(click to make it bigger…)

A poem of mine, “I saw a man on my way to work,” was selected for the second year of the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s MOVING MINDS: VERSE AND VISION PROJECT. The piece will be displayed on over 700 trains and buses all around Cleveland for the next year.

The card’s design was by Kayne Toukonen, a student from the Glyphix Design Studio at Kent State’s School of Visual Communication Design.

Here’s the Official RTA Press Release, and announcement from the Poets and Writers League of Greater Cleveland site (which, has scans of all the bus cards, including my favorite.)

Back in May, Meghan and I were invited to the RTA headquarters to celebrate the unveiling of the cards with a reception and poetry reading. They had a special bus parked out front, displaying all the cards. Here’s my ugly mug in front of the piece:

And hamming it up for the photographer:

And a great pic of Meg with the bus driver, who was cool enough to chat with us about the bus’s soundsystem, and let Meghan pull the horn:

All in all, it was a fun project. 200,000 people ride the RTA every day, and I love the idea that random people from all over the city will see the work. It’s like legitimized graffiti.

They altered the poem slightly for the card, so here’s the original (and an embarrassing video of me reading it):

I saw a man on my way to work

standing in the middle of his yard
hands in his pockets
watching clouds and traffic

He caught me looking at him,
and gave me the eye
as if to say,

“Son, what do you do that’s so important?”

These are caricatures I did last night during a poetry reading. Poetry folks are a different clan. More about that later…

Meg always saves me the Science Times section. I’m obsessed with it. It’s the only part of the newspaper I read regularly.

Today I read about a tribe in Columbia that walked out of the jungle after thousands of years, and declared it wanted to be part of civilization. They asked “whether the planes that fly overhead are moving on some sort of invisible road.” A thousand miles away, a boy is slowly turning into bone. Other people with his disease twist into living statues. He has a mother who protects him, but not all creatures are so lucky.

To my imagination, this stuff is golden. Magic. What is it about reading science that has this effect on me? That makes life seem so spectacular and mysterious?

All other news pales in comparison: the remix page for MLITBOG is finally up, there’s a nice long post about the novel Kurt Vonnegut didn’t write, and George Saunders recalls leaving Ayn Rand for Sam Beckett.

“I learned so much using words and pictures and captions from some of the most concrete poets, because poetry is all about economy, and it’s about reducing things down, and you’re seeing how much freight you can actually give words. Plus, the great thing about comics which I miss when I’m writing prose, is knowing that I can pretty much guarantee that everybody will read every word. I can pace everything, every caption, every line of dialogue.”—Neil Gaiman on Studio 360

Kenneth Koch was a poet who loved comics. Backwards City Review just reprinted some of his comics in their second issue. I tried desperately to find Koch’s posthumous collection, Art of the Possible: Comics Mainly Without Pictures, in a Cleveland Public Library, and turned up nothing. Then, lo and behold, Google Print has the introduction and a few pages online.

In the introduction, David Lehman writes about Koch,

“letting comics into his literary imagination followed not only from his love of the humorous, the whimsical, and the witty, but from an aesthetic point of view that could be charactreized as defieantly antiacademic.”

Koch saw no reason why Popeye shouldn’t enter the same conversation as T.S. Eliot. In one of Koch’s courses on imaginative writing at Columbia, the assignment was to go out, buy a comic strip, and without reading it, paste white paper over the balloons, and write your own dialogue.

“In 1992, Kenneth decided that not only could he borrow subject matter or adapt a narrative technique from comics but it might be possible to write poetry in a new form based on them.”

Some examples:

Link:

• Art of The Possible! Comics Mainly Without Pictures by Kenneth Koch
• Read the introduction and some excerpts at Google Books