She’s a poet — and he or she’s at all times recognized it.
A NYC public college instructor ditched her day job to pursue her lifelong dream of changing into a bard — and now writes poems for strangers on the streets of the Massive Apple.
Shana Roark, 26, units up a desk and a 1969 Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter on sidewalks on Central Park South and in Williamsburg and sells verses on any topic for $55 a pop.
On day, she writes 30 poems and pockets $1,650.
“It’s a really beautiful experience, getting to connect with people, but also turning that connection into art,” she informed The Put up.
Roark, a local of Kentucky, taught English and particular schooling for 3 years at a Brooklyn constitution college, however was sad as a result of she was a poet at coronary heart.
“I’ve been scribbling lines in margins and on napkins since I was a kid,” she mentioned.
She started promoting poems on the streets six years in the past, establishing an indication that mentioned, “Pick a subject and a price, get a poem,” and made the gig full time two years in the past. She has since applied a flat charge of $55 for an in-person poem and $125 for these requested over textual content.
This week, Roark penned an ode to The Put up that may have made Alexander Hamilton proud.
“Headlines red like my typewriter ribbon, headlines read like these pieces of poems,” she wrote in an 18-line poem.
The in-person course of sometimes takes anyplace from 5 to fifteen minutes, she mentioned.
Many shoppers look to memorialize or have fun one thing like a birthday or marriage ceremony — or within the case of 1 little boy just lately, dinosaurs. Others go deeper.
“The other kind of poem is when they want some kind of answer,” Roark defined. “They have a question about their life or something philosophical . . . My friends joke that I’m like a therapist without all the responsibility.”
Probably the most memorable poems she wrote was for a medical pupil who confessed his worry that he was answerable for a affected person’s dying.
“We spoke for like an hour — that was something I’ll never forget,” she mentioned.
Her poems, many on love and loss, typically deliver folks to tears.
Roark has written 1000’s of poems for folks face-to-face — and even has return clients.
And once they’re not pulling up a chair, readers can subscribe to a mail order service Roark launched in 2024 referred to as The Poem Membership, which will get them a printed poem by mail for $4.99 a month.
Because of a current viral video shared on Instagram by the account New Yorkers, her subscribers shot up from 200 to over 2,000. The viral second captured an area gadfly nagging Roark for paperwork to promote her writings on the road close to Central Park.
“You can’t get a real job?” one other individual taunted her final yr. “How do you pay rent? Oh, you have a boyfriend and he pays, or mommy and daddy pay, right?” the individual continued.
Roark stopped answering and continued typing away, prompting the individual to ask, “You’re a poet and you have no words?”
“I don’t waste my words,” Roark calmly replied.
And like every New York service provider, she has overhead and complications. In two years she’s had two typewriters, each value about $240, stolen.
However she marches on.
“It’s crazy to think this little street corner turned into a whole world of poetry,” Roark mentioned. “It’s been this slow, strange, beautiful journey of turning poetry into a livelihood — and I’m grateful every day for it.”
