Poems for Sale
(July 8, 2010) My first encounter with the Poem Store was last summer in a grassy area just outside the main Portland Farmers’ Market. Jacqueline Suskin was sitting on a folding chair in the shade wearing a vintage dress, typing away on a vintage typewriter — clickity click. A handmade sign announced, “Poem Store, Your Subject & Price.”
I bought an improvised bit of free verse for my son and his girlfriend. They loved it.
A couple of months went by, then — a nice surprise — there she was clickity clicking on the Arcata Plaza. She’d moved to Humboldt.
When I bought a poem for my wife, Jacqueline explained how she got in the Poem Store business: “My friend in Oakland, Zach Houston, does it for a living. He told me I should try. I went with him one day and it was amazing. I’ve been doing it ever since.”
She’d taken her poetry rig — everything fits on a bicycle — “all the way up the coast to Seattle,” typing verses on all sorts of subjects for all sorts of people. When she’s not busy writing custom poems she types letters to friends to keep the clickity clicking (and attract customers).
On the side she engages in another pastime, scouring “flea markets, roadside ditches, junk shops and trash bins” collecting vintage found snapshots. On Friday, July 9, she launches her first book of poetry, The Collection, a collection of 23 poems and the snaps that inspired their creation. For example:
We stole the lemons for the cats
cause we found the tom-tabby’s spent body
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STAFF PICK / music / 9 p.m. Red Fox Tavern, 415 5th St., Eureka. Reggae-meets-Latin bilingual vocal duo Vidagua is celebrating the release of a self-titled CD. theredfoxtavern.com. 269-0282.
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