The inside/outside continuum is interesting: what’s public, what’s private—where the boundary lies between the two. Where does one side of these spaces end and the other begin? In the unhappiest city in Canada, where a sense of belonging and our community connections are weak, these questions matter.

On April 25th, my Mount Pleasant neighbours and friends Terry Plummer and Owen Plummer opened up their apartment as the first stop on the Vancouver Poetry Crawl 2015 — an inventive, silly, meaningful, and dead serious event organized and led by Vancouver poet Kevin Spenst.

The Vancouver Poetry Crawl was a day-long event involving a collective meander through Vancouver neighbourboods connecting ten venues where 18 poets read their work. Here’s the roster:

The day launched with a ukulele performance by Terry Plummer and Tara Embree who wowed us with duets from Johnny Cash to the Velvet Underground. Then the poetry started.

When we headed off to the next venue, thanks to some cohesive neighbourbood design, bike paths, and a well-planned itinerary (and no rain), the Crawl was a comfortable roll and stroll to destinations nearby. I walked with a few of the poets, following along little behind the ones biking.

Kevin had arranged the readings with all these art galleries who graciously opened up their doors to an external, seemingly unrelated, event. In these inspirational and creative settings, some poets carefully took their place in front of visual art pieces that connected to them, and their work ….

Equinox Gallery

Monte Clark Gallery

In each venue gallery visitors unaware of the Crawl became part of it, joining with us in the various spaces we inhabited, all of us becoming a bit like Readymades together. Everyone welcome, everyone integral. So, while technically in a private space – a gallery – we remained public, and open. This struck me as very interesting, because a few days prior, when Kevin was in Surrey for readings at his high school alma mater and the Surrey Arts Centre, he began a brief, impromptu reading inside the SFU Surrey atrium, where security threatened to arrest him.

Grunt Gallery

This also got me thinking about the notion of the pop-up, the new term for transitory places, for something we once called guerrilla (think guerrilla gardening and guerrilla radio), and before that Dadaism (something that today would probably be framed as disruptive, a term and concept that Dadists themselves would find repulsive).

While these three iterations of the “spontaneous” share the trait of things temporary (albeit, to varying degrees well-planned in advance), today’s pop-up tends toward the commercial in nature – where what’s proposed is something material and for sale – while its two antecedents tended to propose ideas and experiences meant to elude the permanence that acquisition suggests, challenging the very ideas, norms and values of a society organized around acquisition. As it turns out, the elder manifestations were onto something: it’s the impermanent experiences, the things that make memories (rather than the made things we buy in the material world), that bring us more meaning, and more happiness.

(Listen up Vancouver.)

The Crawl was a bit ahead of schedule, so we stopped in at the Brassneck for a quick brew. One of Kevin’s poems is titled Brassneck, and so there, in the thick of this private place, Kevin introduced the public realm—he leapt up and recited the poem to the room. He wasn’t arrested, or threatened with arrest, and he wasn’t politely shown the door. He was listened to and applauded.

With pop-ups popping up everywhere, from hotdogs to hats, some called this a pop-up poem, but not me, and here’s why: this was a freeform generosity offered to everyone there, drawing people together in a shared experience that couldn’t be bought; it gave us all a moment and a memory; something we all received, and in some ways created, together, but not something any of us could purchase and cart home to own. In this collective experience we found ourselves within a place of social connectedness, another core ingredient of happiness, and something we need here in Vancouver.

At the Grunt, one of Mariner Janes’s poems contained the line, how we fit into the city or don’t. This line resonates with me, with my interest in what makes Vancouver such a hard place to live, a place, it turns out, that’s alienating and unhappy for many. If we’re going to fit in, we need things to fit into—beyond the scope of the private enterprises of home and work. Like Terry and Owen showed us, and like all the galleries along the Crawl, and like the Brassneck did too, private spaces can also be opened to involve the public, to welcome the impromptu and the collective, blurring the lines between what’s on the outside and what’s on the inside. Or, more precisely, and more importantly, blurring the lines between who’s on the outside and who’s on the inside.

So, perhaps, initially, it isn’t so much a question of a physical space, as a psychic one—that is, one to do with the mind, spirit and soul: about an interior space that seeks to involve us and others together in an experience that connects us, and that can’t be bought. From there, might form follow function?

Full list of poets featured in this post below:

• Kevin Spenst
• Andrew McEwan
• Jennifer Z
• Shazia Hafiz Ramji
• Niki Koulouris
• Jeremy Stewart
• Jordan Abel
• Mariner Janes
• Matea Kulic

This is my response to Marcus Bowcott’s Trans Am Totem, a contemplation on what it brings to mind for me. Thanks to Bowcott for this brilliant work, and to Vancouver Biennale for bringing it to us all. Another public art coup de grâce for Vancouver.

Dear Vancouver,

I’m in Miami again, where all my family on my father’s side lives. Every time I’m here I love it, the pull of memory and family ties strong and calling. Now I’m thinking about moving, with my dual citizenship making it a real possibility. But I’m deeply Canadian, in some indescribable way, and this is a very American city. What does it all mean? Is there room for me? Room for how I live? For how I live in Vancouver? For those parts of how I live that I can’t give up? And just what is it that I can’t give up?

Biking—Maybe? Not!

Doesn’t that look like a great bike lock-up? It’s beside MOCA, beside palm trees, under the sun.

But here’s what it looks like curbside, a mere spin of the peddles away. This is what bike-riding involves here—notice the sharrows symbol painted on the pavement in the traffic lane meant for sharing? Not so reassuring, let alone inviting, with move accident vehicles from travel lanes signage right beside it. And that bike you see on the sidewalk? The person riding it arrived there by sidewalk, not via the sharrow. Unlike Vancouver, there aren’t any bike paths running alongside traffic lanes anywhere, and there are no designated bike routes nearby as alternates to busy thoroughfares either.

Metro Miami, 6,000 square miles of land hugging the Atlantic coast with about 250 days of sunshine per year, an average temperature of 25ºC, and whose mean elevation is 6 ft above sea level—a bike-rider’s paradise, right? (Climate crisis/rising sea level issues, not glibly, set aside here.) A paradise for bike-riding someday perhaps, but the city and its car culture has a long way to go before being safe for riding in. So, hauling on raingear for Vancouver’s 168 days of rain per year isn’t looking quite as bad, with biking so central to the city’s commuting culture, and made so thanks to great bike routes and a growing consciousness among automobilists to share the road properly.

Bussing it

I love riding buses and taking in the scenery, especially in a new place where all is to discover; they’re also great for people-watching and a bit of a cultural soak, as well as, obviously, great for getting somewhere.

Even the hopeful gesture of a bus bike-rack (being used!)

Cool nods to important history

Beautiful scenery

So, a great place to ride the bus, right?

But then there’s this ….

This is a commuter route! This 15 km line (about the distance of YVR to downtown) runs north/south through many neighbourhoods on its way to downtown, intersecting with a dozen connecting routes running perpendicular. (Not the only line with really restricted hours.)

This bus route is beside my aunt’s house and I use it when I’m visiting and have the leisure to plan things out around this strange schedule, but what if I lived here and needed to rely on this bus as part of my daily life?

Walking

250 days of tropical sunshine, in a flat land. Walking just make sense, and beckons. What’s there not to like?

But then there’s this: no sidewalks.

There are plenty of neighbourhoods without sidewalks, and there must be plenty with them too (not where I walked, but there must be.)

Driving, Driving, Driving

Last year, I rode my cousin’s bike (only on little neighbourhood jaunts on side streets) and took the bus everywhere. This year the bike’s broken, and I have my aunt’s car. (I don’t own a car in Vancouver so driving is always novel for me.) With public transit servicing only around 8% of the population, here’s what getting around in a car looks like. You get my drift.

The combination of no sidewalks, bad transit, and terrifying biking, forces people into cars—the antithesis of community. So, when out on foot navigating scrappy boulevards under heavenly canopies of sun and palm and birdsong, I’m the only one out walking. And because I’m the only one out on foot, when another walker once appeared, here’s what happened to me: a sense of wariness crept in. Instead of feeling any connection to this fellow pedestrian, instead of readying to nod and say hello, I froze, noticing how alone I was on a street that suddenly felt deserted and secluded—the antithesis of community.

So, Vancouver, despite your average of 197 days of rain per year, you make getting around easy. Whether I want to walk, take transit or ride my bike, I can get to where I’m going, feeling invited and considered, and connected.

Community-making requires not just the desire to be a part of something, it requires the supports that bring people together. The best place to start is where we live, right outside our front doors, in our neighbourhoods (neighborhoods), with the roads and transportation systems available and ready for us to jump on so we can all jump in.

Miami—try it, you’ll like it. And I will too. Till then, I think I’m staying where it’s easier to live the way I do—in motion in community, in Vancouver.