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For a Personalized Autographed copy of “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME” or “WOODEN & ME” mail a check for $25 to:

Woody Woodburn

400 Roosevelt Court

Ventura, CA 93003

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Poet For Hire: Your Topic, Your Price

April is National Poetry Month, proclaimed to be the largest literary celebration in the world, and so I am naturally thinking of Whitman and Dickinson, Longfellow and Frost, Angelou and Shannon.

“Shannon?” you ask, confused if not bewildered.

Shannon is a poet I met in New Orleans, a street poet in the French Quarter, a poet for hire along a storefront sidewalk two doors down from a Cajun restaurant with a 30-minute wait. That was about 25 minutes longer than she needed to compose an original poem for me.

Shannon, seated in a folding chair behind a TV tray table, had her nose in a novel as the world walked by. Intrigued by the vintage typewriter before her – actually, I suppose the word “vintage” is redundant in the 21st century of laptops and tablets – I stopped.

Intrigued also by the handwritten sign hanging from the table, “Pick a Topic, Get a Poem!” I interrupted her reading.

“Any topic?” asked I.

Looking up from her paperback, she smiled and assured: “Yep, anything.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you like,” she answered.

“What if I don’t like the poem?”

“Then it’s free,” she said, sounding earnest. “Even if you like it, it’s free if that’s what you want.”

I decided I wanted a poem. I also decided that even if I hated the free verse I would pay something. Indeed, I imagined that was the brilliance in her marketing: very few people would stiff her for work already performed. Chatting later, she confirmed this was true.

Shannon, a comely 26-year-old, looked the part of a poet with her raven hair buzzed to the length of velvet on the right side, standing tall at attention in the middle, and falling like a crashing wave over her left ear.

While waiting for a dinner table to open, I learned this poet has taken a road less traveled by. At age 13, Shannon moved out of her house for her own safety and after high school fled New Jersey for vagabond excitement.

For a while she “ate fire” as a street performer and also did tricks with a Hula Hoop set ablaze. She eventually gave up fire eating and instead fed people as a short-order cook. Five years ago, she traded a gas stovetop for a QWERTY manual keyboard.

“Words have always been my love,” Shannon told me. “My grandma was a positive influence on that – she forced me to read. She wouldn’t buy me toys, but she’d get me as many books as I wanted.”

Armed with a secondhand typewriter off craigslist, Shannon became a wayfarer poet. She has traveled the country the past few years, from New York to Philadelphia, Nashville to Seattle, San Francisco to Santa Barbara to Ventura – “I set up by your beautiful pier,” she shared – to San Diego.

Shannon has journeyed largely by hitchhiking with occasional hops on grainer train cars and boxcars. Arriving in a city, she couch surfs with friends or sleeps in abandoned buildings – “Urban camping,” she calls it. When needed, she rents a room.

“I like the variety,” Shannon says of her circus-like existence.

For income, she writes poetry for tips along busy boardwalks and sidewalks, on subway landings and at farmers’ markets.

In the early going, Shannon says composing a poem took her 15 minutes or longer. Today, with a few years of deadline experience, her fingers dance on the keyboard confidently and without hesitation, producing word artistry in half the time.

In next week’s column, I will choose a topic and share the resulting original poem by Shannon.

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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” …

• Personalized signed copies are available at WoodyWoodburn.com
• Unsigned paperbacks or Kindle ebook can be purchased here at Amazon