All aboard the Poetry Bus

All the fun of the fare: the Poetry Bus looks a little like this one. Picture: David Sillitoe

Q: How long does it take a busload of poets to traverse America (with a detour through Canada)?

A: 12,333 miles; 50 days.

Last week, a 40-foot bio-diesel vehicle with the words POETRY BUS painted in fat red letters along its sides pulled up outside the office of Wave Books in Seattle at 1am. I wasn't there, but I would like to have been because I've been following that bus for over a month now, and that 1am stop in Seattle marked the points where our lives would have to diverge (though physically speaking it and I have only briefly crossed paths.)

Joshua Beckman, a poet and editor at Wave Books, conceived the idea of the Poetry Bus - a bus that would travel around America, picking up and offloading poets as it went along, leaving poetry readings in its wake around North America. In 50 days it stopped in 50 cities, on-board poets joining up with local poets at every stop, to give readings at venues that varied from bookshops and museums to the Roden Crater land sculpture and the Space Needle in Seattle.

I was at the Poetry Bus' New York City reading - a seven hour extravaganza (I was there for about five hours of it) involving about three dozen poets (headed up alphabetically, and in other ways, by John Ashbery) at the Dia Museum in Chelsea. At two hour intervals the readings would break up and give the space over for an hour to the Typing Explosion - a fabulous three-woman group of poets working collaboratively with typewriters, bells and whistles - who would not only write instant poems for those who queued patiently but would later read a sample of them forwards, backwards, in German accents and in song. Their site is well worth a visit).

And thereafter, I was hooked. I followed the bus through the rest of its journey (and also backwards in time) via two blogs at the Poetry Bus and Poetry Foundation sites. Somewhere along the line I started to wonder, who drives this bus? What does he think of all this? By the end of the journey, my questions were answered - the bus driver, Bill Wesley, had not only taken to writing poetry during the tour but also participated in one of the final readings of the Poetry Bus.

And here's a poem written collaboratively on the bus, just for the Guardian blog:

BROTHER POEM NUMBER ONE

Some wrong turns you make

get you somewhere blank, like a parking lot

outside a stadium

the leaves barking

I had a trouble in my nature

I paced the sunlight at my borders

still the crumpled city slept

I am writing this for you because I think your music

has a traveling nature

and I am right now traveling through