Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 379

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America with a Typewriter," by Brian Sonia-Wallace.

Everyone thinks Americans don’t want to talk to each other. 

In reality, we’re all just dying to be heard.

My role, I quickly realized, was just to grant people permission to express the emotions they kept under wraps in order to get along in public space. The people who come to the mall seem to have this terrible longing to speak and be listened to, to be witnessed. A base, human need to break from the constant impersonal bombardment of consumer culture that lives in that space and to sit, in silence, with a stranger who was there explicitly to care about their stories. 

From my perch at the typewriter, I gathered intel on the human condition from the belly of the beast, and the heart of American consumerism turned into a confessional. Lots of people would ask how much my poems cost—in a citadel of commerce, unless the free thing is a sample to lure us into buying, nothing is free. But I wasn’t selling a product, I was selling the humanity of the mall itself.

I was filled with wonder and awe by an upperclassman, eighteen to my fourteen, who had just gotten back from traveling on his own for the first time and seemed so confident and independent to my opening adolescent eyes. “Did you ever give people a fake name or pretend to be someone else?” I asked him. 

“No,” he told me. “On the road, I felt like I was the most honest I’ve ever been. There was a feeling of not ever having to worry if people would like you or what you said. You’d be gone the next day, so it didn’t matter. At home, I’m performing all the time. Traveling, I didn’t have to worry about anyone else. I was just me.”

They always say reading to your kid is a positive, but in my case, it backfired because I was so scared my mom would stop reading to me that I refused to learn to do it myself. How else was I going to know that she still cared?

I’ve been writing poems on the spot since 2012. I’ve written in three countries and across thirteen states. People are more or less the same, everywhere you go. No matter what the event is, they tell me about their hopes, their sorrows, their spouses, and their dogs. Somehow, before I even start writing, sitting at the typewriter creates permission. Permission for my patrons to sit in their feelings, in their uncertainties. Permission to embrace wherever they may be emotionally and so be able to move forward without fear. I guess sometimes we all just need another person to tell us what we’re doing is okay and what we want is allowed. Across age and gender and class and race, across all the lines that divide us from each other, people are shy and sweet when it comes to having a poem written just for them. 

Years later, when I run into people I’ve written for, they recognize me and tell me where in their house they have their poem framed, a daily reminder to themselves of themselves.

In 2019, I run an initiative with the City of West Hollywood called Pride Poets, to train queer poets to do typewriter poetry. One of the poets, Natalie Nicole Dressel, tells me afterward how she knew she had enough information from talking to someone to start working on their poem. “I talk to the person until I see myself in them. Then I write that,” she says, like it’s obvious. 

A psychologist I wrote for at a party told me that when we tell each other stories, what we’re doing is patterning our brains to be in synch. Neuroimaging suggests that people hearing stories have the same synapses firing as the person telling the story. Sharing memories, sharing stories, is a physical process. Two bodies moving in unison, two brains acting as one brain. Really, the woman at the party says, what’s happening in the exchange of a story for a poem is that the person I’m writing for and I are synching brains. Two people with different identities and pasts, finding themselves in each other. 

It seems to me that most people just need their stories to be heard. And that need is the right word. That we lose something when our stories are not heard. That something not only in us, but in the world, dies. 

With every poem I write, I remember that the value of a story doesn’t always depend on how many likes or retweets it gets, or how many people it reaches. 

Sometimes, just one person hearing a story—is enough.