Special Feature: Jim Palmarini’s “WELCOME TO THE READING”

Jim Palmarini is a fixture in the Cincinnati poetry scene. He’s written, read, and performed in just about every part of this strange and beautiful city—and his poem in issue 20.2, “WELCOME TO THE READING: A Five-Decade Tour of Cincinnati’s Aural/Oral Poetry Scene,” is an ode to the places here where poetry lives and has lived. Jim is a masterful reader, and recently enchanted the crowd at our 20th anniversary celebration with a recitation of this poem (for which he adamantly refused a microphone–his voice carries well in all manner of venues). This collaboration was directed and edited by Assistant Editor Holli Carrell.

Jim Palmarini has been facilitating and participating in public poetry readings in Cincinnati for over thirty-five years. He currently hosts the long-running Word of Mouth Cincinnati series at Over the Rhine’s MOTR Pub and a series at Scarlet Rose Books in Ludlow, Kentucky.