Pass It On

Dear Cass
I love the poem and I love you. You’re awesome and I miss you. Hope to see you soon. Call Dad to get our number I would love to have you visit me at my new house.

Love
Tim

I’m still talking.

There’s a lovely story in today’s New York Times — about Suzanne Vega’s current husband. Check it out. You’ll like it.

A Lawyer, a Poet, and a Love Rekindled
By JIM DWYER

Paul L. Mills recited poems on the street and in clubs for 10 years, then vanished.

He had been, he said, a “James Dean-esque Lord Byron” who helped relight the ancient custom of spoken-word poetry. The job also helped him meet and date glorious women.

Then he was gone.

Not from himself, of course: he was still right there in the mirror. But Mr. Mills dropped out of New York sidewalk poetry, went to law school in California and became a trial lawyer in Los Angeles.

One day a few years ago, he Googled himself — his earlier self, the young street poet who went by the name Poez — and found a generous, appreciative entry on a Web site. The title, however, would frost the loins of any soul who had reached midlife.

“Whatever happened,” the headline asked, “to Poez?”

The question sent him into an orbit: Paul Mills, in his 50s, circling the memory of an uncreased Poez at 27; the lawyer, living alone in California, drawn back to the young poet who had stopped one autumn afternoon in a doorway, held his breath and kissed an unknown singer named Suzanne Vega.

“She could have backed out, but she let the chance of escape slip away, and the next thing, my lips were right there,” he remembered. “I kissed her, and she kissed back, a little.”

In the end, though, he gave up waiting for her to say yes to his marriage proposal. She became famous and married someone else. He did neither.

Earlier this week, as Mr. Mills, now 57, walked down West Fourth Street and stopped at the corner of Jones Street, he explained how the question — whatever happened to Poez? — propelled him back to New York.

The answer begins with his invention of Poez three decades ago, after years of scheming to memorize poems and recite them in public. He made a poetry menu listing his own work and some classics. On a shirt cardboard, he advertised poems for 10 cents apiece. When he finally stepped out to perform for the first time, he froze. Then he bargained with himself: just display the sign for 10 minutes. With time nearly up, his first customer arrived. He wanted an Emily Dickinson.

“I’m nobody,” Paul Mills said, speaking his first words as Poez. “Who are you? Are you nobody too?”

The man left without paying, but not before telling him the sign was too small and 10 cents was too little. People would think there was a hidden charge. Poez instituted a pay-what-you-like policy. He redrew his sign on a window shade, handy for a quick roll-up and getaway.

The summer of 1977 was a perfect moment at West Fourth and Jones Streets.

“The sidewalks were packed,” he said. “At the corner — jugglers, stilts, fire eaters. I’d have to come here at 8 p.m. to get a good spot.”

Then one night, someone in a third-floor window on Jones Street pelted his audience with eggs. People scattered, except for Allan Pepper, an owner of the Bottom Line, who invited Poez to perform. Mr. Mills thrived, at least on the starvation scale of poets. He shared a place on Clinton Street for $75 a month. He met a bunch of women who were writing songs.

At the Cornelia Street Cafe, he read a poem, “Spontaneous Combustion,” about a short, intense relationship he’d had with one of them. As he left, another songwriter, Ms. Vega, came out to praise it. They made a date and went to a museum, then walked up to Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway — which Ms. Vega would render as “Tom’s Diner” in a hit song. Along the way, he took his chance and kissed her. Eventually, he asked her to marry him. She didn’t answer. They broke up. He went to California.

“We were sporadically in touch,” he said. “Just enough to have misunderstandings.”

By 2005, Mr. Mills, the lawyer, tried to figure out if there was an audience for Poez in New York. He posted a message on Suzanne Vega’s Web site, using her old address as the subject matter, to catch her eye. “I have a not very exciting personal question to ask you,” he wrote. “Is this a good way to reach you?”

It was. She told him where he might perform. She was divorced. “A more feverish set of e-mails would be hard to imagine,” he said. Four months after he wrote to her, 23 years after he first proposed, they married. He moved back to New York, performed a show at the Bowery Poetry Club last month, and published a book called “The Poetry Dollars.”

And that’s whatever happened to Poez (poezthepoet.com), and Paul L. Mills.

I came to read your words for the first time when my then ‘internet love’ sent me a CD with the song Broken on it saying how much he admired the women that wrote and performed the song and how the song reminded him of me. I read the words and listened and cried for a long time as my heart and soul had been beaten to a pulp. The boy and I finally met and fell in love in real life and made our home happy and found true joy in one another. We came to see the band play and I heard it live , Broken and even though I was pasted back together this time with superglue, I still cried hearing it live and seeing these great ladies perform. A few months later despite the odds I was given, we found we were to be parents. This baby was a tough one, we knew, and would be strong, and smart and beautiful. We struggled with names. It seemed none would fit. The day we found the baby was a girl, we found her name. We named her Cassidy. We knew with a strong name like that she would overcome the odds not just as the being that was inside me, but as a girl and a woman. We hope that she’s as smart, strong and beautiful as you when she grows up. Thank you for writing. Thank you for singing. And thank you for being.
(PS – i am sorry if this is way mushy, but i just felt so emotional after reading the post!)