Writers of New York great and small

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1 Style Blog Writers of New York great and small By Ron Charles June 1 Actress Mindy Kaling attends BookExpo in New York on Friday. (Photos by Ron Charles/Washington Post) Friday afternoon at BookExpo America, the annual publishers convention in New York, the security guys in black T-shirts seem ready to give up. The crowd waiting to glimpse actress Mindy Kaling is not going to move back.

2 If you re not press, one thick-necked guard announces, you need to clear this area in front. The better behaved attendees form a line that snakes around the Javits Center and ends somewhere in the Hamptons. Brad Meltzer s signing officially ended six minutes ago, but the bestselling thriller writer looks trapped at the desk in front of an electronic poster for Kaling s upcoming essay collection, called Why Not Me? That s a question he must be asking himself as fans keep swelling around him. When the star of The Mindy Project finally appears, she s cool and relaxed before a field of raised iphones jostling for better sightlines. For the next hour, she will sign hundreds possibly thousands of little samplers of her book, which Crown Archetype is publishing in late September. Meltzer poses with Kaling and then dissolves into the crowd, only to reappear again outside the convention center on a Mao-sized billboard looming over the bus lanes. His bespectacled eyes as large as Doctor T.J. Eckleburg s are the final thing I see of BookExpo, where I ve spent the last 48 hours hobnobbing with publishers and publicists. I meet my younger daughter in Greenwich Village. We buy dark-chocolatecovered pineapple popsicles and wander over to Washington Square Park. I begin to think I might survive this trip after all. A woman in a taffeta princess costume sits among dozens of homemade pigeons and rats that she is trying to sell, which betrays a poor understanding of supply and demand.

3 Poet Bill Keys in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Next to her is a gray-haired man named Bill Keys. Sitting on a little stool, he s pecking on an old Corona typewriter. From his tray hangs a cloth banner that reads: Poems about Anyone or Anything. Suddenly, trying to sell rats and pigeons in New York seems comparatively savvy. Keys, 51, started writing poems in 2001, around the time he lost his job as a tour guide in San Francisco. Contrary to what you may have heard, the life of a street poet is not easy. Or lucrative. He s spent time living in his van. There was a brief, horrible stint in a homeless shelter. He wrote thousands of poems on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colo., but it was unstable work. His career finally started to rhyme last year, when he won

4 a $5,000 grant from the Elevations Credit Union in Boulder. The money allowed him to move back to New York. Then earlier this year, he managed to get a place in Artspace PS109, a residence complex in Harlem for artists. Tens of thousands of people applied for fewer than 100 slots. Keys got a completely rehabbed studio apartment for $494 a month. It was, he says, the greatest thing that s ever happened to me. Now he writes in Washington Square, on the High Line and at subway stops. He s available for wedding receptions and parties. His photo on Humans of New York received more than 36,000 likes. He s composed over 6,000 poems for people who are dying and for babies in the womb. Bill Keys reading a new poem in Washington Square. I relate to language viscerally, so I don t have to think about it, he says. It s the heart of a performer. All of this stimulation gives me the sense that I m on point. When I m home alone, that s when I become distracted. Crayfish have this surprising knack for survival that they depend on: If they don t hear the sounds of the landscape, they become disoriented. The soundscape is a web of familiarity so that what s strange becomes obvious. That s the way it is for me.

5 He asks my daughter a few questions about her work as a dancer in New York; then he rolls a half sheet into the Corona and begins composing. He stops frequently to pull the black ribbon along to an inkier stretch. The 3/4 key on his typewriter is about half broken. But that doesn t come up much in my poems, he says. My daughter and I wait quietly for a few minutes. Then he stands and reads our new poem, Dance, in his deep, furry voice: It all started with a lump of breathing clay swirls and eddies the splashes and gushes of the heart wind and water and a body warm as sunlight. He s working on a book, but he doesn t have a publisher. I m just going to publish it myself, he says. Maybe I still have BookExpo too much on my mind. No, don t do that, I tell him. You have a great story here. Somebody will want this.

6 Dance, by Bill Keys, composed May 29, 2015, in Washington Square Park. Ron Charles is the editor of The Washington Post's Book World. For a dozen years, he enjoyed teaching American literature and critical theory in the Midwest, but finally switched to journalism when he realized that if he graded one more paper, he'd go crazy.