Zach Houston sits on a chair in front of an audience at the Green Festival, a sustainability event at the San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center. Many of the attendees watching Houston have perplexed expressions on their faces. “Want a poem?” Houston calls out. “Any topic, any theme. Name your own price.” His curly hair matches his orange–red scruffy beard. He’s wearing a polo shirt, jeans and a fading black trucker hat with an infinity symbol that he never takes off in public. Some are curious about the robin’s–egg–blue typewriter on his lap, but ultimately, most pass him by. Houston makes eye contact with a woman holding a flier with something that looks like an ohm symbol on it. He starts friendly banter with her and asks, “How about I write you a poem about ohm?”

“Okay,” the young woman says, grinning.

Houston works the typewriter with mechanical precision, making a seamless grid of characters with a machine that offers no spell–check or delete button. Each crash of his index fingers is unmistakably meaningful, every letter significant to the cause of constructing a poem about ohm. After five minutes, he’s finished. A poem that is abstract in structure emerges. He takes the freshly printed poem typed on a shipping label, signs his name and email with a pen and hands it to the woman.

Bags in hand, she says, “That’s great –the way you just did that.” He reads the poem aloud to her and before the woman leaves to enjoy the rest of the festival, she gives him some pocket money. Houston waves goodbye to his customer and his poem, which he will never see again.

He sits under a handwritten paper sign that reads, in large stroked block letters, “Poem Store;” the name of his business.

In a society where computers have long made manual typewriters obsolete, the mechanical word processor is the key to this entrepreneurial artist’s one–man business. Without the clicking sound of the typewriter, people wouldn’t stop to look at what he is doing. He’s sold thousands of poems, but has no recorded count of them, and his revenue is exclusively dependent on donations. Some yield little profit – no more than a few dollars – while other works have been sold for as much as 350 dollars. He keeps the cash he earns crumpled up in his pockets and waits to count it until he gets home, sometimes finding surprise fifty–dollar bills. The creation of the Poem Store concept came from Houston’s drive to monetize both his impromptu poems and his text–based artwork.

“The Poem Store was born out of a strange brew of intervention of everyday life. It was caffeine-situation inspired,” Houston says.

He calls his work a “business–performance–literature–art piece.” He looks at it as a business before seeing it as an art, and doesn’t enjoy writing poems as much as he likes making visual art. Writing poetry is limited by genre and there is less space to explore image, text divergences and densities of information, he says. What makes Houston marketable, as an artist selling poems, is that he speaks without thinking too much.
“I get to talk a bunch of nonsense and trash,” he says.

Frustrated by the slow process of getting work into art galleries, Houston wanted to connect with his clientele instantly and frequently. He started showing up to Bay Area Festivals with his typewriter and a Poem Store sign, eventually getting invited to events.

“It’s hard just to argue with someone with a typewriter just typing poetry,” says Houston.
In almost three years, Houston’s innovative career is doing better than ever. His success was featured on CBS and the New York Times, and even the poet laureate of the National Federation of Poets commended him for his efforts. However, his bohemian lifestyle continues to be an economic struggle.

He can’t make rent. He’s been couch surfing for more than five months, spending nights in a close friend’s unkempt but artistically decorated living room in an Uptown Oakland apartment. The place reeks of marijuana and has stacks of Houston’s drawings all over, but it looks comfortable enough to suit the artist’s lifestyle.

On some nights, Houston has no choice but to write poems in San Francisco until he has enough money to eat and take the BART home. He can’t even afford his own computer, but he created a niche for himself, relying on a network of friends in the Northern California art community for support.

“I don’t think that I am breaking new ground in bohemia,” Houston says. “I just think I am willing to live with it in a way a lot of people aren’t. It’s interesting–the capacity life has to survive.”

For two and a half years, Houston’s only job has been selling poems, having found no satisfaction in working on set schedules in occupations such as selling mortgages and working retail. Houston dropped out of Sonoma State University after five years of trying to find a specialty in sociology, psychology and art. He then moved into a large Oakland warehouse of artists to pursue a career in visual art, going from gallery to gallery to get his artwork out. In the swirl of passions and projects, the Poem Store has remained the most constant.

“After selling my art and poetry for a living, I am damn well not going to get a [regular] job,” he says with verve.

Houston doesn’t charge a set amount for his work, which raises the question: Why? Even customers most strapped for cash, those who have only a dollar to spare, are not worth losing. Through his business, Houston wants to make art easily accessible to anyone who seeks it.

“Selling poems isn’t any problem for me because my thoughts are mine and I know that I can have them again,” he says.

He can “relate to anyone about anything at any point in time,” with a cup of coffee and his typewriter. He claims it has never been difficult for him to write about a topic. Houston prefers to work alone because he finds it easier to make money, think and have conversations. This is an inevitable part of his job and it makes Houston nearly unapproachable when he’s focused on typing. “Usually, people distract me when they’re with me. It would make the poems have less value. You don’t ever do better with more people.”
When writing poems, Houston goes with his gut and speaks to issues of the time. He thinks about the spectrum of human experience — from sports to war to drugs and sex.

Andrew Sofie, twenty-five, Houston’s close friend from college, believed in him from the time he came up with the Poem Store idea.

“I’ve seen a lot of people attempt to sell something in a direct way to the public, but I think Zach is kind of an underdog in a way,” says Sofie, who created a web profile for Houston. “He is out there touching more people than any other artist I know.”

Despite his economic status, Houston is still one of a few poets making a living today, and he doesn’t ask his parents for money. He inspired his friend William Chrome to sell impromptu poems when Chrome moved to New York City a year ago after rooming with Houston. Chrome absorbed Houston’s craft when he went to Poem Store events with him.

“It really helped to change my life, as in I was able to write for a living,” says Chrome.

Similar to the Poem Store, but not quite the same, Chrome’s Poem Shop generates dollars through the advertisement of its services, such as facilitating weddings, on its website.

Aside from looking to create a formal website to advertise his services, Houston dreams of opening an art law school where he can inject the exploratory nature of the art world into a traditionally rigid academic setting. He has already brought together a community of artists that know of his dream.

“I am expected to be an anarchist scrapper in a way,” explains Houston. “To apply the kind of irrationality of the arts to something as strict, finite and specific as the law is my empty page. I can do damn well anything I want on that page. That contradiction, that dualism, it’s almost hilarious that I have that much freedom and space.”