Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour: 09.25.06-09.29.06 ANYWHERE, USA Dispatches from poets stuffed in a bus touring 50 cities in 50 days. Wednesday: 09.27.06 | Permalink | Comments (8)

Day 21 / Montreal, Canada / Kate Hall

This morning I woke up and started thinking about time. Time passes really strangely when you are traveling this quickly. It seems so long ago that I arrived in Toronto to join the tour. Now we are in Montreal (my home) and about to read at The Green Room. Already Ottawa also seems far away, although we were only there a matter of hours ago.

The reading last night was amazing. We read outside. The backdrop behind us was the parliament buildings and the National Library of Canada and the Ottawa River was flowing by. Being outside was a little chilly but the audience was so attentive. Typing Explosion performed in the Blink Gallery, a very tiny little limestone building on Major’s Hill. David O’Meara introduced the reading as a kick off to the Ottawa Writer’s Festival and a closing event for the Blink Gallery which is only open in the summer. Monica Fambrough performed a great set of poems in her touque (this is our Canadian word for winter hat) and mitts. Because it was so cold we read straight through without a break but all went well and every one gave a beautiful reading despite the cold.

We drove into Montreal at around 2:30 this afternoon. Parking the bus is very tricky in Montreal. The streets are extremely narrow and parking spots for a car are hard to come by let alone a 40ft. bus. The bus is currently taking up three parking spaces on St. Laurent Street, a busy north running street with many funky cafes and galleries and clothing shops. The bus is right outside the Green Room where we are about to give our reading (in eeek . . . 1/2 an hour) but it’s pulled up on the curb so that we could get off.

I’m expecting the reading to be busy tonight and am really excited to have the poetry bus gang in Montreal! Now off to the reading!

Day 22 / Montreal, Canada, en route to Northampton, MA / Kate Hall

We read last night at The Green Room, a bar in Montreal in the Mile End District. The reading was well attended. It amazes me that everyone on the bus has performed so well for so many readings in a row. Thomas Heise and Erin Moure are local Montreal poets who joined us. Erin gave a great reading from her book Little Theatres. The poems incorporated English and untranslated bits of French, Portuguese,and Galician. She introduced the book by stating that the poems were in Latin, just many different kinds of Latin. With emphatic voice tones and gestures Erin is always engaging and each poem is exciting because her voice rises in surprise at the end of each line as if the turns in the poems surprise her as well. Because the poems switch so fluidly between languages, the musicality of the poems is heightened. As you listen there are points where you do not understand the specific words (in French or Galician for example) and so instead we are forced to piece together some kind of meaning from our own language that surrounds these passages.

Typing Explosion also had another amazing performance in Montreal. This time they read some of the poems they created. They begin each night by allowing audience members to either select a subject card or write their own. All three girls are sitting behind typewriters dressed in vintage clothing. Then an audience participant hands the card to the first typist and she begins the first few lines of the poem and they continue down the line until there is a finished poem for the participant. Typing Explosion is composed of Sierra Nelson, Rachel Kessler, and Sarah Paul Ocampo. They first performed in August 1998 at a Seattle art gallery where they wanted to use poetry in an interactive and inviting way so that the audience could either observe or participate. Sierra, Rachel, and Sarah Paul all owned 1960s typewriters and loved vintage clothes and based the style of the performance around their love of that kind of aesthetic. After 2004 they stopped performing as Typing Explosion as they started individually developing other performance pieces. The bus tour is the reunion of Typing Explosion and they’ve gathered back together for this purpose. They are incredible. The audiences in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal have been enormously responsive and the performances at the events illicit a lot of audience participation.

Weary travelers wanted warm beds to sleep in at the end of the night so we found them places with Montreal writers and everyone got a good sleep and a shower. Now we are driving out of Montreal following the French road signs toward the Pont Champlain (Champlain Bridge) and are heading for Northampton, MA. We’re listening to upbeat music this morning and everyone is wide awake and eating croissants and Montreal style bagels. The bus is a capsule of various conversations and there is a tapestry of murmuring about poetry and plans. Every now and then one voice rises and I catch a few words of each conversation and they become spliced together:
if someone switched over, it would not be what I want, can we sing border crossing as we cross the border…

Day 23 / Northampton, MA / Kate Hall

We arrived at Smith College in Northampton at 5:30 yesterday. It was such a long drive from Montreal and, because we were running late, there weren't very many rest stops. All day, we'd been eating trail mix that we'd bought at gas stations. The first thing we did when we stepped off the bus was look around for somewhere to eat some real food. I've never been to Northampton or Amherst before. Smith College was beautiful and looked so typically New England. But after being on the bus for so long, we all scattered to various restaurants. Betsey, Monica Youn and I walked down the hill, away from Smith toward town, and found a great little Indian restaurant. Northampton is very small but pretty with lots of little shops. Other than the brief panic of misplacing my digital camera in a pharmacy, it was very relaxing to be wandering around. When we finally met up with everyone again, we were all looking better (food is a wondrous thing).

We were welcomed very warmly in Northampton. Lori Shine was there to meet us when we arrived and had arranged beds for all of us. Travis, Monica Fambrough and Matthew read at a bar called The Basement. The Basement was a very small but cozy college bar. The interior walls were brick. It was dim and lit with candles. There were couches in one corner. Typing Explosion opening the show and Sierra told me that it was interesting because, in comparison to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, people were shy about participating in the performance. I think this was probably because of the layout. The bar was long and narrow and Typing Explosion was set up in a nook to the right of the bar closer to the back of the bar. Mutant Ballyhoo, a four person performance group from Northampton, performed a piece that took lines from the Sopranos and created a poem/script using only these lines. The readings by Travis, Monica and Matthew were incredible. All three poets have connections to Northampton and so were reading in front of a crowd of people whom they all knew. This created an interesting tension and so the readings were charged with a lot of energy and the surrounding atmosphere was warm and extremely friendly.

This morning we are waiting at UMass for the poetry bus to come and pick us up because we are going to read at Mount Holyoake and then again in the Amherst Commons. This is my last day with the bus and I am both sad to leave and ready to sleep again. It has been such an amazing experience that it is beyond words.

Day 24 / Somerville, MA / Major Jackson

Thursday morning and I Get on the Bus; actually I get on tomorrow, but I join up tonight with the traveling band of bards at the Burren Irish Pub in Somerville. I probably should have said “No, but thanks.” when Matthew Z. mentioned it back in March. See, I’m away from my family Monday through Wednesday most of this academic year in Cambridge, Mass., and made a pact with my wife Kristen to spend long weekends home. So today, I would have driven three hours north to the Green Mountain State and picked up Romie from daycare in the late afternoon, then driven to Langston’s football practice and stood on the grassy sidelines, cheering with other parents as the bright, early autumnal light of dusk descended on all of us. In short, I feel heartily guilty. This will probably be the first of hopefully not too many weekends in which I renege. Ever the feminist dad, who overcompensates and cares about the amount of domestic workload he shoulders, and whether or not his wife’s professional career is receiving the same amount of attention, I wonder how many other poets on the bus are suffering similar pangs of guilt at leaving their partners, spouses, pets, children, and laundry.

This brings up for me questions of generational and age difference of the touring poets, as well as privilege. Is it no coincidence that two men came up with this idea (Joshua and Matthew) and another is ably managing it (Travis)? And still another man is driving the bus? I wonder what shape the tour would have taken were a woman involved in the planning? Would there have been daycare options? Seriously, who among us has the wherewithal to abandon their jobs and other responsibilities, and live freely and crash bars and couches? I wonder what sorts of deals, if any, had to be cut at home to join such a historic gathering of poets in motion.

I said yes because my friends Prageeta Sharma, David Rivard, John Yau and Thomas Sayers Ellis said yes. I said yes, also, because I admire a good deal of the poets (including the organizers) who have boarded before me and will board after me; I feel a very strong connection to this generation of poets, artists, and musicians. It’s like a poetic version of hands across America. Also, well, Mary Jo Bang is reading. I'm a fan. I said yes because I always say yes, when it comes to poetry.

I said yes because I grew up in Philadelphia and that will be my final destination. When I was younger, I caught the Septa 26 bus in Germantown to and from Central High School; in the morning, the buses would be packed and bus drivers would be reluctant to open the doors for fear of crushing the many passengers packed in on the stairs. Often, they would just drive on by corners that were full of people waiting in a loose queue to board. If you were running late to school or work, you were relieved to see the bus approach. But, if that bus just drove on, you’d be pissed and probably would curse the driver and everyone on the bus. Those on the bus would smirk and laugh at those left standing on the sidewalks. In the winters, it was tough being left behind.

It's Thursday morning, and I Get on the Bus. The allusion is to Spike Lee’s faux-documentary style movie that follows several black men of varying ages and class backgrounds on a cross country trip to the Million Man March, organized mainly by Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in Washington, D.C. I did not get on that bus for some very complicated reasons. I get on this one.

Day 25 / Boston, MA / Major Jackson

O Boston! My Boston! such a historic, literary town, where if you attend any of the open mics or featured readings, you’ll likely not be served a standard dish of self-indulgent minor verses about broken-hearted trips to the movie theater alone or exceedingly played stanzas about sibling rivalries or paeans to a lost adolescence of programmed resistance as a third-wave punk rocker but really good translations of Mayakosky and Akhmatova, or sharply observed and witty lines about one’s co-workers and their weeklong, giddiness and over-excitement at the arrival of new office chairs. That was Michael Brodeur’s poem, which he read last night at the Burren Irish Pub. Michael was the local organizer of last night’s event and owner of the crashpad in South Boston where a number of the poets slept.

The Burren Irish Pub in Davis Square of Somerville has two sections: a bar/restaurant in the front (by the way, which I observed last night had more redheads standing in one room with beers in hand than any other place I have seen in my life) and a bar/performance space in the rear. Clearly those in the front half (college students, young professionals, and neighborhood locals) were clueless about what was happening in the rear although a sign pointed their way “Wave Poetry Bus Reading.” Predictably, old concert posters of “The Pogues” lined some of the walls. The stage took up one half of the room, and opposite it, was the bar; all along its wooden edges stood rapt a host of people ranging in ages and gear, attempting to figure out what was going on, for the evening did not begin with an introduction, but with Typing Explosion typing furiously poems on paper and notecards. Donning 1950-ish matching skirts and tops, they battered away to an endless stream of retro-lounge music. Just at that time, I was returning to my table where seated was poets Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, David Rivard, Jennifer Flescher, poet and PhD candidate, 2006 Bread Loaf waiter, friend of Jon W., Ben (who told me that when he walks by my books on his bookshelf, he salutes them), and a lovely woman I think her name was Amy. I asked, “What was going on?” and Rivard replied, “You’re in a Fellini film, and you don’t know it.”

The crowd was at times sedate and vaguely supportive and at other times enthusiastic and loud. I met Morgan who teaches at Emerson College, Joshua Beckman’s cousin who was eating a topless burger when I asked to take her picture, and a guy who I have seen at two separate poetry readings this month; he came up to me to let me know that he’d been expecting “counter-culture itself to spill out the bus,” but instead the audience as well as the poems seemed too “academic.” On the surface, it is a good point, as touring buses of “fringe” artists do conjure up images that are well-worn and unfortunately associated with the '60s and 70s. Joshua Beckman’s beard, glasses, and hairdo do not help the image of the tour, either; as one person or more has noted, both make him appear as the son of Jerry Garcia. But, I do not know what that term “academic” signifies in this day and age, given the number of MFA graduates and types of MFA programs to serve everyone from newly-minted, non-ivy undergraduate poets to affluent, Appalachian grandmothers. Plus, I have always thought that term “academic” was erroneously applied to poets who were initially regarded as interlopers in English Departments. But, this guy redeemed himself by saying that what would have been hipper and more original is if the organizers had instead rented a number of limousines and traveled the highways and byways of America like a cortege of executives, except when they pulled into a town they would drive around and scream poems through bullhorns. Nice.

Last night’s poets have mad skills. I was happy to hear a host of people for the first time including Jon Woodward, Noelle Kocot, Monica Fambrough, and Caroline Knox. Catherine Wagner is also a new discovery; she had her son Ambrose for most of the evening. (Turns out, according to Cathy, the organizers do provide daycare.) Chelsey Minnis was a particular treat; she read poems in which a bunch of prefaces that she wrote for her new manuscript had begun to colonize the book. Mary Jo read from her marvelous collection of ekphrastic poems. David read the title poem to his book Sugartown as well as a remarkable poem to his daughter titled, “To Simone,” then closed out with Alan Dugan's “Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli.”

Well, I gotta go deposit some cash in my checking account, so I can live comfortably over the next couple of days. I better do some laundry, too, otherwise, I’ll have to just grab some suits and pretend I’m being fashionably different.