“If this is not love, I don’t know what is.”

“POEMS: your topic, your price, about anything, donation.”

Name your subject.  Then, a poem emerges from “the crisp click-clacking of Zach Houston‘s lima-bean green, Swiss-made, Hermes Rocket portable typewriter … amid the bustle on the sidewalk.” The 28-year-old Houston sits on a folding chair he has set up, usually outside the Ferry Building in Oakland, but often elsewhere in the Bay Area.

He calls his project “poemstore.”

He’s written poems for Gavin Newsom, Joe Montana, Steve Martin and even the staff of Oscar de la Renta. He’s been featured on the CBS Evening News and Charles Osgood.

“Hey, want a poem?” Houston offered passers-by last weekend on an unusually warm San Francisco winter day. “Hi there, how ’bout a poem? You look like you need a poem!” Some stopped. Some didn’t. Nearly everyone smiled at the scruffy-faced guy in a black baseball cap with an infinity symbol on the front. Others approached just to view the anachronistic device on his lap, thinking it to be some sort of ancient musical instrument.

“It’s my job,” he says.  It’s been his only job since 2007.  “If this is not love, I don’t know what is,” he says.

You can read about him in the Oakland Tribune‘s Valentine’s Day article here.  Or catch up with him on his own minimalist website here.  Or write him at poems@zachhouston.com

(Hat tip, David Sanders.)

Author: Cynthia Haven

Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year. Join me at twitter: @chaven View all posts by Cynthia Haven