Portland's Poetry Peddlers

A few weeks back, P&PC did a short profile on a personalized poetry business that had set itself up on the waterfront in downtown Portland. At that time, we somewhat rashly proclaimed that the age of the locally-sourced poem had dawned on Stumptown and that lovers of the local could now find appropriate reading material to go along with their farm-fresh eggs, all organic cracked wheat bread, and homemade Marionberry jam. Start your day off right, we implied, by drinking responsibly from your watershed, eating responsibly from your foodshed, and reading responsibly from your poemshed.

The P&PC office isn't about to retract any of those statements just yet, but we will offer a tiny qualifi- cation that perhaps the locally-sourced poetry movement has been in Portland longer than we first thought and has emerged more, uh, organically than we might have indicated. Take the man in the white hat pictured above, for example, whom we encountered peddling his wares—serious, funny, sad and glad poems—at the Saturday Farmer's Market where all the foodie boys and girls go to get their fennel on.* He was busy and we were too uncaffeinated to deal with his customer's pink jacket, striped tote bag and silver flip-flops, so we didn't stop to chat him up. We simply assumed the green newspaper dispenser in the background would serve as caption enough: he and others like him are the Vanguard of the new localism.**

Notes

*Many people associate the act of peddling with small wares and commodity items, not with poems. However, the earliest descriptions of peddling relate to books and verse not to knick knacks and doodads. The Oxford English Dictionary traces "peddling" back to references in Sir Thomas More's The confutacyon of Tyndales answere (1532) ("The pedelyng knaues that here bring ouer theire bookes, grispe aboute an halfepeny") and Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the diuell (1592) ("Who can abide a scuruie pedling Poet to plucke a man by the sleeue at euerie third step"). So maybe More and Nashe didn't exactly hold poetry peddling in the highest esteem, but that doesn't change the fact that Portland's perigrinating poets don't come from a long tradition.

**While the term "new localism" has gained currency of late, it too has poetic origins, as Vachel Lindsay—a poetry peddler in his own right who traded poems for food and lodging as he crossed the U.S. on foot—used the term in the first couple decades of the 20th century to describe his vision for the arts in America.

How Popular Is Popular? The Case of Vachel Lindsay

In 1913, Springfield Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay published "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" in Poetry magazine, and the poem quickly become a popular hit on the day's poetry-reading circuit. Audiences clamored for Lindsay's half-sung dramatic performance so much that Lindsay wrote to friend and Davenport, Iowa, lawyer Arthur Davison Ficke, "I have recited the General til my jaws ache—4444 times."

Here's the beginning of the poem (to be sung, Lindsay instructed, to the tune of "The Blood of the Lamb" with instrumental accompaniment):

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: “He’s come.”
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale—
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:—
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

The publication of Lindsay's "The Congo" in Poetry a year later, however, earned Lindsay more fame than he'd ever bargained for. Response to "The Congo" was sensational among literary and popular audiences alike. Biographer Eleanor Ruggles reports that when Lindsay read "The Congo" at a Poetry event celebrating William Butler Yeats' visit to Chicago, "The audience burst into applause ... and there were bravos from Lindsay's fellow midwesterners, persuading him into reciting General Booth."

Around the same time, in the booming coal-mining metropolis of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1915, 1,500 people—nearly 5% of the population of what was then the 94th largest city in America—turned out to hear Lindsay read.

How popular is that, you might ask?

Well, for Lindsay to find a popular turnout nowadays, he would have to go to Chula Vista in San Diego County, California, now the nation's 94th largest city with a population of 210,000. To match, percentagewise, the size of the crowd that saw Lindsay perform in Wilkes-Barre in 1915, an audiences of about 10,000 people—10,000!—would have to turn out. Earlier this year, when Mary Oliver sold out a 2,500 seat venue in Seattle (consistently ranked as the most literate large city in the U.S. and much larger than Chula Vista), the event made national headlines. "Poet-mania," read one report headline, "Mary Oliver's sold-out appearance sparks a ticket frenzy on Craigslist."

Just imagine what the press would do if 10,000 people turned out in any city for a poetry reading today—or what the frenzy would have been like if Craigslist was around back in 1915.