My Artistic Friends Over the Years Part 17: Dallas, Beverly and Amanda

    There was a poetry group, which met at Borders, every week. I copied dow a couple go my poems and went to one of there meetings.  There was a young woman, college age, facilitating it at the time I first went. went She sadly died and the group was taken over by and the grip was taken over by Dallas Kirk Gantt.  He drove a Dart bus, but certain days of the week he took poetry to the prison inmates.  He later wrote a box about his adventured driving city bus. 

      

         He was a respected and colorful Wilmington Poet and became the editor of Poetry Vortex, which took a loot of my poems over the last twenty years.

        Here is an excerpt from an article he wrote in Dreamstreets Magazine a  number of years ago.

        

For years, Herbie the paperboy wandered the streets of Wilmington hawking his papers. He was a little, white-haired, leprechaun kind of fellow. His distinct nasal cry of: “Paper! Paper!” preceded him as he shambled through the downtown business district with a News Journal held aloft. (He’d sell old batteries, lighters, a bent screwdriver here, a well-worn pair of pliers there, and other castoff things that he’d find in the street in his wanderings.) He was an anachronism, holding to an old trade, in the face of news-stands, home delivery and coin-operated paper boxes.

He never bothered anyone, but he had a fearful worried look about him. He wore the same, disheveled clothes, with his worn pants perpetually tucked into his socks. Urban Legend’s undying rumor had it that he carried his life savings around with him because he didn’t believe in banks.
He kept it in his socks. He was mugged often enough, so some of the ugly souls obviously believed it. Everyone knew him. He was a fixture on the streets for years . . . and then he was gone.

     At our meetings we would read our works.  In the photo at the beginning of this he is with Beverly Romain, a poet who came to Second Saturday.  I loved to hear her read her work since she had this Jamaican accent that sounded so cool when she did a poem.

     Another young poet I became friends with and tried to encourage was Amanda Kimball. She was very shy about reading her work, but she was very good. I don't know what has happened to her since those early days of 2001, but she did readings with me and she became fairly well-known, appearing in an Article in "Delaware Today".      

      Dallas remained a friend, but my affliction has presented me from going to those meetings for a couple years now.  I thank him for his devotion to the gourd, even after we moved to Barnes 7 Noble, I wish him well with his book and hole someday to see him again.