Almeda Street Poets reunited for charity

For the Almeda Street Poets, poetry is a gravitational force that brings people together. On Friday, they will be hosting a reading at Grounds for Thought in Bowling Green at 7 p.m. Four poets from the Almeda Street poetry collective will reunite after five years to read poems for charity.

The Almeda Street Poets consist of Michael Hackney, Jonie McIntire, Lori Kukyendall, Adrian Lime, Kerry Trautman, Michael Kocinski and John Swaile, who have all been attendees of UT at one point in time.

The poets began writing collectively around 1994 in an English class at UT. In 1995 they started an open reading at the Original Sub Shop with conducive workshops. The next year, the group grew to be like family and met regularly for dinners aside from their weekly poetry meetings.

For a few years, the poets were in constant orbit with each other, sharing dinners every Sunday and conducting biweekly poetry readings and workshops. They met most regularly at Kukyekndall's house on Almeda St. In 1997, they were in a poetry workshop class taught by Lipman.

"For the next couple of years, this core group and whoever else we could talk into joining, would meet weekly at Sam and Andy's, a restaurant downtown [currently Manhattan's] where [Kukyendall] worked," McIntire said.

Their weekly meetings alternated between workshops and readings. After a few years, marriages, divorces, children and changes of location, the poets stopped meeting regularly around 2001, but reconvened in spring 2009 for a group reading at Artomatic 419, a reoccurring art exhibit throughout the Toledo area.

"We wrote constantly," McIntire said. "We made up stupid exercises and assignments like going around in a circle and writing a group poem one line at a time. Honestly, now when I write or read I can hear how the other poets would react or what they would say."

"We really did have a lot of fun," Hackney said. "It was well-rounded, like an education in poetry, but we were running the show. Nobody was allowed to have writer's block."

Through years of workshops, dinners, readings and literary bonding, each of the poets developed a unique style and tone.

"I'm a romantic, I write about love," Hackney said. "[Kukyendall] is more gritty and about realism. [Lime] had long weapon stories. Kocinski writes about nature. [Trautman] writes about family and femininity. [McIntire] has more jokes. John Swaile was big into different forms of poetry."

Despite their personal writing tastes, they all share one common element in their work.

"Family is a big connection among all of us, honestly," Hackney said.

Over the years, the poets held open readings at the Original Sub Shop every third Saturday of the month. The poets continued to put together workshops and kindle the spirit of poetry.

"We were searching for other people who were interested in writing and people who had some quality in their writing," McIntire said. "We gravitated toward people who wrote and put thought and care into their work."

"I wouldn't be the writer I am today if it weren't for those people shaping my work," Hackney said.

"When you read a lot of poetry, you start seeing the world that way; it's like a matrix," McIntire said. "When we all started filtering off, it was really hard to write."

"People need stimulation," she said. "You need that community. You cannot write effectively in a vacuum. A community of writers is where you get feedback."

"We find each other," Hackney said. "We can workshop, we can take our work to each other and tell each other if we've gotten lazy or if we're settling; we can tell each other to raise the bar."

For the Feb. 19 reading, Hackney and McIntire organized the reading with the poets alternating every few poems.

"If I read all of my poems to myself, I put myself to sleep, which is why I wanted to have alternating poets," he said. "A rapid fire, round robin, a ‘come at the audience with ‘everything we've got' kind of reading."

Four of the Almeda Street Poets will be reading at the event, each planning to read 14 poems apiece.

"It's an old fashioned generous poetry reading," Hackney said. "We want everyone to come."

The Almeda Street poetry reading is a charitable event in honor of the Library Legacy Foundation. All sales from the chapbook, albums and donations will go toward charity.

"[Reading poetry] is exhilarating," Hackney said. "I want to have an audience; I want to do a few readings a year. There's nothing better than having a live audience for poetry."

For this group of poets, there are two ways to present poetry: written and spoken. In written work, they believe in certain levels of complexity. For spoken, the poems have requires visceral, immediate and sensory images. In a sense, poetry is no different than painting. It can be enjoyed as ‘art on the wall,' a craft between friends or a method of self discovery.

For Hackney, poetry forced him to obtain a sense of self. Writing, reading and work shopping poems is to find oneself and rise above personal or worldly barriers.

"Poetry is magic," Hackney said. "Poetry is the dark horse; it's like the underdog of literature. You've got to get behind it."

"I think poetry is like the worker of literature," McIntire said. "You don't get to the other stuff unless you can start with poetry. In poetry, every word matters."

"As far as popularity, poetry is not a strong suite," Hackney said. "I could never imagine a world without it. Some people say it has no function or purpose in life, but I would like to beg to differ. I feel like poetry is an exclusive club and I feel happy to be a part of it. If half the world doesn't get it, they don't need to be in the club."

For McIntire, poetry adds a spark to life when it becomes tedious.

"You can go through life, you can do your list of verbs throughout the day; people have basic goals for each day, but then there is also what sustains people through that," McIntire said. "It's beauty, it's a dead fly in the window that makes you think of your uncle, it's that sense of interconnectedness when you're not around other people."