Have you ever met the artist, Bree? I have, and she’s a fierce force of creative energy. I’d known Bree through the stories of others, and through social media for several years, and over those years we found a common bond of becoming artists via means of survival, and we both shared many of the same idols, some still amongst us, with gray-hair and leather skinned hearts, and some gone, but not yet forgotten.
I finally met Bree over a year ago at the Flywheel Brewing Co in Elizabethtown, KY, at an open mic hosted by artist and writer A.S. Coomer. I drove five hours to feature read with some friends, and to spend an afternoon with Coomer, a longtime close friend and one of my most frequent collaborators. Bree drove two hours, missed her exit, and showed up anyway. It was a phenomenal reading, and afterwards many of us took up a long, large table at a local pizza joint. At that pizza joint, the first thing the artist Bree said to me was, “I lived in a tree once,” and well, you can see how she has become one of my favorite living artists and humans.
Months after that first meeting, Bree hosted a poetry festival in her small adopted hometown of Shelbyville, KY. That festival spanned three days, and featured over 70 poets from around the country, and at least one or two from others. That weekend was legendary. I read with some of the most talented performing poets you’ll ever find in one place, many I knew before, and many I became friends and acquaintances with after. At that festival I met Ralph La Charity and Jim Palmarini, the hosts of Cincinnati’s longtime monthly poetry series Word of Mouth.
Of course, Bree, my wonderful friend, had been advocating me and my poetry to others in the way that independent artists do, and in a way that I hope I always do for her and my other friends, and Jim and Ralph invited Bree and I to feature together in Cincinnati…. nine months later, which is how you wound up reading this already longsome, lonesome lament.
Word of Mouth meets once a month, on the fourth Sunday, at MOTR Pub in the famous Over The Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati’s downtown area. Bree and I were scheduled to feature on Sunday Feb 25th. I was out on the road in southern Indiana for a reading in Evansville and to visit friends and bookstores the week before Word of Mouth, so Sunday morning I limped into Toledo, and my girlfriend Chrissy and I headed the three hours south on I-75.
Driving I-75 south from its northernmost Ohio tip in Toledo, to its southernmost in Cincinnati, is an uninspiring three hours of the most plain and forgettable road miles you’ll find in the Midwest. Half the drive is light traffic and dotted by small to midsized Midwestern towns that bear little to no visible reason to glance twice. The last half of the drive is from Dayton on down, and that’s a congealed mess of traffic and gray Midwestern blandness. Keep an eye out for the most famous I-75 landmark in the Buckeye State, a giant Jesus statue that appears to be carved from butter. This is the level of meh this drive is.
But once you hit the heart of downtown Cinci, also known as the Queen City and I don’t know why, and I ain’t looking it up. This ain’t that kind of journalism Jack. But once you hit Queen City’s downtown heart, at the last exit before the Ohio River and the rocky abyss that is Kentucky, that three hour sleepy drive suddenly seems worth it.
Downtown Cinci is full of art, murals, and people. It was 60 and sunny in late February, and thousands filled the sidewalks and streets to prove it. And wham, we ran right into a four or five block long pro Palestine protest parade. Hot damn. I haven’t seen a protest this big and righteous since the cops murdered George Floyd. I have marched, and picketed, and raised enough community hell to have sometimes been called an activist, and man, do I love a just, passionate protest march. 49% of me wanted to park the car and join them, the other 51% remembered that I had a poetry reading that I was suddenly wondering if I would be on time for. No matter what else I enjoy in life, there’s only one thing I love more than reading poetry to people, and I’m not allowed to do that during protests, parades, or in public. So, with Chrissy trying to help navigate and record, take photos and take in the raucous scenes of the now, scenes she hasn’t seen nearly as much of as I have, but who has? and we began to try to circle around the parade.
Police whistles shouted. Megaphones were drowned out by pro Palestine chants that were hundreds strong. Car horns beeped and stop light intersections were a goddamned full on circus. Hunter Thompson would have wrote a feature in Rolling Stone if he’d stumbled upon this universally human scene. HST is gone, though, but I was there. It took nearly 30 minutes to find a way to our venue. The outrage in Cincinnati over the active genocide was so big that we found different parts of the protest looming everywhere we turned. Downtown skyscrapers bearing some of the most famous street art in the country echoed with chaos in the warm sunny shadows of late afternoon, and when we finally found parking two blocks from the pub, I shit you not, the righteous rage parade was there, a block away and turning north. Jesus fuck, what a way to start a big poetry reading.
Now, the venue, The MOTR pub? It’s a full on small community performance venue that’s so worthy of its own story that you’d wish you had one in your town if I ever sat down and wrote it. But hey, if these words in this free story ain’t advertisement enough, then I’ll gladly accept big sponsorship checks to make it happen. If you know what I mean.
When you walk up to the MOTR in the almost completely gentrified Over The Rhine, like it’s an old beautiful neighborhood full of middle class people shopping storefronts in their designer coffees and drinking their designer boots that cost the same price as the coffee. When you first walk up to the MOTR Pub you’ll see the large front windows slathered and obliterated by show promo posters for upcoming events. There, on both fucking windows, was a poster with me and Bree’s photos on it, a welcoming sight that underdog and underground poets rarely rate. Boy howdy. I knew the night was alive.
When you open the MOTR doors you’ll find a long 50 seat bar on the right and a performance stage on the left with a dozen tables and booths that lay between the performer’s microphone and the front windows. Beyond the stage were more booths and a window to the kitchen where you turned in food orders for pretty stellar bar food. To the right of the kitchen were stairs that found their way to a basement dungeon with bathrooms, and a full on pinball arcade with 30 tables and chairs prime for pints, pals, and gals, guys, bros and whatever say so’s. The MOTR Pub is likely a legendary well known local establishment, but it was my first time there, and that Sunday night, when it hosted me and Bree and Word of Mouth, that Sunday night was so punk rock perfect that the MOTR Pub will forever live in honor on the hall of fame hallway in my blue collar heart.
I don’t know how long the Word of Mouth poetry series has been running, but what I’ve pieced together on my own over time is the fact that it’s hosts, Jim Palmarini and Ralph La Charity, have been writing, reading, reciting, singing and dancing poetry for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. They both were parts of cutting edge readings and art performances in scenes around Ohio since at least the 70’s, and they’ve no doubt seen just about everything Ohio has to offer to the spoken word poetry genre. Neither of them would tell you unless you started asking, and then maybe only a little, and humbly, but they’re both bonafide beatniks of sorts, and damn sure worthy of further stories that are far better written and by far better known writers than me.
Jim, Ralph, and their trusted sidekick-cohost-sound guy, Nick Barrows, they had it all set up and ready to kick off on time. The room was full of dozens of people.
They start the Word of Mouth Poetry Series off with a lightning round to honor the voices in the room, something I’ve never quite experienced, but fuck, I love it. Jim sort of explained it’s a way to let those in the audience with a fire in their throat a chance to spit it out. The veterans and the longtimers seemed to be given deference, and it was around a 30 minute long, rapid fire segment of poets and performers going to the mic to share a single poem then giving way to the next. Some read their original work. Some shared work from poets they knew that had passed. Some read famous poems from long gone famous poets.
Jim Palmarini read briefly, and Ralph La Charity got to the microphone, and there’s no way I’m going to do this justice, but he launched into a 5-8 minute long performance that seemed a spontaneous spur of the moment stream of conscious performance that mixed poetry, jazz, singing, scatting, Buddhist chanting and holy hymn humming. It instantly reminded me of Bob Kaufman, the original Beatnik, and Ginsberg, and the 60’s, and the times jazz and poetry crashed and became something more and bigger than themselves. It was breathtaking and it was beautiful. I got lost in the whirlwind of diverse, staccato poetry and suddenly wham, it was time for the features.
Bree went first, and she wowed me, and the crowd, like she always does. Bree’s poetry performances are a mixture of poetry, music, art and plucky inspiration. It’s full of the found beauty of simple things in life. Nature. Flowers, weeds, and trees that Bree knows by name like they’re her friends and cousins that she grew up playing and making memories with. Bree writes poetry, and songs, and she’s forever singing and reciting back and forth between them until she lulls me into a sweet symphony of homemade and handmade parts. If you ever get a chance to see her perform, you should. If you ever get the privilege, like I’ve had, to talk to her about her art and creative ideas, she’ll get so excited that her words come out so fast my ability to process them leaves and I just smile. Bree is an artist’s artist, man. She lives it. Breathes it. Sleeps with it and wakes up with it in the morning. Bree is art, but she’s humble and yet unaware of it.
Anyway, I read next, and I was pretty amped up. This being my first time reading in Cincinnati, to a big, enthusiastic audience. After the half hour of both cheering on and trying to skirt a long protest march. After a lightning round of poetry performance that crackled with static energy. After my friend Bree brought all our hearts back to attention with her silky serenade, I read my poetry, and it went pretty ok.
They took a 12 minute break, and the night shifted to the open mic, and the talent in that room was like blinking at the clear night sky. Stars appeared, smiled, and tipped hats at us all evening. I bet 20 poets there had published books, not that that is a marker of talent, but it’s damn sure one of accomplishment.
I got to see Nick Fury perform, and I was like holy shit. Then I met him after and learned he’s not only a longtime poetry host himself, but an all-star member of Cincinnati’s award winning slam poetry team. Pretty incredible human, and owner of the newly opened The White Rabbit Lounge, an Alice in Wonderland themed bar in Versailles, IN, about an hour from the Queen City. It’s my understanding that Nick’s new lounge hosts multiple monthly poetry and music performances and is home to a small bookstore of independent books from independent authors. I can’t wait to go visit.
I got to see my friend Gwendolyn. She read at the open mic. She moved from Ann Arbor to Toledo, then recently to the Cincinnati area. I hadn’t seen her in a year or more, and it was great to get to on that incredible Sunday night.
By the time the open mic was wrapping up, a band that was slated to play the night away was starting to load in instruments and gear, and Word of Mouth does another thing that I love. They bring the features up for one more poem a piece to end the show, a great encore hurrah for their featured guests. In all the afterglow, I’ll be damned if I didn’t almost completely sell out of every book that I brought to sell, and some of the veterans of poetry present passed a hat, and let’s just say I left with my heart full of the music and magic of the universe, yet speechless with gratitude.
Cincinnati, and Jim, Ralph, Nick, the bartender, the generous crowd, damn, they were good to me in such a combined and loving way that I’ll forever remember the night I first read with legends in the famous Over the Rhine Neighborhood.
Chrissy and I slunk back onto a late night, now nearly deserted interstate 75, and headed back towards Toledo, the tundra of Ohio.
I’ve been thinking about this night for over a month now. It’s taken me that long to get the events of it down on paper. I started and stopped 24 times in between other readings, awards, deaths, births, a full moon cycle, wars, continued genocide in many forms and in many places. From the moment the tire rubber hit the surface streets of Cinci, to the moment they exited, there was a continuous thread of rage, hope, protest, poetry, love, hate, comrades, hugs, camaraderie, dancing, singing, art and friendship. Never have I lived through so much angry, happy hope in so short a span of hours.
The sun comes and goes. The human condition is the human condition. Some things never change and somethings will never be the same again. Sidewalks crack. We all fall down eventually. But I’ll always have that night at the MOTR Pub, when me and my beautiful friend Bree were treated like future stars and loved like old family.
The Word of Mouth Poetry Series meets on the fourth Sunday of every month, and it’s like every other wonder of the world I’ve ever experienced, like the Grand Canyon, and the Pacific Ocean at dusk. I could talk to you about them all night, but you gotta see them for yourself to appreciate ‘em.
-Dan Denton 2024
Bree and I standing in front of one of our posters in the window.
Photo of a small snippet of the spacious pinball dungeon
Ralph La Charity providing a master class in performance art.
Host Jim Palmarini bringing 40 plus years of cutting edge performance poetry to a packed house.
Bree singing and slinging her sweet tea silk serenades
Co host, and sound tech Nick Barrows captured this photo of me reading.
Award winning slam poet Nick Fury bringing the fire to the open mic
My friend Gwendolyn is a highly accomplished poet, and she read one of my favorite poems of hers.
Here are the photos!!! Somehow, I've ended up on BOTH Patreon and Substack...must end one of them soon...it is too confusing!! 🙂🙃😉😎
Fine piece, Dan! I sure would like to meet Bree some time but I don't think I would know what to say. I'd probably clam up or stick my head in it's shell like a turtle. I agree with you about the drive from T-town to southern Ohio except that I found that the landscape changed for the better once you hit Chillicothe.