Tomorrow (FRDAY APRIL 26th!) come check out this awesomeness

you know, just something I’m working on with the ICA in my free time between booking 16 shows in May and building a new poetry cart (photos to follow soon)

You know that feeling…

…when you have a draft from a blog post that you meant to post two months ago, and the first line is about how much you’ve neglected your blog?  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my thoughts from February 19th:

“Hello lonely little blog, it sure has been a while.  And while the whole of the East Coast has been covered in 30” of snow, I too have been pretty busy down here in Santa Cruz.  Nothing so epic that it stopped traffic, but it has been a good time.  What have I been up to, you ask?  Well, among other things, this:

go ahead…ask me for a sonnet.

Sometime last month I had a yearning for a typewriter.  Couldn’t explain it, and certainly couldn’t justify it.   That is, until I thought of a man I had seen on the streets of Northampton sitting at a typewriter with a sign that said “Poems: top of the head $1, bottom of the heart $5”  I had always wanted to do the same thing, but I was nervous about both my poetic ability, and the fact that I would totally be stealing his style (now if you want good poetry in Northampton you have to go here).  But Santa Cruz is an interesting town, a great number of things set it apart from Northampton, including the fact that one does not need a permit to busk.  So I purchased the typewriter of my eye, from a thrift store ($65) an ottoman from Marshals ($35), and some plywood and wheels from probuild ($12.50).  With a little help from the best glassblowing shop in Santa Cruz I was able to get the whole rig together ($112.50).  Three days of busking later, I had made back all of what I had spent.  Here’s the happy ending to the story: it turns out that writing poems on the streets pays an even scale of $10/hour (that was in February.  March seems to be closer to $16).  Goodbye endless hours at an unpleasant job; hello becoming a much better writer.  Don’t worry, folks who are concerned for my well being, my mother has beaten you to the finish line where you freak out about me not being able to eat: I’m still picking up shifts at the cafe, but I make more money writing poetry…who knew?

Speaking of better writers, here’s another thing I’ve been doing:

I know it’s not the best flier ever, but it is what I’ll be typing all my poems on the reverse side of for the next month  (I’m an evil marketing genius).  One could theorize that I am simply not capable of moving to any new place without starting a poetry reading.  You could build some pretty solid evidence for this argument, but this reading does feel a bit different to me.  In many ways, it feels like it’s my audition for the Art Bar.  I’ll be running this event at a café with a beer and wine license that is the only venue located in the middle of the Tannery Arts Center, which I have previously gushed about here.   Speaking of the tannery:

That’s where I’m going to live starting in March.  Yes, I’ll be moving into the Tannery!!!  I can’t even express how excited I am.  This is the largest project that ArtSpace has ever funded and I’m going to be running poetry events and living it!  For the next two weeks I’m going to be concentrating very hard on how to count my blessings while simultaneously looking for ways to convince Rebecca to carry beer and wine cheap enough for poets to buy.”

The big updates since that post:  Living in the tannery is awesome, the reading series is going great (in fact I’ll be hosting events on Friday and Saturday as well starting in May), Rebecca now carries $2 Rolling Rocks, and busking is going great as evidenced here:

More pictures of typewriters, and posts to the blog to come soon!  Also, I’m thinking of starting …ugh…a twitter account with some of my adventures writing poems on the street.  Thoughts?