MAYBE IT’D BE A STAND OF TREES encircling a ground soft with pine needles, out of view of neighbors so as not to scare them, but close enough that, should danger come, there might be a witness.
That’s the kind of place George McCarthy adds to his mental inventory of where he could sleep as he travels about the city on bus and foot. Even now, a few months into living in an apartment after ten years of homelessness in South Carolina and Oregon, he scans and adds to his catalog of places he could return.
In one of my first conversations with George, he referred to a Frank O’Hara poem, and I realized I’d found a friend. While he vacillated between sleeping outside and finding a mat in a shelter, he would maintain his membership to the Portland Art Museum so he could spend hours browsing art. A nephew of NYC police officers with a strong Brooklyn accent, despite years away, he easily launches into an astute analysis of the disinvestment into federal services under Reagan, or he emphasizes the high cost of housing that drives so much homelessness.
I have the good fortune of knowing George, and the other poets I’ve collected here, because I run Street Roots, a street newspaper in Portland, Oregon. In any given week, about two hundred people sell the newspaper to earn income; in the parlance of social services, this is “low-barrier” work. People can walk in off the streets, without ID, go through orientation, and start selling the paper to get money in their pocket. About ten people join as vendors every week.
I don’t lead our poetry workshops or edit our poetry page. Instead, I experience it in the boisterous conversations between people lugging backpacks, on the scraps of paper creased with dirt, in the ground score art (the street name for items found and claimed as treasures). Poetry is, as Roque Dalton wrote, like bread. It’s like bread and coffee and socks and the many
