Exclusive | NYC public school teacher ditches her classroom to pursue a lifelong dream and is making bank
She’s a poet — and she’s always known it.A NYC public school teacher ditched her day job to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a bard — and now writes poems for strangers on the streets of the Big Apple.Shana Roark, 26, sets up a table and a 1969 Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter on sidewalks on Central Park South and in Williamsburg and sells verses on any subject for $55 a pop.On a good day, she writes 30 poems and pockets $1,650.“It’s a really beautiful experience, getting to connect with people, but also turning that connection into art,” she told The Post.Roark, a native of Kentucky, taught English and special education for three years at a Brooklyn charter school, but was unhappy because she was a poet at heart.“I’ve been scribbling lines in margins and on napkins since I was a kid,” she said.She began selling poems on the streets six years ago, setting up a sign that said, “Pick a subject and a price, get a poem,” and made the gig full time two years ago.She has since implemented a flat fee of $55 for an in-person poem and $125 for those requested over text.This week, Roark penned an ode to The Post that would have made Alexander Hamilton proud.“Headlines red like my typewriter ribbon, headlines read like these pieces of poems,” she wrote in an 18-line poem.The in-person process typically takes anywhere from five to 15 minutes, she said.Many customers look to memorialize or celebrate something like a birthday or wedding — or in the case of one little boy recently, dinosaurs.
Others go deeper.“The other kind of poem is when they want some kind of answer,” Roark explained.“They have a question about their life or something philosophical .
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My friends joke that I’m like a therapist without all the responsibility.”One of the most memorable poems she wrote was for a medical student who confessed his fear that he was responsible for a patient’s death.“We spoke for like an hour — that was something I’ll never forg...