Drive-By Poetry

This is totally geeky. It's probably something I would have done had I been awesome enough to do it. In a recent issue of The American Scholar there's a story, "Poetry Stand: How a Precocious Group of High School Poets Learned to Provide Verse on Demand," by Douglas Goetsch.

From said story:

Drive-by poetry, as Rich described it, entails loading the students into a van, cruising around a commercial area in Trenton, and pulling over near targeted pedestrians. One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades — or accosts — the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next victim.

Wow! What I wouldn't give to go back in time and do that with my geeky friends in high school. We'd be rollin' down the dark streets of Olympia, find some middle-aged gaggle of state employees and shout menacingly at them a section of William Stafford's "Waking at 3 a.m.":

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

The state employees would then feel the full wrath of poetry!...And then probably say, "Huh?" and then finish their latte and continue their discussion of state fiscal policy. Whatever.

LONG LIVE POETRY!