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Part 2: Poet Types Free Verse For Tips
Shannon, the vagabond street poet I met in New Orleans and wrote about last week in recognition of April being National Poetry Month, has collected half a dozen typewriters.
A couple of her manual machines, including a beloved Royal Aristocrat, are in distant repair shops waiting for her to pick up. Three more are stored with friends in different cities, also awaiting her return visit.
Her sixth portable, a white Smith-Corona Corsair made in the 1960s, is what she was typing on when I met her along a French Quarter sidewalk.
“It’s a conversation starter,” Shannon said, noting that a fair portion of her customers stop originally to ask her about her various vintage typewriters.
As an acoustic guitar is to a subway singer, so is a portable typewriter to Shannon. Indeed, her fingers create music on the keyboard:
Click-clack-click-clack-clack go the keys and typeslugs striking paper.
DING! goes the margin bell.
Ziiiiiip! goes the return carriage sliding back to the right to begin another line.
The composing done, Shannon’s performance is not yet complete. Using a disposable lighter she melts a red blob of envelope sealing wax, about the size of a quarter, onto the bottom left corner of the stationary. Next, while it is still molten, she uses a stamp to imprint the image of a full-leaved tree – in reverence, I took it, to Joyce Kilmer’s famous line: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.”
Shannon’s poem written for me, you will see, was plenty lovely.
Surprisingly, she does not make carbon copies nor snap cell-phone photos of her poetry to keep for remembrance.
“I want to release my art into the world,” Shannon explained. “Letting go reflects the impermanence of my life.”
She did not say this darkly.
“I hope to do this my entire life,” Shannon said of writing poetry for tips. “I love to travel. I love to meet people. And I make a good enough living.”
Asked how much she is typically paid for a poem, she replied, perhaps inflating the figures to prime the pump: “Twenty bucks is the average, I’d say. Some pay only five or ten, which is fine.”
She flashed a toothpaste-ad smile and added: “I’ve gotten a hundred dollars a few times.”
I asked if she had a repertoire of poems that she alters, twists and shoehorns to fit the topics people choose. She was half-insulted: “Oh no, never. My poems are all original content.”
The topic I gave Shannon was “running.” Here is what she clack-clack-click-clack-DING!-ziiiiip composed and then theatrically read aloud:
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RUNNING
I am devoted to the moment
My legs make good time
With my body, and I move
Forward, through the wind
I feel the breeze on my cheeks
My heart beats fast
Soil, earth beneath
I seem to ascend
My potential, limitless, without
Bounds, I am running
Free and nothing can stop me
But the racing of my heart
The only way I can get
My mind to silence
Is to go for a run
I’ll allow the world to
Fade away, I’ll consider only
My steps and I’ll tap in
To the great enigma of
Existence then
Running
Is freedom
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It may not be of Robert Frost or Maya Angelou fame, but it is fairly wonderful all the same – all the more so for having been typed on the fly in less than 10 minutes with no rewriting or XXXX strikeouts.
Indeed, I tried to be generous and still believe the original poem I received from Shannon was a bargain at the price.
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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.
Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …
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