[sustran] Fwd: [chilebookclub] urban verse from the southern cone

[Lake Sagaris]

Perhaps we should all be starting this sort of movement? Or at least the 
writers amongst us (there seem to be a lot of writers involved in transport 
for some reason...)

Best,
Lake

Lake Sagaris
Living City - Ciudad Viva
Santiago, Chile

Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 08:42:04 -0300
>Subject: [chilebookclub] urban verse from the southern cone
>
>Homemade Honku (see below)
>
>======
>Car alarms
>pierce my ears.
>Chile's national anthem.
>++++++++++++
>
>And my own coinage: a Smonku:
>
>The Andes, invisible.
>smog lifts, but not the highrises
>
>
>=============
>Egging on urban poets (from NYTimes)
>
>The honking of horns, as anyone who has tried to get more than a few
>consecutive minutes of sleep in New York will testify, is one of the city's
>most widely enjoyed communal pastimes. But Aaron Naparstek has had enough
>of it.


>On one occasion, the 31-year-old website developer approached the open
>window of a 4x4, waited for the driver to finish honking, offered a polite
>"excuse me" and then yelled "Ho-o-o-o-o-o-onk!" in his face. (The response
>was blind fury.) Then a few months ago he snapped and threw three eggs from
>the window of his Brooklyn apartment on to the windscreen of a car honking
>loudly below. But the driver threatened to kill him. So, nobly, he chose
>the path of non-violence. He started writing anti-honking haiku verses -
>honku, he called them - and taped them to local lampposts:
>
>  Oh, forget Enron
>The problem around here is
>All the damn honking
>
>"Then this really weird thing started happening," Naparstek says, as we
>stroll down his street in the Cobble Hill district. "All these other haiku
>started appearing that I hadn't written." Naparstek's section of Brooklyn
>is now covered in anti-honking poetry, written by everyone from scary
>environmental activist types to militant revolutionaries:
>
>  Patience slowly fades
>Residents stock up their eggs
>
>That day is coming soon. Inevitably Naparstek has started a website -
>www.honku.org - and now people from across the country send him news of
>their own anti-honking campaigns. Poetry, it turns out, can change the
>world after all (if you've got enough Sellotape).
>
>Then, just recently, anti-anti-honking haiku started to appear, taped up by
>locals who thought Naparstek should stop worrying about honking and start
>worrying about starving children, say, or war in the Middle East instead.
>Naparstek has an answer for that. "Stop me if this is too tenuous," he
>says, "but they talk about the violence in the Middle East like it's a
>force of nature, like it's beyond our control. But actually it's kind of
>like the honking - the violence is man-made. If we can figure out how to
>stop honking on Clinton Street, I think we could learn some things that we
>could use on a macro level." He pauses for a moment. "I told you it was
>tenuous."