Claremont Poet Post More Than a Spot to Find Rhymes

Four years ago, Charles Chase called police to report a theft.

Chase told them someone had taken his “poet post.”

Investigators asked Chase to state its monetary value. None, Chase replied. “Only cultural.”

Thus ended the official investigation, although Chase did recover the post after a Claremont McKenna College student responded to his offer of a $50 reward.

Beloved by some, unnoticed by others and even disdained by some sidewalk poetry critics, over the last decade or so the post in its own small way has become a local institution, forever associated with the 75-year-old Chase and the eclectic, exotic folk music store and instrument museum he and his wife, Dorothy, have operated for 32 years.

There, Chase has put up poems by anyone who wants to write them for the reading pleasure of passers-by along Yale Avenue in this eastern San Gabriel Valley college town that’s stereotypically called the city of trees and Ph.Ds.

“The poet post means that, in Claremont, culture is not dead, at least in one part of Claremont,” said regular post contributor James Pomeroy. He noted that auto rows and shopping malls loom ominously close to the bookshops, espresso bars and boutiques of the post’s home in Claremont Village. “The fact that the poet post is there is a good sign, a good omen.”

Bookstore owner Charles A. Goldsmid agrees. “It reflects something special about Claremont,” he said. “Sometimes when you read it, you get interesting, varied perspectives. Other times you walk away shaking your head.”

Frank Ellsworth, president of Pitzer College, one of the six Claremont Colleges, said: “I like the symbolism of it. It’s the world of art writ large.”

The other day, as Chase stapled up two new poems, a gentle wind mussed his long and wispy white hair. With beard, leathery, wrinkled face and brow framed in white hair, he has the 19th-Century look of one of his favorite poets, Walt Whitman.

“The poet post is not so much for the content as it is for the expression,” Chase said as the sound of someone playing a hammered dulcimer inside the store, which is chock-a-block with instruments from around the world, filtered out to the sidewalk.

No more thefts, except of poems, have occurred since Chase replaced the old post with a more secure one three years ago. A long, four-sided, rectangular box made of redwood now spins on a metal axis bolted to the storefront.

“Lots of times people see a poem they like on the post and they tear it off. That’s quite all right,” Chase said. “It’s flattery to the poet.”

For 11 years, Chase has attached thousands of poems to five incarnations of the post in front of the Folk Music Center, which he and his wife opened after they moved from their native New England.

“I’m not really critical of what the poets write, and I don’t know anything about them or their personal lives,” Chase said. “But I want them to write. They’re feeling the muse, and there’s no place they can get published or exposed except here.”

Current offerings include “Curtain Call,” a tribute to Sir Laurence Olivier. Another, about welfare mothers and crack babies, ends with the phrase: “lifestyles of the poor and infamous.”

A third begins:

He thought he was being very profound

but it was really hard to reach him.

Kind of like the oil filter in my Plymouth:

down and under and behind and back.

The idea for a post originated with Nancy Wing, a member of Chase’s Claremont poetry critique group and a founder in 1959 of the Laguna Poets, a thriving group that sponsors weekly readings and occasional festivals in Orange County. “This was something we thought of doing in Laguna and never did,” said Wing, a marriage and family therapist who writes, gives readings and sometimes has Chase tack her work to the post.

“We have readings at Nick’s Caffe Trevi once a month in Claremont,” Wing said, “but the post is there every day.”

Chase knows of no other such poetry bulletin board, although he said that, occasionally, visitors from throughout the nation and the world declare that they plan to put one up when they return home.

He is certain that the post has inspired submissions from people who have seen it on travels to Claremont. Once he got a poem from South Dakota, and an Anchorage man sent one inspired by the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill. Two lines said:

We only wanted a little oil.

Not a sewer the size of the sea.

In the store’s back room, where guitars, mandolins, violins and banjos awaited repair, Chase recently sifted through a sheaf of submissions.

Voices of the poets resonated from the pages as Chase read a line here and there. Poets mused about smog, the Chinese rebellion in Tian An Men Square, and loves lost and won.

One, signed by Capt. I. A. Coca and Scuddles, was written in longhand on brown wrapping paper. Another, about whales, was written on green-lined bookkeeping ledger paper. A poem about a black South African titled “Zantedeschia Aethiopica” (the scientific name for calla lily), was neatly typed on stationery from the Ontario Airport Hilton.

Chase said he doesn’t know or care whether the post has launched poetry careers or been the springboard for publication in poetry reviews. Many poems appear on the post anonymously. Chase himself has never submitted his poems for publication, but he did self-publish three chapbooks.

Nonetheless, poets whose work has appeared on the post say it means a great deal.

“I definitely got my start on the poet post,” said Wade Stanley, 28, of Claremont, a Cal Poly Pomona senior majoring in English. “It was the only place I could put my poems and know that people were reading them.”

Stanley said he once found a note on the post that said: “Dear Wade, Call me and I will explain the universe to you.” Stanley said, “For one moment, I thought: ‘Wow! Women are putting their phone numbers on my poem. Me and Dylan Thomas.’ But I called and she was completely against my poem.”

Regular post contributor Pomeroy, who works in a Harley Davidson motorcyle shop in Upland and at 23 wants to complete his undergraduate education so he can teach English, found a welcome audience. He lives nearby in the tract housing world of Rancho Cucamonga where, he said, poetry is not the talk of the town.

“Claremont is such a beautiful community when it comes to arts, and somewhat bohemian,” he said. “It helped me to feel included in a community where it was more likely that people would appreciate my poems.”