Saturday, April 22, 2006

Jacob Christiano, Poet

I loved this story by Lane DeGregory in the St Petersburg Times online.


'The poems appear on city sidewalks, written in pastel chalk. Words of love bloom outside a chocolate shop; verses about the rain emerge beside a nail salon.

Every letter is precise, as if a human typewriter click-clacked Courier Bold characters across the concrete:

I saw you today

How beautiful you looked,

Lost in the distance

Of so long a silence.


Each line has its own hue: butter yellow, mint green, orange sherbet. The colors spill across 10 feet of sidewalk.

He signs the poem, adds a fake copyright symbol above his fake name.

So who is he really, you ask. Why the veil of secrecy?

The poet smiles. He looks to the sky. Again, he gives a sideways answer:

"T.S. Eliot said,'the more perfect the artist, the more separation there will be between the man who suffers and the art he produces.'

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