Absolutely My Type

The other day I was walking around Pike Place in downtown Seattle and there, outside a store that sells rare and used books, were two guys sitting with retro typewriters on small desks.Their typewriters may have even been Underwoods, which is the brand my dad used for addressing business envelopes at home and I was immediately intrigued. I walked past, got about half a block away and went back to ask them what the heck they were doing. Well, these guys were poets-for-hire. Give them a topic or a person and they’d compose an appropriate poem. It put me in mind of stories I’d read about writers who, in old times, composed and wrote letters for people who were not literate. I suppose those people might have been comically dishonest, like the translator in Doonesbury cartoons who changed things to suit himself, but I assume it was on the up and up. And I thought about the book “The News of the World”, where a man traveled from place to place in the 1800’s and read newspapers to people in public gatherings. It was made into a movie and as much as I like Tom Hanks, I didn’t think it was as good as the book. Plus they gave the movie a different ending, and that made no sense to me at all. Though I suspect the guys I saw downtown probably had more lucrative jobs in addition to being sidewalk poets, I kind of wish I had supported them by having them compose something.

Photo courtesy loveprintedvans at Pixabay.com