Talking to Strangers - by Tommye Blount

Read Tommye Blount's account of his participation in SPACE with fellow poet Nandi Comer at a Chili's in Detroit:

Click here and scroll down to the end for video!

When the invitation to participate in SPACE: simultaneous public acts of creative expression pinged in my inbox, why did everything in me want to type No, no, never!? Just the mere word public is frightening & turns my stomach into an upturned bowl of hot porridge. I revert to the chubby kid all the schoolboys & family members would tease relentlessly, ashamed of his voice & body. Not only was I being asked to venture out into the great void of Public, but also to share my work with Public, this monster that I had thought could care less about anything I had to say, but against all reason—because I had to have been insane—I agreed to participate then ran to the bathroom.

Not only was I a wreck about the act of public performance, but the question of where to read & to whom was also a cause for stress. And then there was my mother's birthday with which I had to contend.

Every year, on or near her birthday, I make the trek across town to clear a year's worth of overgrown grass, grubs & worms from the edges of my mother's headstone. This year, I decided to read a poem there & mentioned the idea to Nandi Comer—a daring Detroit poet & dear friend—who loved the idea & asked to tag along. Of course, I took her up on the offer as I didn't trust myself to go through with it alone.

After the headstone was cleared, I read a poem, Teetering on One Foot, I Slipped, but I don't think I was reading to contribute to SPACE's goal of simultaneous public acts of expression. No, this was a more pared down act; it felt like prayer—me there in the all-too-real world trying to project my voice through the air, through the ground, in all directions, in hopes that the message somehow reaches her ear-that-is-no-longer-an-ear. In other words, I had failed the project.

Having left the cemetery, we decided on Chili's for lunch. It all happened organically: I grabbed my poems & camera along with the car keys & cell phone while Nandi tucked her poems inside a copy of Ai's Cruelty. With our strange cargo, we settled ourselves in a booth. We decided right there & then to read poems to the wait staff starting with our waitress. We ordered our food, but I could not muster the moxie to ask this stranger if she would dedicate her time to hear my simple little poems.

Nandi, without a thought, asked the waitress, Would you like to hear a poem?

Sure, let me put your order in & grab a chair, the waitress answered.

I don't know what I thought the reaction would've been, but I was sure it wouldn't be well received. When I looked up from the first poem—that for so long had made its hermitage on my computer's motherboard & inside my head—I was floored by the glint in the woman's eyes; her look of surprise.

She asked, Is there more? Is that it?

Yes, I said, there is more.

Nandi went to the bar & read her poem Bartender, her words mingled in with the sound of glasses settling against each other, the crunching of ice being scooped into a blender for one of the onlooker's El Presidente Margarita. It was as if this place—this public place—was where the words belonged all along. Although the poems didn't spark much discussion about art or big questions of that sort, it did break down whatever wall that existed between us, Nandi & I, & these people with which we've just shared a piece of ourselves.

Over the course of this experience, I have been thinking a lot about the way artists—particularly poets in Detroit—use the phrase art or poetry for the people. It is one thing to read one's work before an audience seated in carefully placed rows of chairs or to have one's work sprawling the pages of some gorgeous volume shelved in a Borders store for a reader willing to reach & pay, but it is quite another to lay ones work out in the open on a lunch table between a plate of Wings Over Buffalo & Southwestern Egg Rolls before a stranger leaning in closer, wanting to hear every word as if it was important, as if it could save her life. When I told that bartender my name, she looked at me as if she knew me & said, I have a brother named Tommy.