Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour: 09.11.06-09.15.06 ANYWHERE, USA Dispatches from poets stuffed in a bus touring 50 cities in 50 days. Friday: 09.15.06 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Day Eight / Laramie, WY, Denver, CO, Lincoln, NE / Tina Celona

It is the fifth anniversary of the event that made America, for the first time in decades, afraid for its safety. Even more than nuclear proliferation or the spread of Communism, 9/11 invoked in Americans a sense of personal vulnerability precisely because of its arbitrariness—everyone in a major city, or anyone who flew on planes, felt suddenly endangered. There have been many poems written about 9/11 by poets I admire. I wish I could write one too.

The town of Laramie, forlorn on the prairie, presented a scene of almost unbearable loneliness. Even the cowboy bar with its two-headed calf could not dispel the feeling of sheer distance from everywhere else. Willa Cather would have had a hard time finding, in Laramie, whatever it is that makes it possible to write. I am in awe of the poets who manage to live and write there.

One such poet was Craig Arnold, who teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming, and who hosted our ragged troupeau. Immediately on arrival we were escorted to the town’s pizza parlor, where all sampled slices of a pizza called “Thai Pie,” which was very tasty but bore no resemblance to any Thai food I have ever eaten.

The reading took place in a cavernous auditorium, which seemed more cavernous because of the relatively modest size of the crowd that gathered there. Kristin Prevallet, Matthea Harvey, and Tina Celona made their tour debuts to echoing applause. But it was Rebecca Lindenberg, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah and Craig Arnold’s lady friend, who stole the show with her earnest, heartfelt poems about the tall man in her life.

The following morning I was unable to eat the interesting scrambled eggs, cheese, salsa, and corn tortilla hash Craig served up in his bare but homey apartment because I was extremely hungover from the $3 triple whiskey-and-cokes I had consumed after the reading. As the bus hurtled towards Denver, I tried to sleep, waking to find myself at a rest stop surrounded by an attractive prairie plant that Kristin, upon inquiring within, identified as Apache Plume.

It was a short ride to the Tivoli Turnhalle, where were met by Jake Adam York and the Jim Lehrer film crew, who promptly began to interview Matthew and Joshua, who looked exhausted after their frenetic week of poetry travel. The film crew trailed Blake, the devastatingly cool merch guy, into the building where he was instantly mobbed by Denver poetry fans fervently seeking to buy Wave, Fence, and other books.

The audience filtered slowly in to the Turnhalle, another enormous room with a precipitously tall stage, and the reading began a few minutes late. Chelsey Minnis had not arrived, but the show went on, though everyone was hoping she would appear with her skull ring and charming ellipses. Matthea Harvey read a prose poem about depression-dispelling tiny ponies and Joshua and Tyler Gaston (on guitar) performed a selection from their musical about the 18th-century poet-physician Erasmus Darwin, author of the obscure but compelling The Loves Of The Plants. Kristin performed a jaw-dropping, tongue-twisting poem about someone named George. Joshua Marie Wilkinson, a Denver poet who had just joined the tour, read a line containing an image which I vividly (but erroneously) remembered as sunflower seeds but which were really dandelion seeds freezing in his blood.

Dinner was shepherd’s pie and 1/2 pound burgers (Midwestern appetites are huge) washed down with Railroad Ale at the Wynkoop Brewery. Bill, the bus driver, was taking the three-hour nap that would permit him to drive all night to a truck stop somewhere in Nebraska, while we slept to the gentle creak of the suspended bunks, breathing shallowly the fog of orange oil and urine emanating from the bus toilet, which is really UNBEARABLE AND MUST BE CORRECTED!!!!

In Lincoln, Nebraska, which Bill navigated with relative ease, we were met by Zachary Schomburg, editor of the fantastic magazine Octopus, and James Engelhardt, both doctoral candidates at the university. Blake, whom Erin had failed to coerce into looking at dinosaur skeletons, wandered off to the art museum. The rest of us were led to a coffee shop notable for its use of beer glasses to contain scalding-hot coffee, which Erin said was the worst idea she had ever heard of. And that, dear reader, brings us to the present moment, a not-unfamiliar scene of poets grazing on croissants, sipping lattes, hunched over laptops, and scribbling on napkins.

’Til tomorrow,
Tina Celona

Day Nine / Omaha, NE / Tina Celona

Tuesday morning finds us at the Omaha Public Library reading to a large group of 12-year olds wearing fluorescent-inked black t-shirts and applauding wildly after each poem. It is the most enthusiastic crowd yet on the tour, and the poets respond with exaggerated gestures and increased volume. Two local poets, Sarah McKinstry-Brown and Matt Mason, read poems about pregnancy (“The Baby That Ate Cincinnati”) and marriage, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson leads the audience in choruses of “the karate chop of love,” an unforgettable line from a poem Joshua read the night before in Lincoln.

In Lincoln, 13 poets, including five local poets, Anthony Hawley, Grace Bauer, Matthias Svalina, Zachary Schomburg, and Michael Dumanis, read to a packed house at the Sheldon Art Museum at the University of Nebraska. Zachary described relations between a unicorn and a lung, Matthias read a series of creation myths, Anthony a poem inspired by the Rothko Chapel in Texas. Grace, wearing a brooch made from an oven dial, recited a poem about how slang has changed over the years, ending with the line “what a long strange trip it’s been,” and Michael read a poem taking as its point of departure a line from Death Of A Salesman, “the woods are burning.” Erin Belieu closed the reading with an unforgettable poem about Nebraska, her home state, in which football coach Bill Parcells ends up trapped in the body of a tiny yapping Chihuahua.

After the reading we adjourned to a very loud bar where Joshua was denied entrance for not having ID, with the result that everyone left after one drink and went to another bar, less loud and with a smoking room, which did not have martini glasses but served up Cosmopolitans in shot glasses. At the bar I was approached by two Lincoln natives, a man who had been sketching vegetables at the pizza parlor where we had gone for dinner and whom I had invited to the reading, and a lovely and enthusiastic young woman who was making a documentary film about sustainable agriculture.

Many drinks later, Zachary drove Anselm Berrigan, who had just joined the tour, and me to his immaculate house, where I crashed on the hot pink day bed and Anselm commandeered the living room couch. In the morning Zachary woke us up to hot cinnamon rolls and drove us to the Poetry Bus, parked near the railroad tracks on the edge of town. And off we went to Omaha . . .

Day 10 / Ames, IA / Tina Celona

Who knew Iowa could be so exciting. The reading took place at the Octagon Arts Center in a big room lined with paintings by local artists. Matthew Zapruder kicked off with a typically mournful poem (“the white-tail deer of sadness”), followed by Tina Celona going out on a limb with a long, unedited and uneditable poem met with much applause, to her great relief. Anselm Berrigan read a poem about getting arrested in Jersey after riding on the back of an 18-wheeler through the Holland Tunnel at the age of 14, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson read prose poems from a new manuscript, The Book Of Truants And Projectorlight, to be published as a chapbook by Octopus Books later this year. Tyler Gaston emceed in place of Travis Nichols, the hometown hero, who read blushingly from his chapbook Iowa. Anne Boyer, a local poet, read some flarf poems (constructed using Google searches), and Anthony McCann and Joshua Beckman, wearing twin “Gentle Reader” tracksuits, finished up with “erasures” composed by deleting lines from texts by Keats, Byron, and Mary Shelley. These were surprisingly passionate and beautiful, and were warmly received by the astonishingly large audience of poetry fans, many of whom had driven from Des Moines.

And then the night of debauchery began. At the Whiskey River, a pleasant bar with wooden chairs, green plants, a foosball table, and a bartender who appeared to be wasted out of her mind, we relaxed over cheap drinks, conversing freely with Bret, the New York Times reporter, until Anthony whispered to Tina that at the stroke of midnight he would turn 37!! Matthew bought a round of gigantic shots served in tumblers and hilarity ensued until Travis managed to get us out of the bar and on our way to Katie Geha’s parents’ house, in the case of Blake, Matthew, Tina, and Anselm, and his parents’ house, in the case of everyone else. I was not present to witness Tyler, Anthony, Joshua, Bret, and Josh stumbling along the railroad tracks on the way to Travis’s house, (Anthony stumbled harder than the others and hurt his ankle), nor to observe Tyler, at four in the morning, eating a potato salad sandwich in Travis’s parents’ kitchen minus his shirt. Things were relatively sedate at Katie’s house, where we sat around eating dates, Lebanese cheese, and stew while Blake executed a Twombly-esque (Anselm’s analysis) drawing in cheese on the coffee table.

In the morning we awoke from a sound sleep to a full breakfast prepared by Katie’s parents, Fern Kupfer and Joe Geha, both fiction writers who had attended the reading the night before, and who gave Tina and Anselm grief for not looking to see who was in the audience. Meanwhile the group who had stayed at Travis’s house were at Ames High School teaching the students how to write poems after the model of Nice Hat, Thanks, a project by Matt Rohrer and Joshua in which two poets alternate saying words to create a spontaneous and usually hilarious poem. At the middle school, Anthony, Travis, Josh, and Joshua helped the students write a poem replacing nouns with other nouns, coming up with the immortal couplet “the squirrel is your eyebrow, / the tofu is your tongue.”

Stopping only to empty the toilet, our intrepid gang of poets hurtled inexorably toward Iowa City, home of the monolithic Writers’ Workshop, and arguably one of the toughest audiences for poetry in the country.

Day 11 / en route to Minneapolis, MN / Cathy Wagner

I’m going to be away from my three-and-a-half-yr-old son Ambrose for four days. Last night I reminded him that that I was going to fly to meet the Poetry Bus so he wouldn’t freak out when he woke up and found me gone. He said, “But there won’t be any airplanes tomorrow. There won’t be any airports tomorrow.” I said, “Then I guess I won’t be able to go on the Poetry Bus. I’ll be sad.” He said, “You’ll be sad because there won’t be any Poetry Bus, either.” This is a three-year-old’s strategy: what he wants can become real in the thought-realm. It’s comforting to avoid the conditional. Just make it so. I was relieved to find the Dayton airport and airplane where it was supposed to be. I think I’m actually on an airplane now unless I’m in some nightmare thought-construction of Ambrose’s, a world that’s the manifestation of his fears. In this nightmare world I’ve passed through a series of gray-and-cream tunnels, arches, and tubes; was declared a triple-S and had my bag searched at gate C-17; that flight was delayed by storms and I was given a new boarding pass for a flight on a different airline; the new pass declared me a “quad-S” and I was searched again and patted down. My dangerous mascara and my Rescue Remedy were confiscated. In Chicago I misheard (I think) an announcement saying that no liquids or gels were allowed past the security checkpoint, but that baby formula and baby poop were permitted as long as one was traveling with a baby. Seems a loophole here. Why could terrorists not use baby poop (which is a gel) or baby pee to mix with explosive catalysts? (Hello Pampers, an opportunity to market exploding diapers to al Qaeda.) For that matter, why could terrorists not use their own pee or poop or vodka tonic? I know these questions prove my ignorance.

I’m meeting the bus people at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis tonight. Several events are scheduled, beginning with a 5 p.m. garden walk led by poets. I’m not sure what I will do if asked to lead, but it’s okay, I lead Ambrose on walks all the time; I can be the mommy kangaroo and you all be the baby kangaroos and we’ll bounce toward that Donald Judd sculpture! Please do not try to get into my pouch.

Last night at Miami University, where I teach, I saw miekal aND and camille bacos perform (jusTIN KATko, masters’ student at Miami, brought them in). They live in an experimental artistic/gardening community called Dreamtime Village in Wisconsin. (You can look up their doings at http://www.dreamtimevillage.org/. Their press, Xexoxial Editions, produces arresting visual/text documents: http://www.xexoxial.org/.) The show began with a sound piece by aND based on a clip from a Jackson Mac Low reading—the words “shut up,” called out by Mac Low during a performance for an apparently inattentive audience. The piece was atmospheric, loud, echoey, repetitive, a little scary, SHUTSHUTSHUTSHUTSHUTSHUTSHUTSHUT, interesting to me for the way it borrowed an unplanned moment from Mac Low’s carefully choreographed performances. The instructions he gave for performing his pieces were detailed, and I always found it fascinating that pieces so porous in their creation, evading the author’s control in significant ways, ended up demanding such rigidity in performance. It seemed smart to me, then, that aND’s audio piece entrapped and isolated a moment in a Mac Low performance that escaped Mac Low’s choreography, and made the moment bloom and echo and repeat in a new piece—What happens to what we send out into the world? It blooms and echoes and turns inside out. I wonder if I’ll encounter anything as wild as the aND/bacos films and sound pieces while I’m on the bus. Xexoxial Editions is emphatically small-press, under the radar, in a way Wave Books actively seeks not to be. Wave’s got distributor, Wave’s got marketing. Do these facts prevent Wave from radically questioning status quos? I hope not. This is the old question Steve Evans posed in his attack on Fence Books some years ago (http://www.thirdfactory.net/resistible.html): Can you participate fervently in the capitalist marketplace and still pose alternatives to the way it so overpoweringly structures our world, so much so that we have a hard time imagining how to think outside of it?

What can this bus be? It promotes Wave Books and Wave authors, certainly, and other authors, but I think its organizers also hoped it would be a place of moving, transforming energy—artists join the bus, depart the bus, energies combine—for what? I don’t know—perhaps getting us connected so that we are revved up to connect in our own communities. I want for us to think on the bus about what forms and engagements and statements might be right for now, what might drive the tiniest wedge into the corporate-media world. If the air coalesces above the bus and becomes a black red-lightninged screen and scans our bar code, may the bar code jam the machine, for one second. But a lot of egos are on the bus, including mine, and mine wants to sell some goddamn books while I’m professing to try to save the world. We’ll see.

Day 11 / Iowa City, IA, en route to Minneapolis, MN / Tina Celona

The bus rolls in an hour before the reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore. Anthony McCann, whose birthday it is, and Anselm Berrigan are reading with Mimi Khalvati and Gentian Cocoli of the International Writers Program (IWP). The reading is airing live on the local radio station, heightening everyone’s nervousness, and the room is crowded with young poets from the Writers’ Workshop. Anselm reads three poems by his dad, the legendary poet Ted Berrigan, who briefly taught in the Workshop, but “was too fat, hairy and sane to stay there.” Mimi read a villanelle and a ghazal (not, she emphasized, pronounced “guzzle”) and Gentian declaimed in a thick accent several lyrics translated into English from his native Albanian. Finally Anthony, who had been a student in the Workshop, took the stage, reading passionately from his battered copy of his book Moon Garden, but was cut short by the radio host, who seemed more interested in interviewing Matthew, Travis, and Joshua, who said a few choice words then turned the microphone back over to Anthony. As the crowd filtered out into the street, talking excitedly, we realized that we were hadn’t eaten since breakfast. However, there was no time to eat, so we decided to drink instead at the Deadwood across the street.

An hour later we had made our way over to The Sanctuary, a dark, wood-paneled bar with a small stage and a music stand that read “DO NOT REMOVE FROM UI MUSIC DEPARTMENT.” At Matthew and Joshua’s urging Anthony got up to read a poem, followed by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, his clipped delivery underscoring the emotional tension in his poems. Tina Celona read five poems, including one written while a student in the Workshop that ended, melodramatically, “I will die, I will die, I will die.” Next Travis read two poems from a series titled “August,” and Anselm once more took the stage, delivering “The Autobiography of Donald Rumsfeld,” an acerbic political critique full of interesting neologisms. Matthew Zapruder, in his calm and thrilling voice, recited a poem about “the newlyweds inside me,” and Joshua closed with four poems from his new book Shake.

The crowd that gathered after the reading was vocal and persistent, thronging the writers at the bar for several hours before the party moved to Harriet Woodford’s lovely, ceramic-vegetable-filled house on Davenport St., trailed by a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. Two charming graduate students, Cheryl Clark and John Braun, exchanged gossip about the Workshop for anecdotes about the tour. The talk was of poetry and poets, but the atmosphere was, as usual, unpretentious and friendly. At 2:30 the party began to break up, and the poets split off to collapse gratefully into beds offered by friends of Anthony’s.

Morning finds us headed for Minneapolis, where Josh Wilkinson will give his last reading of the tour at the Walker Art Center, along with a long roster of local poets. At a rest stop Joshua (Beckman) was interviewed by a Minneapolis radio station while the poets threw a Frisbee around in an adjacent field and Anthony iced his sore and alarmingly swollen ankle. Look out, Twin Cities, here comes the Poetry Bus!

Day 12 / Minneapolis, MN, en route to The Poetry Farm in Orfordville, WI / Cathy Wagner

Met up with the poetry bus people to read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Minneapolis has a sharp new light-rail, grassy parks to lie in, and very friendly residents who turned out in force for the poetry. Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi and Sarah at the Walker (sorry Sarah, I’ve forgotten your last name) organized the reading, which started in the sculpture garden, wound through various indoor galleries and ended up at the Walker cinema. We heard 16 readers over the course of about four hours. That sounds arduous, but the changes of scenery kept us lively. Travis, Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press, Joshua Marie Wilkinson of Denver (who’s now left us), and Amanda Nadelberg read under billowing leaves in the sculpture garden. It was a warm blue sunny day and the necessity to avoid treading on goose poop kept us alert as we strolled between sculptures and readings. Inside, pairs of readers performed in a series of echoey high-ceilinged galleries—Anthony, Joshua, Matthew, Kelly Everding of Rain Taxi, Brian Engle-Fuentes, and Becky Peterson. A visual poet named Scott Helmes presented his work, too; his pieces were minimalist and lyrical and I liked them, though I would have loved to see them performed, interpreted by a musician perhaps.

Gar Eliot Patterson, John Colburn, Tina Celona, Anselm, and I read in the cinema for the final set, which was my favorite, despite the fact that I read in it. I’d had a little trouble following the readings in the galleries because the echoes muddied them a bit. I recall Tina saying Ssszt in her terrifying funny penguin poem, and Gar Eliot’s beautiful soft voice, and John Colburn’s excellent and astute acid-trip Lawrence Welk poem—he must be influenced by Ed Dorn (John Colburn, I mean, not sure about who influenced Lawrence Welk) and Anselm’s sweet line about setting free the bird that’s flipped behind you. After a couple of glasses of wine at the pizza party (thanks Walker), Gar Eliot took me to his lovely little Craftsman house in St Paul where I slept like a thing that had had its batteries removed.

Poetry bus not feeling like marketing strategy. Poetry bus feeling like cocoon. Here is what the inside of the poetry bus looks like on my first day: The back and front of the bus are lined with long, long flower-cushioned benches facing one another. The benches are as wide as twin beds. Anthony McCann is stretched out on the front half of one of the two rear benches, and Tina Celona is just beyond him, closer to the rear, crosslegged and upright, frowning at her notebook. Tyler Gaston is playing guitar opposite her, only five feet from me, but I can’t hear more than the occasional note because the engine is noisy back here. At the center of the bus is the dining/working area, two tables jutting perpendicularly from the sides of the bus and flanked by benches. The typewriter is on one of these tables; Blake Young is there too, and he appears to be working on a video clip of the poets at the hot springs. In my brief glance I suspected more poetic flesh might have been revealed than I wanted to see, but Blake is stoical. On the other table sits the coffee dispenser, full of Caribou Coffee fetched this morning by Matthew Zapruder; the local caribous were so excited about the Poetry Bus that they insisted he take an entire quart of half-and-half with him. The front benches seem to be the conversation area; Anselm Berrigan, Joshua Beckman, Matthew, and Travis Nichols are up there. Above, all along the length of the bus, curtained sleeping benches are suspended. It’s all very comfy, like a long messy living room.

The bus is easy to be in; you can be as sociable or solitary as you please. Today in order to be patriotic and spend our dollars we’ve stopped at Wal-Mart, where I bought carrots and Bill, the driver, stocked up on underpants because he wasn’t sure when he’d next have a chance to do laundry. We’ve picked up heart attacks to go at a Culver Frozen Custard Butter Burger next to the Ho Chunk Cinema in Onalaska, WI. Now, on to the Poetry Farm in Orfordville, WI. Lisa Fishman presides there and I’m looking forward to seeing her and I’m loving the poetry bus. Over and out.