First, this:
Rag and Bone Poetry Tour was born from the poetry workshop that Amy Lipman and Jakob VanLammeren started in the summer of 2010, both struggling to find communities of poets in Chicago, and longing for a consistent and energizing workshop structure. We happened to meet in a bar. We have been writing, revising, and laughing together ever since.
After numerous open mics, Jakob’s featured readings at Woman Made Gallery and the Rhino Reading Series in Chicago, and our amassed and numerous rejection letters, we decided to go on the road and meet, firsthand, the community that we’ve been seeking to know through submissions and applications. We want to challenge the competition and physical distance between our poetic contemporaries and ourselves. We look to other poetry tours for inspiration—the "drive-by readings" of The Dark Room Collective, a community of established and emerging African American writers founded in 1988 and led by Thomas Sayers-Ellis and Sharon Strange; The Poetry Bus Tour 2006, organized by Wave Books, visited 50 states in 50 days which included over 100 poets and a variety of venues including the Green Mill in Chicago and a number of bookstores, galleries, bars, and prisons. The energy and passion of these tours inspire and inform our vision for the Rag and Bone Tour.
Jakob VanLammeren
I have facilitated RAWR (Radical Awesome Writers Resisting), a creative writing group for homeless and/or street-based youth at a drop-in center for 3 years. For RAWR, writing and reading poetry is rooted in community, in resistance to the oppression that the youth struggle through, survive, and celebrate every day. Poetry has saved my life too, more than once, and writing for me is both a solitary task and a collaborative journey—I need writers and readers and thinkers and radical activists and dreamers involved in my writing process.
Amy Lipman
I am interested in stories. As a theatre student at the University of Illinois, I worked with young authors in the Urbana-Champaign community to turn their stories into plays, and as a graduate, I volunteered with students at Tree House Books in Philadelphia, facilitating creative writing activities in an after school program. Most days, it was very difficult to coax a story, an image, or even a sentence from the program’s young participants. I learned for what seemed to be the thousandth time that it is difficult to tell a story. Language is at once in our own hands, and out of our reach. Now, as an art teacher to children aged 18 months through 5 years, with various capacities for spoken language with which to explain their art, I ask about the origins of imagery, of scribbles and paint stains—but who can answer why we make what we make? Sharing one’s voice and stories with a community, for the young and for the old, is of utmost importance to me. I intend to share stories through my poems, to meet other writers, to listen.
We want to make connections with other Midwest poets, to exchange information, ideas, writing. To be reminded that writing and writing life is bigger than us, that other writers inform our work. Rag and Bone Tour is about using language to connect us as individuals to larger poetic communities in the Midwest. Often we forget that our Midwestern landscapes, our seasons and their extremes, the sheer rivers and roadways that both unite and divide our state lines, are shared. We want to celebrate our region and connect with fellow writers who we might otherwise never meet. We are committed to supporting local poets and their favorite coffee shops, bookstores and reading spaces. It is crucial that we reach out to the folks who know their poetry communities and to read with at least one local poet in each town or city.
We'll be traveling to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri. We can't wait to see you.
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