Driven by the need to put poetry back on the map

Two days ago, Michael Earl Craig, a poet from Livingston, Mont., and a handful of poets from all over the country were riffing on the future of their art.

They talked about the power of verse, the changing subject matter and about how poetry is making a comeback. Not next year, not "over the course of the next decades," but right now. From Seattle to New Orleans, from Omaha to Ottawa, poetry is back.

These guys should know. Craig and his fellow poets were headed back to Seattle after a 50-day, 50-city bus tour, bent on exploring both poets and poetry across North America.

The aptly named Poetry Bus — labeled as such in cut-to-the-chase bright-red letters along its shimmering silver siding — began as the brainchild of Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman, editors of the Seattle-based press Wave Books. It kicked off Sept. 5 and returned to Seattle Wednesday, after traversing the country twice. Each night, the 40-foot Green Tortoise motor coach, complete with convertible sleeping bunks and a coffin-size storage space filled with snacks, stopped to discharge its poets to read at more than 60 venues across North America. Friday, the poets will perform their grand finale at the Space Needle.

The goal of the trip was refreshingly simple: "We want to get people thinking about poetry," said tour manager Travis Nichols, 27, explaining that the bus became a mobile society, around which both poets and local communities gathered and learned from one another.

"People have a very specific idea of what a poet can be," said Zapruder, sitting between Craig, who shoes horses for a living, and Lisa Fishman, a poet who lives on a farm in Wisconsin. "But it's an incredibly heterogenous group, and their language and subject matter reflects that."

Part of this cooperative and experimental crew was tied up in the daily rotation of life on a bus. As the Grateful Dead's song "That's It For The Other One" (a eulogy for the band's comrade Neal Cassady, who joined Ken Kesey on his renowned cross-country bus trip in 1964) famously says, "the bus came by and I got on, that's where it all began."

Over the course of the tour, 350 poets "got on" the bus for some amount of time, changing and molding not only nightly audiences' ideas of what poetry is but each other's as well. Aside from the bus driver, Bill Wesley of Oakland, and a quirky documentarian, Linas Phillips of Seattle, only Nichols, Zapruder, and the Allen Ginsberg-looking Beckman remained for the entire duration of the adventure.

The poets and towns left in this ramshackle road trip's wake are recounted by Nichols in his colorful blog (take a look at www.poetrybus.com).

Jury-rigged with the twine of hangovers, mini-golf and poetic collaborations, the community aboard the bus was not united by a cultural manifesto but by a common love of verse. "The point is not to show up and say, 'You should like what we're doing,' " said Nichols. "If they listen and say, 'That's crap,' then hey, at least people are considering poetry at all."

For the record, most of the time people didn't hate what they're doing. In Houston, several high-school kids came to a Poetry Bus reading in an old converted church, listened intently the entire time, then refused to leave.

"They just hung around saying, 'I thought poets were all dead! I thought it was something in books! But you guys are really doing it!' " recounted Zapruder.

After a steady diet of sleepless nights, ostrich farms and attempted U-turns, the road-weary bards aboard the Poetry Bus are not quite ready to begin planning a "next time." But this they're sure of: Poets and poetry are very much alive.

Haley Edwards: hedwards@seattletimes.com