Poetry on demand

NEW YORK

He’s an urban curiosity — a poet of passers-by, a vendor of verse.

With his manual typewriter outside a downtown Manhattan supermarket, William Chrome forges poems on the spot from bystanders’ requests, sentiments and dares. He does it for the creative challenge, plus the donations.

In his carbon-copied pages is a mental panorama of New York, or anywhere. Write me a poem to honor Jesus. Eulogize my dog. Celebrate my grandmother’s birthday. Win back my girlfriend.

“So you just write poems?” asks one of the persons who circle like moths, peripheral and hesitant, and perhaps proffer a word or a theme for a poem on a balmy fall afternoon.

“Not just. It’s very important work,” says Mr. Chrome, born William Curtis.

Mr. Chrome is not without compatriots, whether online or on other street corners. Reference points range from European court poets to “The Typing Explosion,” a trio of typewriter-toting performance artists based in Seattle and Los Angeles who team-write poems for an audience that chooses titles. Created in 1998, the group performed regularly until 2004 and continues occasional appearances now, says Sierra Nelson, a member who lives in Seattle.

Mr. Chrome was directly inspired by a friend — artist/poet Zach Houston, who started plying his poetic trade in the San Francisco Bay Area last year.

“I knew it would be interesting,” says Mr. Houston, 25, primarily a visual artist whose work has been exhibited at Oakland International Airport, among other places.

“I think I could respond to anyone on the level of what could be taken as poetry,” he says. “I think anybody could. If you sit down and look somebody in the eye, you’re going to get somewhere.”

Still, Mr. Chrome’s poem shop is novel enough to get quite a bit of notice in his chosen spot in Manhattan’s East Village. And so it should at a time when the acclaimed HBO spoken-word series “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry” and other “performance poetry” is yanking the venerable art form off library shelves and onto streets and stages, says Matthew Rohrer, a poet and New York University creative writing professor.

“People think, ’Poetry, oh, that’s Shakespeare and Keats in a book, and you figure out what it means.’ But that’s only one part of it,” Mr. Rohrer explains. “It’s been troubadours. … It’s been a lot of other things.”

For Mr. Chrome, it’s a way to be creative while clearing, he says, an average of about $15 to $20 an hour, about 20 hours a week. An average four-hour day produces seven to 15 poems, sometimes fetching as much as $20 apiece. A typical custom-tailored poem is finished in less than 10 minutes; ready-made ones are available for people short on time or ideas, which Mr. Chrome is not.

“It feels to me like poetry is the council in your own mind who you take your advice from, your instincts, your intuition,” says Mr. Chrome, 25.

Except for a stint in college, he has pursued an idiosyncratic education in experience and self-expression since graduating from high school in 2000 in Springfield, Va. He’s lived in New York, the San Francisco area, and Montreal. He’s made paintings and moved furniture, played guitar and had a gig helping a blind man read his mail. His poetic training consists of reading — Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings, Joyce Carol Oates.

Often abstract and by nature impressionistic, Mr. Chrome’s “spontaneous verse” might not satisfy the keepers of iambic pentameter, but that’s not to say it’s just rambling punctuated by carriage returns.

On a recent visit to the street-corner poet, Elizabeth Bernstein got a poem that incorporated money, freedom and the girl’s name Skye. It read, in part, “Clouds lick the sea level and it rises / 5 dollars fortunate and 10 dollars old.”

“I like the idea of supporting someone’s creative process,” says Ms. Bernstein, 44. “I mean, he’s not selling earrings — he’s selling his thoughts.”