Meredith Holmes served as the inaugural Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate.
In her poem "When Poetry Was," Meredith writes:
The people
shouted their dreams
and the poets built cities
with these conversations.
Everyone was housed and fed.
Meredith's poems balance compelling beauty with sober detachment. She recalls images that are at once personal and universal, often meditating about places we have all visited, like a city street, a movie theater, or a classroom. The public face of poetry is also important for Meredith. As she points out, "Poetry requires no paint, no instruments, no armature....only that people pay attention."
Enjoy some poems Meredith wrote during her tenure as Cleveland Heights Poet Laureate
Meredith tells her favorite stories of events during her tenure:
I have three favorites. First, the delight on the faces of city council members when I read “Cleveland Heights Field Notes,” at the Monday night meeting in April 2005, when I was installed as the first poet laureate of Cleveland Heights. Council was delighted with HeightsArts, of course, and with being the first city in the region to have a Poet Laureate, and with a brief respite, no doubt, from zoning variances, budgets, and complaints. But it was more than that. They seemed to be genuinely enjoying the poem – really listening and enjoying it. If you are a dead poet or a very, very famous one, people will pay attention because they have to, but the appreciation I experienced that night is rare.
When I was invited to open a teen poetry slam at Studio You, sponsored by the CHUH Library Youth Services, I figured I better memorize my poem. Fortunately the poem I’d chosen (the only one I’ve ever written that could hold its head up at a slam), “When Poetry Was in the Life,” is short. I also figured I better wear a jeans jacket to disguise the 40-year age difference between me and all the other poets. I’ll never know whether it was the delivery, the poem, or the jacket, but afterwards a young poet came up to me and said, “Your poem? It was raw!”
I worked with teens at the Cleveland Heights Main Library on narrative poetry in preparation for Tellabration – National Story Telling Day – on November 20. “Worked with” here is a euphemism for I arrived with books, handouts, markers, and a large newsprint pad and tried to lure about a dozen kids away from the video games. Because Nancy Levin, the youth librarian asked them to, because they like her, and because they are good kids, they dragged themselves away from the monitor and sat down at a table where I had set out copies of “For My People” by Langston Hughes:
The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.
The youngest of the group, a boy of about seven or eight, leaned over the poem, as if he were looking into a pool of water at his reflection, and read it aloud. When he finished, he looked up at me and said, “That’s God talking, right?”
