Antoine Scott thought a panhandler was on the bus. Then he heard verse — and wondered why the reciter was brandishing a shoe.
This was no ordinary bus ride. In the end, it made sense — and, Scott said, an impact.
Scott was one of a half-dozen riders on the 10:43 a.m. bus Saturday from Lighthouse Point to the Green.
Deborah Elmore was on the bus, too. She was reciting her poetry. (Click on the play arrow to watch a sample.)
Elmore was one of five artists in Exact Change, a performance on wheels organized by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven in partnership with CT Transit. It placed performers on five buses traversing different routes throughout the city.
Elmore, who also is president of the women’s support group Sisters With a New Attitude (SWANA), has been writing and reciting for a decade at many venues. Her work is inspirational and recovery-oriented. (Click here to read a previous article about the group.)
“Many of my poems derived from my struggle,” she said, “with substance abuse.”
While she’s conquered that, Elmore said, she does still have a little problem with motion sickness. This was the first time she’d ever been asked to recite on a moving vehicle.
However, she was not only game. She bought props and two friends to help her dramatize her verse. For example, when she read “Walk in My Shoes,” she brandished a big loafer, like a metronome, accompanying the description of her journey of recovery.
When Elmore read “Rocky Road,” which she described as a “distress call for help,” she dramatized the conceit, which was a phone call, by hoisting a cell phone to her ear.
Antoine Scott (pictured) was a little disoriented when he first got on the bus. “I honestly thought it was someone trying to panhandle,” he said.
Then he listened a little more and it came into focus that this was a performance. However, why, he wondered, if it was a performance, would the reader interrupt the recitation to take a phone call?
Then Scott, who had read an advertisement about Exact Change, realized that the call was a conceit and part of the performance. Then he enjoyed it, and more. The thread of the poem is Elmore’s calling to a friend to give her strength to resist lapsing again into drug use. “That poem,” said Scott, “was realistic and dramatic. It had a real impact.”
Scott drives a limo in New Haven, he said, and feels that he would be comfortable with more poetry being read on buses. “But,” he also cautioned, when people got on the bus “they should be aware so there’s no initial adverse reaction.”
Elmore’s last poem, which she read as the bus moved through Wooster Square, was “Meeting of the Moms.” That’s also the name of a group within SWANA of women stepping up to address violence. Here are the beginning and concluding stanzas:
People need to understand
That toting a gun does not make you a man.
Where do we start and what do we do?
It starts right here ‚with you, you, and you.
How did Elmore feel by journey’s end? “I do better if I’m not moving,” she said modestly. However, she added. “I did have impact on one rider. I’d do it again.”
Elmore even suggested that next time it might be interesting to have not one poet, but a busload of poets. Instead of one featured writer like her, poets could read, she said, “from seat to seat.”
Shari Caldwell, a dancer who accompanied Elmore as this year’s coordinator of Exact Change, said she was a little dubious. If the bus were full of poets, Caldwell said, CT Transit might be concerned there’d be no room for passengers. A poetry-powered bus, she said, is an idea worth putting on the table, maybe for a separate program
The four other performers participating in this, the third year of Exact Change, were: Lansana Toure’ and Mabinty Keira of the percussion and dance group Les Merveilles D’Afrique; bunraku puppets courtesy of the New Haven Theater Company; the Yale-based Viola Question, an improv group; and musicians and artists from the jazz, hip-hop, and soul group Urban Concept.