You can get to the new goodies (like the picture of Seamus Rohrer below) three ways:

1) Click on “previous posts” either above or below this entry, and then look for the updated links at the beginning of each post.

2) Click the back arrow on the “Tour Log” to the right so that the October or September Calender appears. Then, click on the day of your choice to see a synopsis of the previous posts. To get the full post with the new links, you have to click on the heading (”Days 1-52: Poetry Bus Retrofit” for example).

3) Type the name of your favorite city into the search engine to the right. Hit return to view previews of each post that mentions your city, then click the heading (”Day 1: Bumbershoot,” for example) to read the full post with all the new goodies.

If you have any goodies you would like to add to the archive, email them to me, Travis, at bus@wavepoetry.com.  (In case anyone is interested, I’ve moved my non-poetry bus HQ to www.weirddeer.com)

Enjoy!

More Photos

From The Stranger

From The Seattle Times

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Home after the dream or is home itself the dream?

The bus back where we loaded it up with books, typewriters and snacks two months ago and me in the bed I left all hallowed out.

Bill, a hand shake and a mountanous hug, a pat on the arm from Linas, and my own guilty dread for leaving everyone to find their own ways home.

As much as we all want and need to stop, it is devastating to know once we step into this city, the Poetry Bus stops forever.

There is no getting back on, no meeting up later.

When I wake up tomorrow morning in this bed the tour will have ended.

Sometime in the night, its fading into memory will have begun.

Thank you, North America, for your kindness and hospitality.

We are grateful and humbled.

See you again sometime soon, I hope.

More from Oregon!

From the Oregonian

From Studio 360

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Five facts from Portland, OR:

1) In Portland, Oregon the Poetry Bus parked in front of Mississippi Studios, a wonderful sanctuary with the most amazing sound of anywhere we’ve been.

2) The wonderful Mississippi Studios had to turn people away from the door because more people than Mississippi Studios could handle had come to hear the Poetry Bus.

3) The Vis a Vis Society did a survey and found that the fox and the bear are the new Poet Animal Laureates of Portland.

4) Philip Jenks has a huge tattoo of Emily Dickinson on his back.

5) We left Portland in the morning to do some shooting of the bus in motion for Linas, and we ended up back in Portland that night to eat chicken-fried steak and broccoli soufflé.

More from Ashland!

Emergent Forms!

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We’ve taken a lot of cabs on this trip, and we usually get a gruff no-response when we tell the cabbies what we’re up to

(e.g. Cabbie: “So what brings you to our fair city?”
Us: “Yay! Poetry reading! Yay!”
Cabbie: “uh . . . ”
Us: “We’re doing fifty in fifty days on a bus! The Poetry Bus!”
Cabbie: ” . . . mmm ”
Us: “The Poetry Bus!”
Cabbie: “Yeah so that’s nine fifty, you want me to pop the trunk?”)

But we took a cab from the Make Out Room to Club Deluxe in San Francisco, and our cab driver got VERY excited about the fact that we were poets.

“No shit?” he said, turning to look me in the eye, “I have poets in my cab right now?”

We told him that it was no shit, that he did have poets in his cab right now and so he recited one of his own poems, a short one with the line “a day in the life and a life in a day”, and then he told us that he had committed his life to fighting for his culture, the American bohemian culture.

“I’ve been fighting hard, man, but I’ve begun to think about leaving this country,” he said, “There comes a point when you have to stop fighting and just get out, you know?”

“I know,” I said, and then I told him I thought it would be a shame to leave, and I meant it.

“I hitchhiked down here from Seattle 23 years ago, man, and I love it I mean look at this city,” he said pointing through the fog to the lights below us, “I left once to have a romance in the mountains with a hippie girl, which you totally have to do, but I’ve been here ever since. I met Kesey once at a Dead show, but I was too fried on acid, man. Totally fried. How long are you staying?”

“Not long,” I said, “we leave in the morning for Ashland.”

“Ashland!” he said, slapping the wheel, “That’s one of the great places on the West Coast, a total diamond in the fucking rough.”

That got us very excited, because we had thought, for no reason really, that we might be going to somewhere terrible.

“I can’t believe I had a bunch of poets in my cab going to Ashland!” he said when he let us out, shaking our hands and wishing us the best.

We tipped him as well as we could and headed in to the reading, beaming.

And then the next morning we drove up the coast to Ashland, which was as amazing as our cab driver had said.

Mountains, eggplant burgers, micro brewed beer, and trees.

K. Silem Mohammad and Craig Wright welcomed us into the Meese Room in the library of Southern Oregon University, where about a hundred folks, including Christian Hawkey’s mom and brother, sat waiting to listen.

And do you know what happened in Ashland? What happened in Ashland was that Bill Wesley, the man who has been driving us around the country in this bus for fifty days, got up in front of the crowd in Ashland and read poems.

Poems he wrote while driving us around the country on this trip.

Bill is a musician as well as a driver, and he’s an incredibly open and creative person, but he hadn’t really considered himself a poet before this trip began, so to see him up there in front of people reading his poems was profoundly moving.

Moving, profound, and incredible because I mean Bill! Fucking Bill was up there in front of the people of Ashland reading poems! Bill!

I almost lost my mind.

Watching him I almost lost my mind because I had forgotten, after 50 or so readings, how much courage takes to get up in front of a crowd and read the poems you’ve spent your time working on.

It’s not normal.

It’s not normal but we forget how special it is, but I watched Michael Earl Craig listening while Bill read, and Earl kept slapping his hands on his legs and shaking his head. He understood how not normal it was.

“I can’t believe it,” he said to me, wide eyed, after it was over.

Neither can I.

Thanks, Bill.

Below is a poem from Bill, and if you want to hear it straight from the Bill, then head over to the Poetry Foundation site to read his own dispatches.

Thanks, Kasey. Thanks, Craig.

More from San Francisco

From The Believer

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The Make Out Room

Edwin Torres at Club Deluxe

Below are three lil movies from our amazing time in San Francisco.

One of Andrew Joron reading with a backing band at Club Deluxe, one of Noelle Kocot getting her beatnik bravado on, and the last of Michael Zapruder performing a poem set to music.

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We rode all night from Los Angeles, woke up to egrets, sea otters, hawks and finally 50 high school marching bands on the streets of Santa Cruz (the place poet Peter Gizzi lovingly calls “the Deep End”) where a peculiar kind of exhaustion took over.

We scattered throughout the city, some kayaking, some swimming in the ocean and some sleeping until time came to head up to High Street where the readings happened.

A deep wooly exhaustion through which I can move and dimly perceive but most definitely not be “present” which is what we all aspire to be.

So, I leave the representation of the reading to Beth Pittinger, who put together this cento from lines at the reading.

Thank you, Dennis Morton.

Cento—On the Bus

lost in a forest of pronouns
the non-light of realism
a single answer to a complex question
I rub the grains of the moon in my hands
when you light my cigarette just that way
I am smoke
this is what my lips are for
replacing all the words

I was born in January
or maybe it was July
the signs that said yield
the uncreated still
from the periphery of another world
what if your imagination
went on vacation too

I couldn’t account for my hand
which had turned into starfish
a season arrives with its odd luggage
the gravity of each word
a loneliness about the shoulders
seen as storied

the practice is to unwind the song slowly
sound has its own horizon
long enough to plant an argument
that face driven along some high wire
without a net

that would be like little candles
having feeling for the wax
the events are so far from each other
we are zones

we became breathless
and called it busy
they have bodies
that’s all the faith they need
I’d like to reduce everything
to one syllable

face your face cranium
plant not the color green
it’s black
these fish do swim in partial language
and putting LSD in swimming pools
except some things under this seat
let it be the one who inhales the drunken
dream of a woman

crescendo denotes climax
like a fist out of a water
the better of two futures
it is where the gap is

you’re full of magic holes
concentrate seriously on the pathways
of insects
except to speak for the missing
in the shadow of a great mistake
the sensation of space where it had been once
dense and full
I must have felt the vagrant quotations

I will write for the chill of it
can the corporate highway be replaced
by a rainbow
you were my first ticket to pain
how so clear whereas before
invisible between the sky

all alphabets are manual
an absence spliced
a veined hand waving
to erect a huge disk
over are the days of background windows

is some thing a matter with you
averages predict distant moments from the past
four lines of chopped resonance
not the knowledge of smallness
and who on earth am I telling this to

From Chicken Corner

The Machine Proejct

Emily Lacy

*****

At 3pm, when our reading at the Natural History Museum in LA had been scheduled to begin, the auditorium was empty.

Juliana Spahr poked her head in despite my protestations and after seeing the pristine, untouched expanse of seating, she turned to me with her eyes gleaming.

“This has always been a fantasy of mine,” she said.

“To have no one at a reading?” I asked with the pure peculiar horror of an organizer at an unattended event.

“Totally,” she said.

When three people finally showed up, she seemed genuinely let down.

Oh well, Juliana.

She would have been especially dissapointed in the Machine Project Reading later that night, since we had to turn people away from the door because it was so packed.

Both readings were excellent, giving further proof that it doesn’t matter how many people are in an audience for a reading. If you’re that one person and the reading is good, then you could be in the middle of Times Square or on the moon, it wouldn’t matter.

Will Alexander

Dudes and burgers

On a long stretch of construction riddled highway from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, Linas dissappeared for half an hour only to show up in the back of a squad car driven by the prototype highway patrolman.

Whoops.

But only a little humiliation and a ticket, and not, as threatened, a confiscated camera and jail time.

So we made it to Cal Arts for a reading in a bunkerized building full of attentive awesome listeners, remarkable especially for a Wednesday night.

Though the Mets lost, everyone stayed sane enough and there was little gnashing of teeth, and I got to go early to meet my new niece, Willa. Hello, Willa!

More from Las Vegas!

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I want to hear Elvis sing one more time so I keep pressing this button.

I believe Elvis sees into my soul and he sees I am on a fundamental leval a loser so he gives me nothing, only takes more and more numbers from my tally on the screen.

Noodly doodly ding ding!

From the monumental awe of Roden Crater to the flimsy sugar high of a Las Vegas casino, we’ve had an intense 24 hours, in no small part because of readings like Eileen Myles’ below.

All of Las Vegas is not like this, but this is what we see when we come to read at the Brooklyn Room of the New York New York Casino.

A strangely charged reading, with some of the most intense performances we’ve had yet, with one particularly loud heckler and a man telling me I’m sexy afterwards as I stand at the urinal.

Really?

Elvis doesn’t think so.

More from Roden Crater

More on Roden Crater

More on Chris Cogburn

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Carrying a drum up a tunnel to the sunset, nothing is adequate to communicate the experience of awe except poetry.

We could have taken pictures or videos or I could write about what happened in the most precise prose, but nothing would come close.

The tunnel.

The light.

The cool air and the sound.

My whole life I’ve felt this way, but only every so often does an experience overwhelm so completely as to obliterate all other modes of communication except poetry.

Thank you, light.

Thank you, James Turrell.

Thank you, poetry bus.

More from Phoenix

From the Arizona Republic

From Stamped and Metered Flying Fish

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On the way to Phoenix from Gallup, we stopped the bus for a bathroom break in Arizona at an ostrich farm off of old Route 66 (now I-40) where Gazelle, the kinky haired proprietor, told us the bathroom didn’t work, but we could look around at the ostriches and feed them if we wanted.

Gazelle looked seriously at me when she spoke, probing my face with her deep brown eyes.

“Everybody’s a poet?” she asked.

“Yep,” we said, “everybody’s a poet.”

She walked us over the ostriches with cups of grain pellets.

If you don’t know, feeding an ostrich is like sticking your hand into a ceiling fan, if the ceiling fan blade looks like Burgess Merideth.

We timidly fed these creatures and they nipped at our hands with their bony beaks and rolled their eyes back into their heads as they did it.

Can you feel me shivering?

“How fast can you run?” Gazelle asked me.

“Pretty fast,” I said, shaking scattered pellets out of my hair.

“You wanna ride one?” she asked, “I have a saddle that’s perfect for your skinny ass.”

I looked around at all the grinning poets and then I looked at the bus. Did I want to ride an ostrich?

“Sure,” I said, “I could ride an ostrich.”

“Well, if you fall off the ostrich they will peck you and kick you until you’re dead,” she said.

“Dead?” I said.

“Dead,” she said, “you got anyone back home who can bury you?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Well okay then,” she said, “come on” and we walked over to the adolescent male ostriches looming with their gnarly heads over the chicken wire fence.

“You just hold tight around the neck and if you fall off you gotta run as fast as you can away from them,” she said, “ or they will kick (here she mimed kicking) and peck (here she mimed pecking) you until you are a dead one.”

I thought about it a little more and began emptying my pockets of change and pens. I took my hat off and my sunglasses.

“I think I can do it,” I said.

All the poets had grins stuck on their faces.

“Are you sure you want to do this,” Matthew asked.

However this happens, I thought, I’m going to get hurt.

“Sure,” I said, “it’s okay.”

“Okay?” Gazelle asked and grabbed my hand.

“Okay,” I said.

She looked me in the eye and held it for a moment. And then she started laughing.

“I can’t let you ride no ostrich,” she laughed, “an ostrich would kill you.”

I looked up at one ostrich head bobbing over the fence and then I read Gazelle a poem.

I think she liked it okay.

More from Santa Fe

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A coyote and a catfish across the Rio Grande seen from a mineral bath in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico and then on to Santa Fe.

We welcomed Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on to the bus this evening, two poets involved in a collaborative project made specifically for their time on the bus.

Jen Bervin writes fully about the project over at the Poetry Foundation (link to the Southeast), and I would love to hear from anyone with thoughts about their process and execution (especially anyone who hears any of the performances).

After the reading, we drove into the night to stay at El Rancho in Gallup, New Mexico where we split the troops between the bus and one or two of the “all nice rooms” there, and then up for a crappy breakfast (I had some “Navajo Herbal Tea,” which featured the Navajo herb chamomile) and a beautiful drive through the desert.

More from Marfa!
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More from Austin!

Effing Press

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Sultry Woman’s Voice: It’s nighttime in the big city. The Poetry Bus sits in a cul de sac in Texas after a day at the Menil Collection in Houston and then at the Big Red Sun building in Austin. A grackle shrieks in a tree and the smell of guano drifts from under the Congress Ave. Bridge.

Bob Dylan: Today’s theme is “Surrealist Lunch.” I had a particularly surreal lunch once in 1967, when Tiny Tim and I ran naked through a set of golf course sprinklers.

Bob Wills: Oh Nancy!

The Menil Collection (bereft of her recently departed poets, but full of smiling patrons): I can’t quite explain what happened to me today, but it sure was fun!

Gillian Conoley: A bit-o-pain?

The Menil: Not at all!

Bob Dylan: Poet Gillian Conoley was born in Taylor, Texas. Actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas used to be on the cover of Teen Beat with some frequency, though I never saw it for sale in Texas. I sure would have loved to be on the cover of Teen Beat sometime. Maybe next month.

Sierra Nelson: Forgive me for not putting you on the cover of Teen Beat, I was busy editing an agricultural paper with some misgivings.

Valzyhna Mort: Today is my last day on the Poetry Bus! I am sad!

Elizabeth Hughey: Me too!

Dara Wier: It was nice getting to know y’all!

Scott Pierce: I would never say this in real life, but here in the world of the Poetry Bus blog, I’ll say that I set up this whole event at Big Red Sun and I run an awesome small press called Effing. If anyone is coming through Austin and would like to hang out, give me a call or drop me a line.

Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith: We too would never mention this in real life, but here on the blog we would like to mention that we hosted the poets from the Poetry Bus at our house in Austin.

Bob Dylan: Thanks, Scott, Hoa, and Dale. Let’s check out the email buggy to see what the people have to say:

Dearest Bob,

I’ve been wondering what Joshua Clover is like. Can you help me out?

Sincerely,
The Dwarf

Well, the Dwarf, there’s no need to be so loquacious. Like Hamlet said to Claudius, Just get to the point.

Joshua Clover, eh? Well, he showed up in Houston in black jeans and a “Who the Fuck is Mick Jagger” t-shirt. He falls asleep like a dead person on the bus and then wakes up to play virtuosic scales on Bill’s guitar while talking about Frederic Jameson. Here’s a picture of him.

Since, the Dwarf, I know you are concerned about hair, I’ll tell you Joshua Clover has a lot of it. A white shock exploding upwards and outwards as if were thought itself. Somehow, his ur-intellectual tortoise shell glasses accentuate the positive.

The Dwarf: Oh Nancy! (Swoons)

Linas Phillips: Welcome to Amateur Hour!

Texas: Just so you know, George W. Bush was born in Connecticut.

Auden: It is America but not yet.

More from Houston!

Aurora Picture Show!

The Menil Collection!

Surrealist Lunch!

More Surrealist Lunch!

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In Houston, the fourth biggest city in America, we traveled to a homey neighborhood called Houston Heights where Andrea Grover had turned an old Baptist church into an indie cinema house called the Aurora Picture Show.

Across the street from the picture show, Linas and I talked with Chino, a professional car detailer, and his father, Ernest.

I read a poem to their dogs, which seemed to go over well enough.

The reading itself was a rarity in that the readers were all from the bus—not one local. So we did the only sensible thing, which was to get drunk and read new poems while passing notes between us on the pews.

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Five from New Orleans:

1) Café Du Monde, which is, no matter how full of tourists, the best place in America to read the paper and eat breakfast while listening to Dixieland Jazz, especially after a long drive through the night from Tuscaloosa in the bumpiest bunk known to poetry watching the sun rise over FEMA trailers.

2) Jan Gilbert and Kevin McCaffery, two amazingly hospitable and warm New Orleaneans who lead us through some of the ghostly neighborhoods of the city, to the 17th Street Canal, the 9th Ward, and East New Orleans on back through to downtown and the French Quarter, showing us what happened to the city last year when disaster stuck and every incompetent blowhard in the country displayed his or her complete ineptitude in the face of adversity.

3) The Mississippi River, still as mythic a thing as we have in this country, and a thing in another life I would love to travel up and down with a boat full of poets, reading at every place ever mentioned by Mark Twain.

4) The Long Black Line.

5) Dave Brinks and Megan Brown, two remarkable poets who, along with the bus’s own Tonya Foster, gave awesome readings at the Contemporary Arts Center.

More from Tuscaloosa!

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Hey there Tuscaloosa!

T-Town!

The Tusk!

Could we have had more fun in Tuscaloosa?

Maybe.

If Bear Bryant and Stokely Carmichael had challenged us to a game of doubles Hi-Li, but otherwise probably not.

How awesome is this?

And this?

More from Athens!

The Athens-Banner Herald!

The Red and Black!

Flagpole Magazine!

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In the fine tradition of Neutral Milk Hotel, Bubba Sparxxx, DJ Danger Mouse, Rumi, Hugh Kenner, Herschel Walker, the B-52s and John Cameron Mitchell, the Poetry Bus made a temporary home for itself in Athens, GA, not far from where I once saw a man dressed in only saran wrap and fried chicken.

Despite the wander-inhibiting rain, we enjoyed ourselves on the Chase Park Warehouse loading docks and snacked on red beans and rice from the world famous Grit restaurant where the dishwashers get free PBR on busy nights and the incomparable Vernon Thornsberry holds court (where ya from?).

As we munched, Lizzie Saltz and Steve Somethingorother of ATHICA and Sabrina Orah Mark of the VOX reading series graciously received us and about a hundred of the friendliest Athenian literature lovers drifted into the gallery space for one of the best readings we’ve had so far on the tour.

(ATTN: Video of Vic Chesnutt singing Stevie Smith below)

After the reading we had a few drinks at the Globe and then set off for Vic’s beautiful house where we talked on the porch about Pluto’s demotion, Carson McCullers, Robyn Hitchcock and intelligent design.

A late drive back to the bus from Vic’s via my good friend Cobra Crabcake, then a little show from a man with a gun in the hotel parking lot, and finally a little sleep before some carry out breakfast from the Grill.

More Asheville!

Malaprops!

Emily Louise Smith!

Fits of Strange Mercy!

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Asheville, the sleepy Southern town jittery Yankees move to with dreams of home ownership and porch lounging, introduced us to at the very least nine awesome things:

1) The full moon slipping into clouds.

2) Clouds hiding the full moon and reflecting the stadium lights from a car dealership.

3) The Black Mountain College museum where some relics of a more thoughtful time are semi-preserved under glass, and some, like Josef Albers’ desk, are there for the leaning on.

4) Lee Ann Brown’s parents

5) Steve and Nava (thank you!)

6) Steve and Nava’s hot tub (thank you thank you!)

7) Steve and Nava’s two cats, One Eye and Two Eyes.

8) More rainy mockingbirds in a morning than anyone could have ever believed possible.

9) Malaprop’s Books where I searched in vain for a new book to read since Emily Dickinson’s letters, though perfect, reflect too stable a mind for this traveler.