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Short Order Poems gains momentum as H&8th comes to a close this year
BY Jessica Valentine | Photos By Emily Brashier
The sun starts to set over Oklahoma City’s growing skyline as buildings and street lamps light up the liveliness of Midtown. The north Hudson Avenue and N.W. 8th Street intersection starts to bustle with locals greeting one another and sipping espresso outside Elemental Coffee. The H&8th Night Market has officially kicked off its monthly celebration as the late, summer humidity lingers among a seemingly endless row of food trucks.
As people navigate to the COOP Ale Works tent for ice-cold beer, what really catches the eye is a table lined with silvery blue and seafoam green vintage typewriters, surrounded by stacks of parchment paper. But the men and women taking their seats behind the typewriters are not there to appraise antiques. These are the poets of Short Order Poems, who stand ready to create personalized poems for visitors at H&8th. Short Order Poems is exactly as it sounds: a group of poets who serve poems after customers fill out a menu of their chosen topic. These talented individuals can “cook up” a poem on the spot sometimes as quickly as the nearby food trucks serve their specialties.
Chad Reynolds and Timothy Bradford, the creators behind Short Order Poems, are nearing the end of their second season with H&8th and have watched their endeavor increase considerably since beginning in 2014. Now the group has about 30 local and regional guest poets who loan their creative talents at any given H&8th. Reynolds is an insurance broker by day and Bradford is a visiting assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, but both are poets at heart who have published poetry and share a penchant for language aesthetics. One day, after talking over a cup of joe at Elemental Coffee with the festival’s creator, Brian Bergman, Reynolds and Bradford were given the green light to set up their poetry table in front of the coffee shop.
“It was really fortuitous because we’ve tried it at other places and it generates some interest, but nothing like this,” Bradford relates. “Right now we write about 40 to 60 poems a night.”
So with H&8th, now comes poetry, and it’s proving to be a huge success at the popular Oklahoma City food truck festival.
“Short Order has really grown this season. Now we’ll likely be able to send different writers out in the community to do poetry at different events, just because we’ve generated so much name recognition now,” Bradford says.
Short Order has also written poems at events such as deadCenter Film Festival and Art Moves in Oklahoma City. This October holds more expansive opportunities for the unique group, such as attracting prestigious Chicago poet, Kathleen Rooney, who will be a guest poet this month at H&8th.
“Of course this is all really exciting to us and other people in the poetry world,” Bradford relates. “These people who attend H&8th whom we write poems for, don’t know any of these names, but we’re hoping to change some of that.”
Reynolds, in particular, is interested in sharing poetry and typewriting education in public schools. He picks up a flyer he was given earlier at the festival from The Foundation for Oklahoma City Public Schools. His eyes light up as he describes a documentary film about typewriters being brought back into classrooms.
“It’s a neat, novel idea with a really cool old machine that these kids don’t see,” Reynolds says.
After all, wouldn’t you rather receive a poem hot off a vintage typewriter rather than a modern word processor? You can feel the energy behind Reynold’s passion for the nostalgic source of poetry as he describes the different typewriters on their table.
“That’s a Hermes 3000. That came from eBay,” Reynolds says. “It’s made in Switzerland, 1965.”
As the night progresses, the Short Order line gets longer. A variety of people come to see what the typewriters table is all about and fill out poem menus with a colorful range of requests. One request in particular seems to stand out. Almost 10 minutes later, guest poet, Jonathan Stalling, hands a scroll tied with a vintage string to an older man who walks slowly toward a resting place behind the poets’ table. The man unrolls the scroll to reveal his poem. It reads: “Late sun falls through trees. No birds, dark green leaves. Years pass, she’s still here. Day breaks yet we grieve.”
Stalling, a University of Oklahoma English professor who is fluent in the Chinese poetry style, Jue ju, has written Tom Hohn a beautiful poem about his wife who passed away only one week ago.
“We had a green funeral for her. We were married for 65 years,” Hohn says as he looks up at the night sky. “She was a Grecian beauty.”
After his wife’s death, he made the decision to move from Wenatchee, Washington to Oklahoma City to be with his family. It’s Hohn’s first time to attend H&8th. It’s easy to see that it he will cherish this poem forever.
“Poetry derives its power from ordinary people and ordinary things,” Reynolds says. “We’re putting it in places where people don’t expect it to be. We are just trying to capture that energy and reflect it back to people in a way that inspires them and shows them the power of language.”
To keep up with Oklahoma City’s poetry scene after H&8th is over this month, check out shortorderpoems.tumblr.com or facebook.com/shortorderpoems.
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