TKOG Who peddles poetry on street corners

NTKOG #143: The kind of verse-spouting hippie chick who — too acrophobic to shout iambically from the rooftops — is content to proselytize for poetry on the street corner.

I am: little more than the sum of great words I have read. Imagine the Oogie Boogie man in Nightmare Before Christmas, but scraps of Whitman and Bukowski instead of cockroaches.

I am not: going to force you to feel the same way.

The Scene: Harvard Square, home of the hippies, the burn-outs, the quivering young intellectuals, the pointedly anti-social, the huggers of strangers, the peddlers of street art, and of course of those who have no other home. Or, as my sister succinctly put it this morning: “Your people.” Sing it, sistah. Stopped at CVS to pick up a sheet of posterboard and a Sharpie, then set about making magic.

After casting about my mental external storage drive (aka: Wikipedia), found two quotes that spoke both to me and to the situation. Both are Whitman, cribbed from Leaves Of Grass, of which I have read three copies into dust over the last decade.

How could you read this and not just think: "Yes. Yes, that is the thing."

Once the time to actually become a street person arrived, though, my dreamy poetry haze steeled up a bit. Rolled my banner up tight and pinned it out of view, between my thigh and a trash can, while I pep-talked myself. It’s fine, dude. Not everyone who holds a sign is crazy. Look, there’s a sign guy over th–caught the eye of my fellow canvasser for humanity and he tilted toward me a sign that read: “BIN LADEN MINI-ROBOTS POISON MURDER HUMANS.”

Frig.

Gulped down my shame and unfurled my sign. And you know how I say usually you shouldn’t be afraid to do whatever you want, because chances are nobody’s going to notice anyway? Does. Not. Apply. Here.

People started staring right away. Moments after I unrolled the sign, a WASPy mama walking by tugged her toddler daughter away from me in a wide arc. A crew of no-socks-with-loafers lingered in front of me, me, mouthing the words in unison; after a moment, the most sunkissed of the dudes snorted explosively and pivoted on his heel. They all followed, except for one who hung back for half a second. “I read that one,” he murmured, low. “Blades of Grass, right? I liked it.”

I ended up not showing this side at all because, as Kiss-Ducker pointed out, holding up a sign beckoning strangers to talk to you is a little ... off-putting.

Somehow, “just long enough for the blog” stretched into an hour and a half in the gorgeous breezy street; hundreds of people streamed past my sign. Many of them, upon accidentally catching my eye, glanced at the sign then ripped their eyes away as though the words were finger-painted in HIV-positive blood. But of those who read, there were three reactions:

About half of the readers flicked their eyes over the words perfunctorily, then grimaced at me with the bewildered betrayal of a dog you’ve just tricked into eating its heartworm medicine. A little fewer than half of the readers caught my eye and shot me a bright, fast smile afterwards. And then there was the small handful of folks to talked to me.

Some of them were fellow Whitman fans (good taste!) who thought my project was cool; some wanted to know what the rest of the poem was about. Most couldn’t figure out why the frig I was standing on a street corner making them read words about feelings.

“Well, it’s National Poetry Month,” I’d shrug. “And you always see signs about politics, so why not signs about poetry?” This simple explanation didn’t work for some.

Soooo, is this about healthcare reform? Nope. It’s about poetry! Education spending? Poetry! Feminist poetry? Poetry for everyone. …pro-choice?

A wheelchair-bound homeless woman, ripped plastic grocery bags tied around her legs, rolled up and ran me through my standard explanations. Her hands were cupped around a paper up of steaming coffee, despite the afternoon’s heat.

“Why don’t you make a sign that’ll get you money?” she asked me.

“I don’t want money,” I told her. “I just felt like sharing some poetry.” She gazed up at me for a long beat.

“That’s fucking stupid. That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I guess. At least it’s nice weather for it.”  I smiled, then waved her goodbye. She raised her hand too — and poured the sixteen ounces of scalding coffee all over my right foot.

Guess poetry’s not for everyone, huh?

The Verdict: Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t do this again. Oh heck no. But this was far from the apocalyptically awkward task I thought it would be. Most passers-by flinched under my gaze and treated me like human garbage, sure, but at least my sign time gave a few pedestrians a secret smile for the afternoon, a jolt of beautiful language. And that’s very much worth suffering a few second-degree burns for.

On which note, guys, I have a very important favor to ask you. I believe that people need literature to live, and I suspect you feel the same way, or you wouldn’t be here. My dear friend Muscles is another of us artsy types and, between us?, he is going to set the world on fire. Right now he’s working for a non-profit whose current project is close to my heart: a musical theatre piece entitled More or Less I Am, based on Whitman’s “Song Of Myself”. And they’re going a bit bigger than homemade posterboard on corners: they’re playing a two-week run in New York, including seven performances free to the public — elementary schools — workshops — the whole deal.

I wanted to ask if you could please check out the project’s Kickstarter fundraising page, read a little bit more. Look, I’m not one of those dirty for-money bloggers, with their PayPal buttons and their Amazon Wishlists, but if reading my little blog over the past several months has brought you one or two dollars’ worth of amusement — can I ask you to consider putting those one or two dollars toward helping a very talented theatre company bring the words of the greatest American poet to life in front of people who need to see it?

If you could find it in your heart (and budget) to make even a token contribution to this special project, please email me and let me know so I can thank you properly and acknowledge you on the blog.

Tagged as: cambridge, in which i appear to be a crazy person, it almost physically pains me to ask you guys for a favor but the fact that i'm doing it anyway speaks to how important i think it is, more or less i am, national poetry month, never thought i'd interact with homeless people this often -- thanks boston!, poetry, proselytizing, this great wacked-out older guy stopped after reading my quote and bellowed: "WHITMAN! One of the greatest faggots who ever lived!" then told me Oscar Wilde's life story, walt whitman