dumbfoundry

One day he was sitting around with his roommate, poet Sam Shavel, lamenting the inaccessibility -- literally -- of poetry. Poetry, they realized, is even more insulated from the public than the other high arts. Painters have their galleries, dancers their stages, and classical musicians their concert halls, but poets are hidden inside the covers of their books, in the dank recesses of libraries and bookstores. I said, says Neill, What if we just started putting poems up?' Tear the cover off the book, and catch people by surprise.

Unlike most of us, who have wonderful ideas all the time but never the gumption to bring them into the world, Neill created Drive-By Poets. He designed a logo, took one of his own poems and made a hundred or so copies, posting them to bulletin boards and hanging them in store windows throughout Northampton. At the bottom of each he gave an email address and requested submissions.

Since then he's posted about 25 poems. He has no regular schedule, but instead waits for a submission good enough to justify the effort. At first, that poem came in about once a month. Now it's closer to once a week. His taste is catholic. I like surrealist poetry, he says. I really like prose poems -- James Tate is one of my favorites -- and I like shorter poems. We once did a Drive-Through Haiku. There are no criteria for the authors except that they be from the area.

For the stores, mostly bookstores, who post the drive-by poetry in their windows, Neill uses fancy cardstock. For the rest, a run of about 150, he uses standard copier paper, which he staples to bulletin boards in Northampton, Amherst and other parts north. Laundromats, I think, are my best venue, because people have to wait there. [...]

To submit poems to Drive-By Poets, email dbpoets@yahoo.com [...]

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, August 05, 2004 at 8:48 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.