Poetry on Demand with Adam Grabowski

Go On Bewilderment. Adam Grabowski Attack Bear Press (2020)

Adam Grabowski, aka the typewriter poet, will be banging out poems on a manual typewriter, handing them back to the curious passerby, at the Poetry on Demand table at the Northampton Book Fair.

Rather than asking for a topic for a poem, Grabowski writes based a single word prompt: anything from serendipity to sailboat, androgyny to cataplexy. He takes about 15 minutes to compose the poem. "It is a collaboration between the word given to me and where I am emotionally that day," the poet says.

The poet uses carbon paper to make a copy of each poem he writes. After handing over the original, he keeps the carbon for himself. Over years, Grabowski collected a large set of these spontaneously written poems, the best are available, exactly as they were written, with no edits or modifications, in a chapbook that he designed. The covers are a testament to the old Scribner's editions of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The only change is the triggering word is emboldened in each of the poems.

"It is all about close encounters - about two humans meeting in the moment," he says. There is no set price for the poems, just a tip jar. "People pay what it is worth to them," Gabrowski says, "Anything from $10 to $100." People reactions very widely, from a simple thank you, to a blank stare, to handwritten letters of appreciation.

The first typewriter poem in Go On Bewilderment prompted by the word: celestial

Between 2018 and 2020, Grabowski collaborated with Attack Bear Press on their “Poetry on Demand” series, writing poems on a borrowed typewriter & handing them back to the curious passerby. What emerged from these sessions took everyone by surprise—poems of remarkable depth and nervous wit, improvisatory in tone, but fully realized. Go on Bewilderment, published by Attack Bear Press in 2020, gathers 16 of the best poems from these sessions into a chapbook. Composed in public and in dialogue with a single word (“Robinhood,” “celestial,” “gently”)—nothing in Go on Bewilderment has been revised, the poems reprinted based on the original carbon copies.

Adam Grabowski

Grabowski poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Whale Road Review, , jubilat,, and OVERSOUND, as well as the anthologies What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Rage in the Age of Trump, and Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism.

He is an associate poetry editor for The Maine Review and a past recipient of a Parent-Writer Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Adam has led workshops for the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop, Mass Poetry, and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance on topics including the intersections of poetry and photography, radical revision, and the art of the postcard poem.

Grabowski is currently working on a chapbook Life Model, a collection of poems which focuses on the concept of the human body. (The poet has a side gig as a figure model). Grabowski says he, "writes, publishes, reads, and teaches whenever he can, always living in language."

Come meet Grabowski and see what he has to offer at the Northampton Antiquarian Book, Ephemera, and Book Arts Fair on Friday, November 21st, 5 -8 pm and Saturday, the 22nd, 10am - 4pm in the Community Arts Trust at 33 Hawley Street. 

For advance tickets and fair information: click here