Troupe uses Kickstarter to fund tour

Most people don’t go around spilling their most intimate ideas and secrets to anyone who will listen.

But six poets from Pittsburgh are doing just that as they tour the country reading and making poetry in every coffee shop, bookstore and library that will have them.

Line Assembly, a group of poets that met in college and reunited to go on tour, made a stop Tuesday night to share their work at Boxcar Books.

“This stuff isn’t meant to be kept in a book somewhere on a shelf,” Adam Atkinson said. “We want to make poetry public, get people thinking about it.”

As writers, Atkinson said they definitely didn’t earn their tour funds on their own. They applied for help from Kickstarter, a program that helps fund creative projects.

It worked, and one van and almost $19,000 dollars later, Line Assembly was on the road, traveling state to state, holding poetry slams and free workshops almost daily.
Their session at Boxcar was their 24th event in 18 days.

“We’re exhausted, but I feel amazing having shared my poetry, some of it for the first time,” Atkinson said.

Despite having been a student in dance and theatre for most of his life, Atkinson said reading poetry to an audience was the first time he experienced stage fright.

“It’s different because the personal nature of it,” he explained. “It’s easy to feel like if people dislike my poem, they dislike me.”

On the bright side, he said criticism can breathe life into something that’s not as good as it can be.

“I used to be afraid of it, but now I crave it,” Atkinson said. “It’s the best feeling in the world to be in conversation with my peers about what I’m feeling, what I want to say and how to say it.”

But he said being poetic isn’t always about a careful selection of words.

“Poetry isn’t just what’s read aloud or written down,” he said. “It’s the things people say in casual conversation, the jokes they tell. Everyone has their own way of speaking. To me, that counts as poetry because you’re constantly creating a message, and are conscious of different ways to relay it.”

He said their audiences have been large, small, old and young, but all have been eager to discover the poet within themselves.

“Some of the stuff you hear is out of this world,” Atkinson said. “And they’ve never even tried it. We just provided the push.”

Topics ranged from the Super Bowl to snacks to sex.

But Atkinson pointed out that the poems weren’t necessarily inspired by those things.

“Talking about the inspiration behind my work makes me a little uncomfortable,” Atkinson said. “It’s a bad assumption that a poem is the result of being inspired, good or bad. Sometimes a poem is just a person’s way of sorting through curiosities. It’s my means of asking life questions.”