Poetry On Demand – Back in the Saddle

After years (yes, the pandemic) of sitting alone in my room, or alone on Zoom (yes, the pandemic) I found myself yesterday in bright sunshine, in a huge field full of people, food, music, and fresh air. My deep gratitude to Keiko O’Leary, the current Cupertino Poet Laureate, for inviting me to join her at her Poetry On Demand booth at the Cupertino Earth and Arbor Day Festival.

Poetry On Demand is like a game of charades, or free association therapy, or just a way to hang out with strangers and ask personal questions. It’s one of my favorite things to do publicly with poetry. Keiko’s booth had three poets – all with different methods. Lisa asked questions, facing her “client” quietly in chairs, then wrote her poem in pencil, and ultimately in beautiful ink on lovely cards. Keiko was more about coaxing a poem directly from the person who approached the booth; she’s also gentle and surprisingly insistent, and she gets results. She uses elegant calligraphy pens and bold colors.

My approach is noisier. I point my finger at people standing on the other side of the table, I ask questions about their favorite foods and I pester them with more questions if their answers don’t inspire me. Sometimes a person chooses a cutout word from a box I carry around, and I glue the word to the page. I type poems on an old, shiny black, very heavy Smith Corona typewriter that a friend rescued from a thrift shop. (I’ll write another post some day about missing my typewriter from college, my envy of other poets’ typewriter collections, what fun it is to let kids who’ve never seen a typewriter try it out.) As a result, my poems are austere and filled with messy mistakes, an impression I try to soften with some handwritten notes. They look faded (the ribbon is old) like they’ve been neglected in an attic. Yesterday we spilled hand sanitizer on a few.

Twice yesterday the mother of the child who requested the poem (or did the mother request the poem?) mentioned that they planned to frame my hastily typed binder paper efforts. That’s strange to contemplate: an honor, embarrassing, and also somehow wrong for a 15-minute knock off poem from a stranger. But I love the process of these poems, and maybe that feeling of attention makes its way to the recipient. Once in a while they say how moved they are, and even if they don’t read the poem at the table, I watch them walk away and see how they smile or talk to a companion. The poems themselves aren’t particularly good in terms of edited or final work, but I believe they are an excellent record of a moment in time, an intimate glimpse of another person that I was lucky and privileged to experience. I wonder if sidewalk artists who draw caricatures feel this way.

One gentleman wanted me to write about gardening, but what I heard was that he misses his wife. Another amiable fellow wanted a poem about a car, which triggered a love poem to my husband. Teenagers wanted poems about what they like (of course) and kids wanted poems about colors and animals. The hardest one I wrote was for a young woman who wanted to write her own poem but was completely tongue-tied in her attempts. I hope Chester’s parents came back for their poem while I was on a break at the taco truck; after I took the photo of it I never saw it again. That was one I especially liked, influenced as I was by a boy who engaged us in a long conversation about rhyme.

People come in two types to Poetry on Demand. Either they know about poetry and have opinions, or they like the idea of having something made for them that they don’t really understand. That’s when I feel the freest – I can make a little mystery based on a brief encounter and I’ll never know what it really means to the person I give it to. Sometimes I have an idea of what it means to me at the time I write it, or later on I notice something about a word I chose. When I review the whole batch from a particular evening or afternoon, I remember the heat or dark, the smells, my exhaustion, the sun burning on my neck and toes, an achy wrist, and all the faces I peered into so intently, asking, asking, asking, and wondering if I even came close.