In the airy, third-floor “School in the Sky” classroom, George McCarthy let out a small groan that sounded a lot like exasperation.

“Oh, Ashbery,” he said as he considered a poem called “Farm Implements and Rutabaga in a Landscape.” “He’s such a pain in the ass.”

But John Ashbery’s sestina, mixing allusions to Popeye, spinach and scratching a certain region of the male anatomy, was what was on the menu at that Monday’s session of the Street Roots Poetry Workshop. McCarthy, a Street Roots vendor for nine years, pushed his pink reader glasses farther up on his nose and turned his attention to the printed handout of “Farm Implements.”

“He’s difficult,” McCarthy grumbled about Ashbery, a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur “genius” award winner who is considered one of 20^th century America’s leading poets. “He’s known for it. Trying to put much of his writing into a logical framework can drive you nuts.”

McCarthy’s assessment drew nods of agreement. Each week, a group of Street Roots vendors gathers to discuss, dissect, study and produce poetry. The workshops reflect an ongoing presence of poets and poetry in Portland’s award-winning street newspaper. Poems often appear in the weekly publication sold around town by men and women who are experiencing — or have experienced — homelessness. And last fall, a book called Flowers of the Litter: poetry of and for people living on the street, published by San Francisco-based Eye Publish Ewe, included works by nine Street Roots vendor-poets.

Mike Findlay-Agnew, chief executive of the International Network of Street Papers in Glasgow, Scotland, referred a query about comparable poetry-writing meetups at other street papers to Lindsay Calka, the managing director at Groundcover News in Ann Arbor, Mich. Calka said Groundcover does hold periodic open-mic poetry events, but “it is not ongoing, like the Street Roots poetry group.”

For Portland photographer Jim Lommasson, the weekly gatherings at Street Roots’ sparkling new headquarters at Third and Burnside in downtown Portland offered a one-stop-shopping entrée to a project he had wanted to undertake since the pandemic rearranged the city’s landscape. Lommasson and his wife spent most of the first grim year of Covid hunkered down at home. When at last, vaccinated and double-masked, he felt semi-safe venturing out, he discovered that tent settlements around town had multiplied.

Lommasson won major awards and accolades for his first book, Shadow Boxers, about the grueling and gritty world of boxing gyms. Exit Wounds: Soldiers’ Stories—Life After Iraq and Afghanistan earned similar acclaim. In 2007, Lomasson began photographing displaced Iraqi and Syrian refugees in the U.S., focusing on the objects they had managed to bring with them as they fled their home countries — and by extension, the objects and emotional connections they had left behind. That project evolved into What We Carried: Fragments And Memories From the Cradle of Civilization, in which Lommasson photographed a teddy bear, a Qur’an, a doll or some other treasured object and then invited the object’s owner to write about that item’s significance in his/her/their own handwriting, alongside Lommasson’s photo.

That project garnered national notice, with coast-to-coast exhibits, from the Oregon Historical Society to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration. Another Lommasson photo/narrative endeavor, Stories of Survival: Genocide Remembrance and Prevention, was displayed in 2023 at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.

Lommasson calls this body of work “a bridge-building project to illustrate our common humanity.” That was exactly the approach he wanted to take in documenting life on Portland’s streets.

But he knew that knocking on some random tent might not be the most effective technique. He also knew that even if the person inside that tent did agree to a photograph, Lommasson would have to return to his studio, develop and print the picture and then hope that  the person he had talked to would not have disappeared in a street-sweep or some other unhappy fate.

So, armed with a Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) grant in early 2024, he contacted several organizations that work with Portland’s unhoused population. In less than 24 hours, he received an enthusiastic email from Street Roots. Overnight, Lommasson and his iPhone camera became fixtures at the Monday poetry workshops.

what i carry at the library gallery

By early this year, Lommasson and a panel of the Street Roots poets were speaking at the opening of what i carry, an exhibit that will run at the Central Library’s Collins Gallery through March 15.

Multnomah County Library Houseless Services Coordinator Stephanie White said in a statement that the exhibit presented “an opportunity for the library to expand our understanding and further our relationships with people we might already serve each day and to be a conduit for understanding and connection throughout our community.”

Photographer Joe Cantrell, part of the standing-room-only audience at the exhibit’s opening, found himself unexpectedly moved. “It truly is a perspective-changer for the new reality in so many American cities,” he said. “I feel that we really must do a major look at Jim Lommasson’s work here. It is incredible, crucial insight.”

Of the objects portrayed in the exhibit, library official White added: “People who are housed might see this exhibit and recognize similarities of their existence with unhoused people; we all carry things that connect us to our world in a concrete way.”

Along with hand-written explanations from their owners, those objects range from George McCarthy’s compass to Bronwyn Carver’s kaleidoscope-colored socks. McCarthy, whose mother taught him to read at age 3, carries the compass in memory of his grandfather, who gave McCarthy his first compass. He calls it a part of his history and his childhood — not to mention a kind of metaphor for his occasionally vagabond life.

Carver penned a poem, “The Rain, It Pours” alongside the dry socks that she writes are “treated like commodities, openly exchanged on some fictitious homeless network—‘I’ll take three shares of dry socks!’”

Back at the poetry gathering (with dessert)

Carver has done hard time on the street, living in a tent with her cats. She lives in an apartment now, thanks to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 program that assists very low-income families, the elderly and the disabled in securing affordable housing.

Carver won her first writing award in second grade in New York City and today, churns out poems with alacrity and intensity. She also supplies the poetry group with homemade baked goods that could easily win prizes of their own. At Christmastime, for example, Carver wowed the class with a magnificent buche de Noel, the traditional (and highly elaborate) French holiday log.

Another time, she sent cheesecake aficionados to the culinary stratosphere: “I’ve never tasted cheesecake as good as Bronwyn’s, ever,” Jim Lommasson said.

While “Farm Implements” was under discussion, the 10 or so poets in the room nibbled on Carver’s mouthwatering apple fritters. Lommasson assumed his usual fly-on-the-wall presence, insisting that he gained far more by listening than he could by contributing. At the first poets’ session that he attended early last year, he said, “they started quoting from Shakespeare and the Torah. I felt like I was in an upper division literature class.”

When he heard McCarthy holding forth on which translation of Dante’s Inferno was most accurate, Lommasson decided he needed to rethink some preconceptions of his own.

“What I realized early on is that circumstance is what it is all about,” he said. “My diagram is that we inherit our software nine months before we come out the chute. After that, nature and nurture come in.”

And, as he noted, circumstances: birth order, family structure, possible neurodivergent issues that go untreated, wealth or poverty, access to education — and on, and on.

But while acknowledging that the writers in her workshop have had challenging life experiences, Katy Rossing, the group’s facilitator, said she conducts each session as if she were in a college classroom. She sets a high intellectual bar, and provides a safe space where both honesty and vulnerability are permitted. She is careful, however, never to turn her classroom into sob-filled therapy sessions.

“I have tended to bring in poems that are the crown jewels of the Western canon,” she said. “Bringing in truly excellent, widely admired canonical poetry shows a respect for their minds, and invites them to write as if they themselves are citizens of the world of poetry — literary citizens in their own right.”

As a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Michigan, Rossing was asked to design her own service-based internship program. She pitched the Street Roots creative writing/poetry program, and two years ago signed on as an intern. She never finished her doctoral thesis, but graduated to full-time Street Roots instructor. Rossing has had other experience with what are politely termed marginalized populations — she once taught in a prison in Alabama — but continues to feel a sense of awe at what transpires in her School in the Sky.

“It means a lot to me that people get on the bus on a rainy Monday morning — that maybe they have to take two buses — to read and write poetry together,” Rossing said. “To me, sometimes it takes me four or five drafts, and they rattle it off in 10 minutes. That humbles me.”

Not to get too down and dirty, but this is a cynical world where even the most refined and excessively educated souls might question the purpose of deconstructing a sestina. Put more bluntly, what’s poetry got to do with it?

“I think that asking people to do something challenging and rigorous — it is engaging with something complex, like the Ashbery poem. That they have the capacity, I think it is really enabling, in a positive sense,” Rossing replied.

The poetry workshop is a quiet place, somewhere where each person speaks in turn. Life on the streets and in shelters can be just the opposite: noisy to the point of being deafening, Rossing observed. “Just being in a quiet room can be a gift,” she said. Unhoused people can be made by the culture around them to feel disposable, whereas the poetry workshop offers a place to flex their talents. In addition, Rossing said, “the workshop provides a bit of an audience, some validation — and we all need that.”

Meanwhile, back at the School in the Sky, Ashbery’s poem remained a source of quiet consternation.

“From the first stanza, it is, like, strange,” said Wookie. His actual name is Douglas, but everyone knows him by the Star Wars nickname he has used since his childhood in Wisconsin. “The title!,” he exclaimed. “It has nothing to do with rutabagas.”

Sadie, who does much of her prolific writing in the Central Library’s Writers’ Room, summarized the conundrum outright: “What is this about?”

“Great question,” said Rossing.

Which prompted Sadie to offer her own explanation: “I think toxic relationships is what it looks like. Behind closed doors, sexual aggression. That grandfather is toxic.”

“Domestic discord, conflict,” Rossing agreed. “People who are stuck with each other.”

George McCarthy recalled how he had watched Popeye cartoons as a kid. Ashbery’s “Rutabaga” poem, he decided, “is a little, like, David Lynch-y.”

“Yeah, wow,” agreed John Beer, associate professor of English at Portland State University, when asked to weigh in on the Ashbery-as-pain-in-the-derriere dilemma. Beer, on sabbatical as he completes his own book of poetry, heralded the very existence of the Street Roots poetry group. The sestina, he pointed out, dates from the troubadours of 12^th century France. The form is fixed: six stanzas of six lines, normally followed by a three-line poetic punch line known as an envoi. Ashbery, he conceded, was a bit of a showoff, summoning this ancient format for a poem in which Olive Oyl grabs Swee’pea and declares, “I’m taking the brat to the country.”

But Beer also noted the veiled appropriateness of poems composed by troubadours for men and women who may have moved from doorway to doorway or tent to tent or city to city.

“It’s probably germane to their lives in the way that it is germane to anyone’s life — which isn’t always obvious,” he said. “Poems do on the one hand touch on the deepest problems people face. Then, on the other hand, there’s a sort of rich playfulness that poetry has.”

Poetry can seem abstruse, Beer conceded, or even effete. “But there has always been a very robust tradition of what you might call peoples’ poetry.”

Back at Street Roots, Rossing gave the poets 10 minutes to create their own sestina. More accurately, she assigned different stanzas to different poets, so the group would produce a kind of collective sestina. Some, like Sadie, demurred, preferring not to be hemmed in by the sestina format.

 Once he had finished his stanza, Wookie rolled his wheelchair over to Rossing to show her what he had written.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Rossing took a minute to study what Wookie had written. “Perfect,” she concluded, adding: “The great thing about a sestina is you know exactly where you are going.”

Here, in the 21^st century, is exactly where the Street Roots poets went in response to 20^th century poet John Ashbery, who in turn paid homage to the troubadours of 12^th-century France:

Measuring Moments in the Meadow 

(a sestina by writers at the 2/10/2025 Street Roots writing workshop)

The air was crisp after the rain

So I decided to take a walk to the library

Which is a rural one in the meadow

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But it was extremely cold out so I decided to get inside quick.

And go upstairs to the quiet room that I loved

To read the daily newspaper and eat chocolate.

Walking along the highway toward the bus eating chocolate

I could smell it in the air with the purple flowers: rain

I walked slowly in the warmth seeing this landscape  I loved

& watching the butterflies flashing yellow, writing a library

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On their wings like icing over scarlet petals…a quick

Flash of lightning and a broad sweep of rain moving across the meadow 

Oh sweet scent of meadow

Colors blend as chocolate

With which my pulse does quick

Similar to drops simple of rain

As I lay amongst books, a library

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All this I have loved.

Loved was the meadow 

In its library

Of foliage. As a chocolate 

tower loomed over them as the rain

Began to fall, they moved to shelter

As they can–quick.  

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In the dusty quiet of the library

The young girl with the quick 

Wit ran. She wanted to eat her chocolate

In peace. Which she loved

In the buzz and hum of the meadow.

In the rain.

Discarded wrapper, chocolate bar, up the steps of the library

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We never minded rain, lest left too quick, 

Lest left to love, I close my heart against the meadow.