The first typewriter station that poet Henry Goldkamp set up was in the Central West End, in front of 10denza. He and his collaborator, photographer and fixer of typewriters Rob Rohe, were nearby one afternoon and watched as a middle-aged woman walking a dog stopped in front of it. She casually typed a couple of lines, took up her dog’s leash, and walked off.
The instructions on the wooden kiosk asked the typist to put his or her sheet into the slot on the top; the woman didn’t see this or didn’t care. She left her page exposed, ruffling in the breeze. Rohe ran over to pull it off the carriage, fold it, and drop it in on her behalf, to preserve her anonymity, but he accidentally glanced at what she wrote.
I really love living in the Central West End.
Bill made a big mistake.
The idea started at a party. Goldkamp scrolled a huge roll of paper into a typewriter and set it in the middle of the room for people to use. It was like a cross between Jack Kerouac’s On the Road teletype manuscript and an exquisite corpse.
“During the headache of cleanup the next day, I pulled it out and read it, and it was hilarious,” Goldkamp says. “It was like, ‘Well, I wonder what would happen if I did this on a grand scale—a citywide scale?’”
He already had a sense of what St. Louis dreams of, anguishes over, laughs at. For his project Fresh Poetry, Ink., he throws down a Persian carpet on the sidewalk, sets up his desk and typewriter, sometimes accessorizes with a floor lamp, and offers to write poems for people in 15 minutes or less. Most people pay $5 or $10, but one client was so overwhelmed, he gave Goldkamp $97. He’s also been paid nothing. Once, he was paid in a back flip.
On Fresh Poetry’s website, he writes, “This is about sticking a quirk in the spokes of your ragtag & bobtail day—from the group of kids about to spend an afternoon at the zoo, the homeless man asking for change, the yuppie on her way to some well-to-do establishment I’ve never heard of, etc. We just want to make your day (or night) a little bit neater.”
He’s posted lots of the resulting poems online. They have titles like “Code word: ‘Aardvark’”; “Pink (for the third time)”; “Animals/Patterns”; and “Love as Tetris.” Some are prefaced by explanations. “Aardvark” was about a gay couple “with very large beards,” who would use the word to alert each other of the presence of some backward, frowning so-and-so glaring at them as they held hands. One of the most Goldkampian poems, perhaps, is “Saint Louis, straight-up,” which addresses the city almost as if it were a person:
As I eye the skyline,
our lit buildings serve as a vessel.
The river runs through it,
my existential conduit.
I am bound to her hand and use it.
She is everything to me:
My father, my mother, brother, bride-to-be,
my sister, my nemesis, my enemy.
I’ll stay forever, restless,
asunder inside her concrete & steel.
It makes sense, then, that Goldkamp is the poet who has engineered a way for St. Louis to write its own book. Last August, he launched “What the Hell is St. Louis Thinking?” setting up 25 wooden kiosks topped with typewriters. He posted ads on Craigslist to round up the machines, set up a Facebook page, and approached businesses to see if they’d host. The enthusiastic response—as well as the headaches—began almost immediately.
“I was really adamant about upkeep,” he says, “asking the business owners to immediately call me if anything goes wrong.” Next thing he knows, he’s getting a call at 1 a.m. from HandleBar, saying the ribbon’s out. He and Rohe had just dropped it off. Goldkamp rolled out of bed, went over to inspect the typewriter, and discovered that, to his exasperation, “They’re just not hitting the fucking keys hard enough!”
“We put his old Underwood No. 5 down there, this hulking machine that you really have to hammer the keys on,” Rohe remembers. “That was the first shift. Who’s going to be here? It’s going to be younger kids, maybe drinking. They don’t necessarily know how this works. Let’s try to put a machine there that’s easier to use, the keys are a little friendlier.”
Not long after that, Goldkamp retrieved a rather stunning submission from the box at City Museum. Someone had typed, “I don’t think this represents the true St. Louis. It’s all white hipsters and tourists.”
“It did sting,” Goldkamp says, “but the way that it was written, I didn’t feel any malice behind it. I felt like it was constructive criticism. There really weren’t that many things in the boxes that were malicious. There were maybe five at most out of 1,500-plus.”
He took the advice to heart, swearing to get typewriters into all of St. Louis’ 79 neighborhoods. He wasn’t sure how. Help arrived in an unsolicited email from his friend Mallory Nezam, founder of STL Improv Anywhere, which organized the No-Pants MetroLink Ride and the annual flash-mob pillow fight in Forest Park. In addition to her background in visual art and theater, Nezam is trained in community-engaged art through the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Arts Training Institute and Creative Time in New York.
“I wanted to help him, because I have hundreds of connections all around the region, and they’re very diverse,” she says. “I thought, ‘It’s important to me that this project is a good representation of the community.’ So I asked if he wanted to go for coffee, and I’d be happy to give him resources. We met at Sump and started talking about all these people, all these networks, everything from the Pink House to Rebuild Foundation. So we had one at the Pink House, through the CAT network, and in communities where we are trying to elevate voices anyway.”
Rohe continued to wrench typewriters and document things photographically. Goldkamp, who until recently worked in construction at his family’s business, built dozens more kiosks. They set up one across from Crown Candy Kitchen, at the North City Farmers’ Market. One morning, a group of 10-year-old girls huddled around it, confused about how to make it work. Goldkamp and Rohe gave them an impromptu combination how-to and history lesson. Around the same time, What the Hell instituted a sort of roving adopt-a-typewriter program, both to get machines into more neighborhoods and to give people a more intimate space to type their thoughts.
“There was this entire page of stipulations,” Goldkamp says, sighing. “The main thing being—and this is in bold, underline, and italic—’Don’t keep it for more than three days; you have to pass it on. You call me when that happens, and then I’ll come and get it. I want two phone calls; I don’t care if they’re within five minutes of each other.’ That never happened. I was hoping to knock out one of 79 neighborhoods by mapping out where the stations had traveled. But then, all of a sudden, I get a phone call, and it’s out in Eureka…”
Around the same time, local newspapers and TV stations took notice of What the Hell, and people in the county—maybe including disgruntled neighbors of the folks in Eureka with the misdelivered machine—raised an indignant howl: “Where are our typewriters?”
But Goldkamp’s funding the entire project himself. “And my truck gets like 10 miles to the gallon,” he says. “So that’s when we kicked open the PO box. So of course the people who complain about it, you send them personal messages, and they never take you up on it. No county people have used it.”
He did get a handwritten letter—“really sad, really brief”—from a boy in rural Illinois who talked about his terror of coming out. “There was another from this girl lamenting about her desperation to be loved and how the dating scene in St. Louis is killing her,” Goldkamp says. “It was very well-written.”
St. Louis definitely wants to know what St. Louis is thinking. Actually, the rest of the country would like to know, too. Both TIME and NPR interviewed Goldkamp about What the Hell last summer. He’s gotten letters from people asking how to do the same thing in their cities. And when a Hollywood movie shooting in St. Louis, The Makings of You (starring Sheryl Lee of Twin Peaks fame) discovered Henry, they cast him in the film—as a poet. His manager, Aaron Saltzman, an old friend from Tulane University who’s now based in New York, is working on a major-house book deal for What the Hell, with a predicted publishing date sometime this year.
“With everyone so invested in social media, people really do care what everyone else is thinking,” Saltzman says. “What Henry is doing is blurring those lines into something that is really physical, but that could be brought to a digital platform and harnessed that way on a much larger scale. It’s really exciting how into these ideas everyone is. I think this is where art is going—I think everyone is becoming the artist.”
The structure of the book, Goldkamp says, will be by “genres of thought. It’s like ‘St. Louis’ heart is breaking,’ ‘St. Louis is pissed off,’—or drunk, worried, whatever. I always thought that I would have to have a chapter titled ‘St. Louis is racist,’ but there’s not… Well, I haven’t picked them all up yet, so I don’t know.”
Even as he gathers up the last of his What the Hell pages, Goldkamp has already partnered with Nezam on another project. The What the Hell PO box has now become The Poetree Project’s PO box.
“What we’re doing is collecting poems from across the country, email or post, and on December 14, in the middle of winter, we’re installing them in five different groves of trees in Forest Park,” he says. “Then, on the day of the installation, we’re inviting people to come drink hot chocolate and pluck the poems from the trees. You can’t keep them. The stipulation is that if you take one off the tree, you have to mail it somewhere. We’re going to have prestamped envelopes—and a phone book.”
The idea was Nezam’s. She described it to him during their coffee meeting. “His eyes lit up, and he was so into it,” she remembers. “We knew it needed to happen in the winter because it’s a winter project—the trees need to be bare. And the color scheme, too: white sky, black trees, white paper, black ink, dark mud…just those stark contrasts. Not only is it a literary project, but it’s also a visual-art installation.”
By early November, they’d already gotten together with Forestry Division employees to find groves of sufficiently healthy trees and done test-hangs of poems in their own back yards. They held a fundraiser at Sasha’s on Shaw, auctioning off beer, chocolate, music, a tour with architectural historian Michael Allen, and even a shiny black Underwood typewriter. They passed out notebooks and asked people at the party to write poems. At 2 a.m., they drove to Castlewood State Park, where they read the poems out loud on the banks of the Meramec River, using their cellphones for light, then—when their phones died—the light of the full moon. Nezam says she doesn’t know another artist in St. Louis who’s doing what she does—except Goldkamp.
“Ultimately, what connects us and why we’re a perfect combination for this project,” she says, “is that everything that Henry and I do is really participatory and engaging other people in the artwork. I think we are both at the same point, where we want other people to make artwork. And we don’t want to just design small structures where people can engage a little bit. We want an entire community to engage: From your artwork, we’re going to make more artwork. Then we’re going to share it, and let the community interaction blossom out.”
As exasperated as Goldkamp can get with people who don’t follow directions, he still has faith in humans. When he wrote on the street, he says, he sometimes felt that people’s descriptions of what they wanted him to write were more poetic than his final poem. That feeling, in fact, may have been crucial to the genesis of What the Hell— more crucial, even, than that outrageous, scrolly text that he delighted over while nursing a hangover.
For more information, go to freshpoetrystl.org, facebook.com/whatthehellissaintlouisthinking, and facebook.com/thepoetreeproject.
