It makes so much sense that a café named Ezra’s Pound should sport a vending machine that dispenses poems. Installed last month, Toronto Poetry Vendors is a repurposed gum machine that pumps out poems by 10 local writers for $2 apiece.
Curious, I fed a toonie into the slot and out popped “Grave Mistake” by Stuart Ross. Café regulars were a bit excited to see me photographing and using the machine. “Does it work?” asked one. “I thought it was an art piece,” remarked another.
When I showed them my poem they seemed impressed, if not necessarily by Ross’s work, then at least by the fact that the machine performs as advertised.
The brainchild of writers Carey Toane and Elisabeth de Mariaffi, the first two TPV’s were unveiled at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library and Type Books in April to coincide with poetry month. The third “permanent” machine was installed at Ezra’s Pound last month and is currently dispensing poems by Ross, Toane and de Mariaffi, as well as by Kevin Connolly, Dani Couture, Andrew Faulkner, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Jenny Sampirisi, Meaghan Strimas and Paul Vermeersch.
Toane and de Mariaffi have also created a mobile machine, which they inaugurated at last weekend’s Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market at Clinton’s Tavern. Watch for it again July 8 at The Scream Literary Festival’s Bureaucracy Night.
TPV operates “exactly like a poetry journal,” explains de Mariaffi, “it’s just a different format. Twice a year we’ll publish 10 new poems and the poets are told up-front exactly what they’ll be paid and in what time frame.”
“So far we haven’t applied for, or received, any grant funding, this is just something Carey and I did off the cuff, out of our own pockets. Aside from paying the poets, we’d love to recoup some of our capital costs before we invest in any more machines, but I could probably place three machines right now just based on the interest we’ve had so far.”
Click through to read Stuart Ross’s “Grave Mistake” . . .
Grave Mistake
after Ngaio Marsh
I concluded
the sack.
A formal letter replied,
throwing his chair.
I jibbed his voice
with cool storage.
Your telephone
saw you talking.
Oh, good.
Because, darling.
I’m a squeak,
a wheel.
Tell her
what I mean
and put it
in the desk.
By Stuart Ross, Copyright 2010
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