“I want to put up posters/on the newspaper boxes/on the banks/and on the Stores”

Those are the opening lines to a song I wrote 30 years ago. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that I was yearning for life in the city; this was right after college when I was making a real go of it with my band in Minneapolis.

(To give you a sense of what a misfit I was, my band was called The Diary of Anne Frank String Quartet; literally, my aesthetic and aspirations did not fit the Midwest. you can find some of the music here. )

Those lyrics convey my reverie about livivng at the center of a scene—a vital time and place where my music would be some sign of all the action. In my imagination, the idea of defacing newspaper boxes (the media), banks (capitalism), and stores (commercialism) was an integral part of my music fantasy.

This wish to be both living in the swirl of a city scene and besmirching the city at the same time, points to a defining aspect of urbanism. Marking up a city—be it with posters, graffiti, gigs, sloppy romance, protests, starting new businesses, adding new buildings, painting new bike lanes, replacing parking spaces with microparks—captures the beauty of city living. As home to millions of people, cities cannot remain in stasis or intact. Mirroring the fact that so many souls, brains, and miles of DNA & skin have set up shop in one place, cities are constantly rebuilding themselves on top of themselves in a messy, iterative process.

Putting up posters was perhaps my favorite part of being in a band. And, though it’s on-line only now, I’ve transplanted the tradition into my poetry practice.

Here are this year’s gig posters (including the most recent one for this Saturday’s reading, opening for Paco & the Cradle.)