Day 1: Bumbershoot Arts Festival in Seattle, WA
UPDATE!
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Let me tell you about our bus.
Our bus is a forty foot Green Tortoise MCI “touring coach” operated by Bill, our driver for this 50 day, 50 city adventure.
Our bus is silver with white marquees painted on either side. In the middle of these marquees on our bus the Green Tortoise company has painted the phrase “Poetry Bus” in fat red letters.
Our bus is a beautiful bus and today from noon until 6pm poets read every half hour in Seattle Center as part of the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, and for every reading the beautiful bus was packed full of people–people intently listening with their eyes closed, with smiles on their faces and with their hands clasped over their chests.
These people.
They loved poetry.
Where did they come from?
Here in Seattle, surely as in every other city in America, the poetry loving people can be lost, but, if Seattle is any indication, they can also be found, but maybe it takes a 40 foot touring coach filled with poets, camping gear, temporary tattoos and books to bring them out.
They can be found with their feet curled under them on the flower print cushions of our beautiful poetry bus as Catherine Wing reads through a megaphone from the driver’s seat.
They can be found banging their heads on the padded bottoms of the sleeping berths after JW Marshall gives the best New York School Seattle reading I’ll ever hear.
They can be found squeezing in close to one another and sweating as John Olson leads them through a Missoula travleogue to the hot heart of poetry in the late afternoon sun, and they can be found witnessing a stunning blessing read by Chrstine Deavel, the first poem read on the poetry bus.
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Lovely launch yesterday. Congratulations.
Still awaiting the MPM register.
When you stop on Sept. 28th here in Boston, is there any way to have the words of our first published poet from America, Anne Dudley Bradstreet read on the bus?
I live in the town she lived in for the last half of her life. She died here in North Andover on Sept. 16, 1672 at the age of sixty.
I would LOVE to hear “To My Dear Children”!