A Gift of Poetry from Paris

Kitty and Richard brought me this photo from Paris, along with a copy of the chapbook displayed on the poet-for-hire’s tiny table. He’s seated on the sidewalk outside Shakespeare & Company, wearing a black leather jacket—either it’s chilly in Paris in July or posing is more important than practicality—and by the look on his face, he’s got attitude. A genuine American poet, then.

Poet-for-hire in Paris, photo by Kitty Knight

The chapbook covers are composed of pulped rags sprinkled with bits of international bills and were printed in Germany. The poems within were written in Paris, Madrid, New York, London, New Orleans, where he’s based, and Vermont, where he’s from. The chapbook was published in Vermont, funded in part by the NEA, and titled, of course, Currency.

Attention, 45 fans: our world is so internationally entrenched, there is no undoing it. This is one tiny example. There are zillions like it. The isolation you dream of going back to no longer exists, if it ever did. 

Poet Benjamin Aleshire has a shtick: he takes instructions from passersby, tells them to come back in ten minutes, and writes poems to order on his yellow manual typewriter. Personalized poems. Customers pay what they think it’s worth, $3 or $300. Instant capitalism-based criticism. He keeps carbon copies—do you know what those are? Some of them became this chapbook. The pages have the fuzzy, anachronistic look of copied carbons, suggesting that no time was wasted in revision.

The sign behind our American poet in Paris announces the next poetry reading. Ishion Hutchinson, a Jamaican poet who teaches writing at Cornell, reading from his latest book, House of Lords and Commons. Dan Chiasson reviewed that collection in The New Yorker last fall, described the poems as “punk-baroque and brat-belletristic.” Chiasson quotes the following lines from a poem whose title includes the word “Ark,” a metaphor alert if I ever saw one:

The genie says build a studio. I build
a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum
things. I alone when blood and bullet and all
Christ-fucking-‘Merican-dollar politicians talk
the pressure down to nothing, when the equator’s
confused and coke bubbles on tinfoil to cemented wreath.

Heavy stuff being read at the expat bookstore in Paris these days. Sylvia Beach founded Shakespeare & Company in 1919. Her store became a focus of expat literary life, but I hear she endured James Joyce’s constant attempts to borrow money. George Whitman opened the current store in 1951—his daughter runs it now—and hosted habitués like Ginsburg, Baldwin, and Cortázar. Whitman lets writers sleep at the store, says thousands have done so. That explains Aleshire’s statement that he’s currently living at Shakespeare & Company. Whitman added “The Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart” to the bookstore’s name. But he edited Yeats, who in his old age was lamenting the loss of youth’s inspiration:

Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Foul, dear aging poets. When the circus leaves town, you’re left with the foul root cellar and no way to climb out.

Among Aleshire’s poems written for cash on the barrelhead is one called “El Peso del Peso,” written in Barcelona for Sara:

There is the weight of the metaphor,
& then there is the weight
of what it’s trying to touch…

A poem written in Vermont, typed onto a 5000 won Korean bill, asks “When did your solitude become currency to you?” See, you need a manual typewriter to do that kind of thing, type directly on greenbacks. Plus, what about when the lights go out? Poets of America, get yourselves manual typewriters! And carbon paper!

For having such focus on money, Currency mentions no price on its cover. Publishers of poetry chapbooks often neglect that detail, I’ve noticed. The relationship of poets to money has always been awkward. Poets don’t like to think about money and money returns the favor.

Kitty asked if she could take his picture. The poet explained that he was out here to make a living and if she bought a poem…She handed him a ten. For that much, you get a copy of my book, he announced. Dedicate it to my friend Pat, who is also a poet, she requested.

Used to be, I keep saying, though no one listens. You should be required to exhibit evidence of your poethood, such as, for example, writing a poem from time to time. A renewal process, like for teaching licenses. But once a poet, always a poet, they insist. It’s like saying once a Baptist always a Baptist and I left that bandwagon behind long ago.

Anyway, wasn’t that sweet of Kitty? And this good American poet wrote: “for Pat, with love and squalor, from Paris.”

Interested? Here’s Aleshire’s Poet for Hire site: https://www.poetforhire.org/