The Ballard Farmers Market is full of your traditional vendors. You can buy produce, meats, flowers, etc. You can even get a poem at the Poem Store. “I’m a writer, writing is what I love to do,” Meredith Clark told us on a recent Sunday.

With her vintage typewriter balanced neatly on her lap, Clark will take your ideas and create a poem. “As a writer you end up doing your own work, lamenting your own thoughts,” she tells us, so she decided to take her passion to the streets. “Get other people’s thoughts, ideas and inspiration.”

“Poetry is the kind of things that shuts itself off most of the time, so it’s really wonderful to write for people. To find the way people respond, it’s lovely,” she says. You can find Clark at the market on Sundays. When we ran into her she was in front of Ballard Home Comforts (5334 Ballard Ave. NW).

Adds poemstore in comments:

I’ve been doing this project since 2006, and always close up shop at the end of the day feeling energized and inspired. I spend the week writing for myself and my own projects, and welcome the opportunity to write poems for other people. People approach me for remarkable reasons–to celebrate births, commemorate deaths, consider friendships, and to remember places, events, comedies, arguments, objects, and errors. Fundamentally, the Poem Store is about conversation. It is about the value of words and the way words can serve us.

I don’t keep copies of these poems; I see them as a collaboration between me and the people requesting the work. While there is no required donation, it is also a way for me to make a little money doing something I enjoy, in the same way a composer or sculptor makes money on commissions for his or her art. It is a wonderful thing to make even a part of my rent doing something that feels fundamentally satisfying.