Welcome to Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour: 10.02.06-10.06.06 ANYWHERE, USA Dispatches from poets stuffed in a bus touring 50 cities in 50 days. Friday: 10.06.06 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Day 28 / Philadelphia, PA / Catie Rosemurgy

It’s almost midnight on Monday night, and the Poetry Bus is rolling out of Philly. There goes Betsy Ross’s house. There goes the Ben Franklin Bridge.
There goes the strange magenta tower that dominates the Camden skyline.

I just moved to Philly about two months ago so I am experimenting with feeling nostalgic about the city’s sights. I have to say I was pretty proud of my new home tonight. There was a great turn out, great energy, lots of love for all things poetry. The reading was held in the old home of the Real World Philadelphia, which has been converted into a groovy, very white gallery space. A nice buzzy feeling that something good was happening filled the room. I have confirmed my opinion that it was a very fine evening with both Travis Nichols and Sierra Nelson, who pointed out that the fun level was especially impressive for a Monday night. One reason I wanted to ask them is because they have both been on the bus awhile—Travis since the beginning and Sierra since Toronto —and I wanted to be sure that Philly held up its end of the deal. The other reason is because I actually didn’t get to stay at the reading. When I showed up to get ready to read and went to check out the Bus (perfect!) I found out that for various logistical reasons we were actually pulling out of town after the reading and not in the morning. No problem, but I did have to duck out in the middle of things to go pack a bag. It was the best way for things to play out, though, because now I really do feel like I spontaneously decided to throw things in a bag and run off with the poetry circus.

On the other hand, I also feel a little car sick, or bus sick, from riding backwards and writing into a bouncing laptop as we roll on between the ditches. Cross your fingers!!!

Day 29 / en route, at, and leaving the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD / Catie Rosemurgy

Firing up the bus at 10:54 am and getting ready to address the cadets of the Naval Academy. It’s fun to listen to people consider how to play to this particular crowd.

Last night ended beautifully at the Zapruder family river house. Perhaps the greatest moment of the dying day came as we all watched with baited breath as Bill, the driver, like the true magician he is, eased all the bus’ giantness into the tiny country space of the driveway. As the lesser among us (me) assumed we were stuck forever in a bus pinned in by trees (it seemed like a peaceful enough life), he announced triumphantly, “This driveway is my bitch!” Everyone loved it. It was 4 am and we were in the best of hands.

So the night ended with everybody getting a real bed, or a futon or an air mattress, and today everyone is rested and feisty again. Ready to get some poetry done!!! The house itself was airy and lovely, and the river view was idyllic, slow-moving and shadowed. Folks saw lots of weird fish and sweet birds throughout the morning.

We are again negotiating that same driveway, with Zapruder helping Bill avoid crushing the family boat. Everyone is nibbling and typing and comfortable. Life on the bus is good.

Later that same day…

We are headed out of Annapolis now and on its outskirts it has started to look like Anywhere, USA. Not so in the heart of town, which takes the term “idyllic” to a whole new level. Also not so on the grounds of the Naval Academy, which looks like you think an incredibly impressive and formidable Naval Academy would look. The whole scene was lovely and sun-struck and even the air felt deeply conservative, though I’m sure all sorts of interesting fault lines run through what comes off as such a solid smooth surface.

One important note: I am not at all up on my military designations and it turns out we did not read to cadets as I wrote earlier, but to midshipmen.
Two young women told me that: we’re midshipmen. Of course you are! They were amazing young people, but I am getting way ahead of myself.

First of all, everyone on the Bus gave an especially great reading.
Everything Matthew Zapruder, Josh Beckman, Dorothea Lasky, and Peter Gizzi read rang with a strange and terrible significance given who they were and where they were and who they were reading to. It was chilling and exciting to hear how the poems took on such sharp edges and added implications and misgivings and questions.

And the midshipmen and their teachers were a great audience, fairly quiet but attentive and thoughtful. The Q & A afterward turned into a really warm, spontaneous conversation between these two incredibly different groups of people. One midshipman asked if being on the bus had changed how we felt about poetry, and Matthew Zapruder answered that beautiful question so beautifully. He said that people often think poems are written from a place of knowing and are read to an audience from that same resolved place. Then he gave a really accurate and honest description of the kind of uncertainty and possibility writing poetry opens up and how being on the Bus has accelerated that process of wondering and changing and not knowing and growing.

The only regret I have about what turned out to be a really great exchange is that I would have loved to hear the bright, incredibly self-possessed young people in the audience respond in kind with their own words and theories and rhythms. Travis Nichols did the next best thing, though, and invited all of them to send their poems to the Bus Web site.

The reading culminated with an amazing half-sung performance by Kenward Elmslie of his dark, witty, winking piece Girl Machine.

And it’s only 3:30!!!!!

Day 30 / Checy Chase, MD and Washington D.C. / Catie Rosemurgy

The Bus pulled into Chevy Chase right outside D.C. yesterday afternoon, and ever since everyone has been enjoying a long, slow afternoon-after-Thanksgiving type feeling. We’re staying at the Zapruder family home, which is a remarkably warm and comfortable place. Matthew’s family has been gracious beyond compare, and it’s easy to see where he gets his instinctual generosity.

In fact, I have to get this down before I go on . . . Matthew Zapruder, Joshua Beckman, and Travis Nichols are working so hard and selflessly for poets and poetry that it’s impossible not to have flashes of genuinely optimistic feelings about humanity and American letters when around them.

These guys are quietly and steadily devoting themselves to each and every daily event with such good freaking will and competence that it’s easy to miss the fact that they are actually working 24/7. Never mind the planning that had to go into setting up 50 poetry readings involving hundreds of poets, it’s the daily work of making all the phone calls to get cameras and getting everyone a bed and making sure people are fed and helping the bus riders come and go when there is any free time all the while keeping a eye on the event that’s coming up that evening and figuring out how and where they can park the bus. I know it must occasionally feel chaotic to them, but you’d never know it. The conversation between them moves easily between poets and books and Chinese food and chess and baseball. I’m real glad they play for Team Poetry.

Tonight’s reading looks to be a big one with lots of great readers, and soon enough it will take over our day, but right now my mind is still on yesterday’s reading at the Naval Academy. I wish I had a (much!) better memory and could give the lines from the poems that hung so strangely in air between us and about 100 or so young uniformed midshipmen. I almost think, though, that any really good poem stands in a sharp relief when you pick it up and read it thinking of the audience for it being a group of people who have for various reasons decided to shoulder an enormous amount of responsibility at such a young age. Some or most of them will be involved in the war. A few already had been. In just a brief conversation with three midshipmen, they made it very clear that they know what going to the war might mean. It’s also clear that a group of poets probably sees things differently than they do, but who really knows? Our poems sounded new and kind of raw to me, though, when taken so far out of the context I am used to hearing them in (poet to poet mostly?) and that has got me thinking about other ways of jarring poems out of context, like choreographers who set pieces in the outdoors on rock formations.

Day 31 / Miami, FL / Carrie St. George Comer

Tomorrow I get on a plane headed to Durham, NC, where I’ll meet up with up with the Poetry Bus. I’ve never been to Durham. I’ve never ridden a poetry bus. I am afraid. No. Maybe I am. The poetry bus, I suspect, will be populated by people with thoughts. (Remember thoughts?) And I haven’t been around people like that in a long time. I teach at a university. I teach freshmen how to write, and hopefully, how to have thoughts. Because they don’t. Or at least, that’s how I’m feeling as we reach the mid-semester drag. And now I am going away, abandoning my students to figure out this thought thing on their own so that I can rejoin the world of thinkers. Try to think. The world of unkempt (candid bus shots don’t lie) people who circle the nation on buses reading their thoughts to midshipmen.

I don’t want to be a freak. I don’t want to be one of the nuts that spills out of this well-marked bus and onto the sidewalk of someone’s town center. But like it or not, I am one. I am among them and of them and there’s no fixing that. Sweet. Bitter sweet. When I board the bus Saturday morning, I return to freaksville, to the thinking world, where the unexplained and the inexplicable are understood. I hear some people on the bus (no names) are going the way of the loon. Sounds exciting. I’m going to bring them some rum. Some Miami rum.

I will miss my husband, Ben, and my baby girl, Evelyn. Her first birthday is October 18th. I feel guilty, sure, but mostly sad at the thought of being away from home for so long. I love my home. And I’m not a couch surfer, not anymore. So yes, I am ever so slightly afraid. And yet I keep catching myself thinking I’m going in for some kind of restorative treatment. A spa, of sorts, where I might return me to me. The me of several years ago. The freaky one. The one that thinks she thinks.

I’ve been to Asheville, but not Athens. I’ve been to Tuscaloosa (I’m from Birmingham) and New Orleans. New Orleans—what will it be? I’ve got the best leg, I’m sure of that. And I’m going with Zapruder and Beckman, cool. I’ll see Dara Wier and David Roderick, cool. And I’ll meet some people, cool. I don’t know where these guys will be tomorrow when I get in. They never said where to meet them. So I guess I’ll just walk around looking for the big red letters? Much like an idiot would do. Sounds good.

So North Carolina. I’m thinking lakes, boots, soup. I’m thinking of being cozy. Holing up, bedding down, nesting. I am thinking it’s cold there, colder than here. In Miami, it’s easy to slip away from the life of the mind. And I do, with pleasure. The sun shines, the palms sway, the lizards scatter. We have wind chimes. My brain is soft and softer. So I turn to the poetry bus. I hope it will solve all my problems, whatever those problems are.
I’m not sure anymore.

The bus, yes. I love the road. I love to watch the yellow lines slip under the hood. I love it when it gets dark outside, and the sun sets behind the chain link. And I love thinky people. And I love poems, much of the time. So yeah, the poetry bus, I’ll be with them soon.

Day 32 / Miami, FL en route to Durham, NC / Carrie St. George Comer

This’ll be brief. I’m running out the door to catch my plane to Durham, and I’ve got a mantra in my head: “You are not a get-it-done person. You are not one who gets things done . . .” I had to go to the bank to get my ATM card back after the machine swallowed it last week. Then I had to go get a bottle of Anejo for Zapruder and Beckman, though it’ll probably be confiscated soon. And I needed to spend time with Evelyn before leaving for so long, so we went to the park with her grandparents who came down to help Ben while I’m gone. Then I had to shower—the tedium. Then I had to pack. What to wear??? I’m 35, so looking hot is now out. I have to look cool and sort of smart, without appearing to have tried and all that. So I cleared a shelf into my bag. I don’t know what’s in there but hopefully I won’t freeze to death up in the hills. Hopefully there’s a toothbrush.

I’m gonna look like shit.

I still don’t know where to find the bus, and Roderick says he doesn’t know either. So I guess I’ll walk around till I bump into him. No, I’ll call him. I’m gonna call you Roderick. And then we’ll find the reading. And then we better be getting a drink somewhere or I’m going home!