by Cleveland painter Timothy Callaghan, photographs by Herb Ascherman, Jr., cover design by JoAnn Dickey

To order a copy ($14 + tax) call 216-371-3457. Copies can be picked up at Heights Arts Gallery.

Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate project is mentioned in the Washington Post.