Slow Food, Fast Poems
Finding the Write Words at the Farmers Market
Their poetry is part of the nourishment that is the currency of a farmers market: a creative exchange, food for the spirit and the soul.
When the beautiful bounty of the farmers market weighs you down, when you haven’t room in your bag for another bundle of parsley or basket of berries, there’s one more stop. Visit the typewriter poets and collaborate on an original hand-crafted literary creation that may actually lighten your load. Witness it composed on the spot on a vintage manual typewriter, and add embellishments (washi tape, stickers) to complete the tiny, colorful, mixed-media manuscript. Carry on, uplifted.
Simon Kiefer, a retired city planner, began by typing love letters on State Street after 2020. It started out an intense one-on-one process—deeply satisfying but time-consuming. He shifted to poetry, recognizing that while his format changed, “these are impromptu poems that, nearly every one of them, is about the subject of love. It can be the love for a partner or a parent or a child or a dog, but they’re all about this notion of love. Even when the poem is for the [requesting] person themself, it’s an aspect of love—it’s people looking for confirmation or affirmation or assurance that they’re gonna be OK.”
Soon, his wife joined him behind the folding table at the Tuesday farmers market. Karenina Manpearl, a labor and delivery nurse at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, met Simon contra dancing in 2006. She recalls “it was an act of love, Simon inviting me to type poetry with him, because I was having such a hard time after my dad died. My experience of writing the poems is similar to my experience of nursing, and to my experience of contra dancing. I feel like I am beaming the person in front of me with love, like I’m calling on the muse to speak through us, to make whatever people need come through us. When I’m contra dancing, I’m often beaming people with love. As a nurse, it’s what I do. Like, ‘How can I just love and support this person with what they need?'”
For Simon, the process “is an exercise in paying attention.” People tell him what they want in their poems, “but I’m also getting visual cues about how they present themselves in the world. You can read all sorts of things nonverbally. I pay attention to all of that, and then I just get my ego out of the way and I let the words flow based on what I’m hearing and seeing. My goal is for them to be seen, to feel that I’ve really witnessed them.”
Their poetry is part of the nourishment that is the currency of a farmers market: a creative exchange, food for the spirit and the soul. “We are locally grown,” says Karenina. “We produce it in front of us, in front of the buyer. It is organic.” Their promise of “no AI” parallels the “no GMO” on their neighbors’ signs. Their poetry is part of the nourishment that is the currency of a farmers market: a creative exchange, food for the spirit and the soul.
Another link with the edible wares of the farmers market: “We have in good confidence learned that most of our poems live on refrigerators around town,” says Karenina. “Yes!” Simon laughs. “Folks are shopping at the market for things that go on the inside and outside of their refrigerators. One time I actually wrote a poem about someone’s love FOR their refrigerator.”
Once a week, on vintage typewriters, they cultivate connection, creativity and love, “so nourishing to people and so needed in our digital age,” says Karenina.
Find Simon Kiefer and Karenina Manpearl at the Downtown Santa Barbara Farmers Market on Tuesdays and occasionally on Saturdays. You can also hire them for events such as weddings, birthdays and retirement parties. For more information, see their website at Typewriters Unlimited.
