The idea for the Improbable Places Poetry Tour arrived at a time when Colleen Michaels’s daughter was young and they’d walk everywhere, especially along Cabot Street in Beverly, where they live. Michaels was also teaching writing to artists as the Writing Studio director at Montserrat College of Art in the town.
“I was going to get my bike fixed at Centraal Cycle and I was like wouldn’t it be wonderful if all these worlds could come together,” Michaels recalls. So she talked to the shop folks and arranged to host a poetry reading there on Oct. 28, 2010.
“About 60 people showed up, which blew me away,” Michaels says. There were people in bike shorts and people, um, dressed like poets. “I just wanted all our groups to come together in poetry.”
The “Improbable Places” toured have since included a tattoo parlor, a paint store, a used furniture store, a diner, a metal fabrication shop, a chocolate shop, a dress shop, a laundromat as patrons continued to plunk coins into the machines to wash their clothes, and in the center of a roller palace as skaters circled around.
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Mostly the readings have been held around Beverly and Salem. “I had these very familiar places in my town—the bank and the flower shop and the supermarket—already it had this context, but I wondered if there might be a bigger story there,” Michaels says. “I’m trying to find the story of the place.”
The next “Improbable Places Poetry Tour” reading is “a night of nautical poetry about deep water and tall sails” scheduled for tomorrow, May 10, at the Essex Shipbuilding Museum in Essex, Massachusetts. It begins with Three Sheets To The Wind singing sea shanties at 6:30 p.m., then the poetry reading at 7 p.m. They’re aiming to hold the reading aboard a replica Viking ship docked there. If weather is foul, they’ll hold the event indoors in the boat workshop. Guests are invited to bring picnics—and, if they’re so inclined, arrive by kayak. “There will also be a lot of sailors there, which will be,” Michaels says, “nice.”
“It’s a sort of neighborhood anthology. It’s almost a weird way to look at commerce in your town, kind of turning it upsidedown,” Michaels says. “…I feel like it makes me fall in love with it, even with all the problems any town can have. Being able to sit together and talk about it makes for a happy experience. … It just feels like we’re in this together.”
Modern Millie's -Improbable Places Poetry Tour
Check out the beautiful video created by Jade Brewer for the Improbable Places Poetry Tour stop at Modern Millie's.
Posted by Improbable Places Poetry Tour on Sunday, April 22, 2018
Michaels seeks new submissions for each reading related to the theme of the place—and at the event Michaels wears an ensemble to match. For tomorrow’s reading, she asked for poems about “being on a boat or boat building.” She received about 45 submissions and will use about 20.
One time, at an “Improbable Places” reading in an auto shop underneath a car raised up on a lift to be repaired, the poems turned out to be about learning to drive and escaping an accident unscathed. Another time, they read in the YMCA swimming pool. “In the pool,” Michaels notes. “I learned a lot about acoustics. They suck in a pool. We had actual poets in the pool. Dawn Paul read this amazing poem about her mother teaching her to swim.”
They’ve also read poetry at the Salem Power Plant, the last public event there before it was demolished. Michaels says, “We read poems about the power of work and the work of power. And the last poem was the sound of the turbines shutting down.”
“As I’m listing this to you,” Michaels says, “I’m realizing many of these places are gone.”
The lineup changes each time, and ranges from poets who’ve won Pushcart Prizes to “maybe people writing their first poem and they’re learning to write poetry by writing about a place that’s familiar to them.” The format aims for democracy: “There’s 20 readers and they each get one poem. … I don’t want one person to own the story. These are all of our places.”
Michaels recalls a scene in the 1991 Terry Gilliam film “The Fisher King” in which a crowd of commuters suddenly, wondrously begins to waltz in the middle of New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Michaels says, “What I want in my life is everyone to stop, look up and start dancing—but the dancing is poetry.”
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