Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Poetry Bus

[Engine start, honking, constant driving audio bed]

I don?t know much about poetry, but I couldn?t miss the bus: huge, silver, 40 foot long touring coach, with ?poetry bus? written on the side in large red letters, I caught it in Portland Oregon, on it?s way back to Seattle where it started almost 2 months ago. The bus has been on the road for 15,000 miles, giving over 60 readings across the country,

[Joshua] I think we wanted to be something new, wanted it to operate, without sounding cheesy, like a poem itself, you enter it, and you try to experience it along the way.

That?s Joshua Beckman, one of the founders of the poetry bus, and an editor at Wave books, a Seattle-based independent press that?s sponsoring the trip.

[Matthew]?Ear to the aluminum floor, crushed pavement beneath?.The wide way of the sky becoming dark, white van speeding along the bottom of darkness?
Like I said, I don?t know much about poetry, so I asked another poet on the bus, Matthew Zapruder,

[Matthew] Maybe when I was young I had a definition of poetry I could fit in a sentence. It?s been getting bigger and bigger over the years. I think at some point the desire to define it was exploded. I didn?t want to define it, poetry has possibilities that expand farther beyond than I?m capable of understanding?

He?s been on the bus for the whole trip.
[Matthew]?Here and forever is how long he imagines he will drive.

[Edwin] Life can be a dream, sing me a note from sleep.
I asked another poet,
[Edwin] ?I am a poet.
What is a poet?
[Edwin] What does it mean to be a poet?
Edwin Torres spends most of the drive at one of the tables in the bus,
[Edwin] To be in touch with life I think, what?s inside you, at it?s most basic for me, it?s the complexities of the human emotion can be captured in a poem.
?With one?s eyes half, over the landscape, or, a glint in the eye?

I tried to imagine what it?s like to be on the same bus for 50days
[Travis] I?ve been on the bus for 50 days.
with a bunch of poets sprawled on bench-cushions with faded prints of tropical plants,
[Travis] Can you move your feet out of my face I?m trying to sleep and I still like your poems. That?s something.

Behind every good road-band is a tour-manager, this is Travis Nichols
[Travis] We live together in this tube. It?s a great way to get to know people.

He looks like a cross between an indi rock star and a beat poet; long hair, at home in a hoodie, among people who encourage facial hair and grungy clothing,
[Travis] There isn?t NY of the 50?s, or Paris of the teens anymore, there isn?t a place where people can go to now to live and work and collaborate, this is a 2mo experiment to see if whether or not you can make a rolling society of poets work.

[Molly] There is no place you haven?t been, when we throw things out, it is then that they change?
Molly Darzinsky is a poet from New York,
When I sit down to write a poem I?m trying to put together language in the riskiest possible way. Every person is trying to unlock something that isn?t normally put into words some way of thinking that we don?t have other means of expression for. You do a lot of things that are on the verge of being beautiful and also on the verge of being ridiculous, and you never know if you?ve gone too far.

It?s a bus. Filled with poets, writing poetry. What, then, about love? Does it not fuel poetry like bio-diesel fuels the poetry bus? Scattered around are pieces of paper with a letter on each, people feed them into an old manual typewriter and contribute. Here?s the letter ?O?
[Molly] oh oh Ohh, ahh, sachet long gown
Love notes are scattered on the tables, documenting a passionate affair, between the front of the bus
Dear front of the bus?
?and the back of the bus
Dear back of the bus?I?d be lying if I said I didn?t miss you [?]
Dear front of the bus, What do you see out your big front window?What will happen to us when there is no more Poetry Bus?

(intercut?) Another person that?s been on the bus the whole time is the driver, Bill. He wasn?t a poet when they first left Seattle,
[Bill]...Thermals, disappearing up up up into the stratosphere, it never flapped its wings once.

But towards the end of the trip he was doing readings in front of audiences,
?unexpected changes in myself in this trip, didn?t think I?d read and write poetry, wiles away the hours while composing poetry in my head.
he?s been driving the bus for 12 thousand miles
?been driving the poetry bus for twelve thousand miles

[start: ambient music from stereo]
No one was giving me a definition of poetry [typing sounds] So I decided to type-out my question, feeding pages of my reporter?s notebook and typed onto each: ?What is poetry??

I left the notebook innocently sitting out with a pen.
Here are some of the answers [paper turning]:

Poetry is in between and off to the side.

Hat is try. The sun rolls along the badlands.

Around 1am, when I should be tired, I?m not. Instead, I try to think how to write a conclusion to this story in a?poetic way. How about:

Reflectors in the road, blur pass.
Comets thumping underneith, hard to define, like
poetry, it?s about the journey, not the definition.

For Studio 360, this is Jake Warga

[Outro: You can see photos, logs, blogs and download podcasts of readings from the whole trip at poetrybus.com]

[end]

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