Good morning, and happy April, last year’s Confederate History Month and this year’s Civil War in Virginia Month.

Next year, who knows? We who seek permanence from our months would grow annoyed were it not for that old workhorse National Poetry Month.

I’ve been planning to commemorate this month by interviewing some local poets. My first conversation, with Norfolk poet and iconoclast Olaf Rislop, 84, turns out to be quite timely. If you read the paper, you won’t find the day’s most startling news, because it’s here in If You Read the Paper. I can’t take credit; I was ignorant of Olaf’s erstwhile career until he spoke with me yesterday over Rosée D’hibiscus at the Birch:

AltDaily: Olaf, thanks for making time to talk to me, especially at a busy time like Poetry Month. Will you start by introducing yourself to readers unfamiliar with your work?

Olaf Rislop: I was raised in Gothenburg, Sweden, and came to Virginia after I earned my masters in engineering. I’ve lived here since.

When did you begin writing poetry?

During Norfolk City Council meetings I wrote down things that Mayor Duckworth said and turned them into poems. This was 1950, 1951. I passed the poems around. People giggled. I got in trouble, and I guess I liked that.

You liked getting in trouble?

My first tattoo was of Loki, the Norse god of mischief.

Why were you at City Council meetings?

Because I was a member of the council for seven years.

I had no idea.

Norfolk was preparing some major engineering projects, redesigns and so forth, and they wanted a civil engineer on the council. I didn’t have a job yet in my field, so it didn’t require my walking away from a lucrative private salary to join our city’s government.

Did you write about council meetings because they intrigued you, or because they bored you?

From the Capital-Times, April 1, 1933

Forget poetry. I came to this interview to get something off my chest. But the answer is they were dreary, and by 1951 I was desperate for a laugh. The inspiration for what I did was the Madison Capital-Times April Fool’s story about the Wisconsin Capitol dome collapse. Have you seen that picture?

I don’t recall.

The geometric impossibility—well, I’m saying I never expected to be taken seriously when on April Fool’s Day ‘51 I submitted to the council the most absurd long-range strategic plan imaginable.

What was absurd about it?

Residential neighborhoods without adjacent commercial space. Miles of waterfront with no public access. A six-lane divided boulevard—essentially a highway—separating downtown from the river. City-block-sized ground-level parking lots. No street-level retail downtown. No public parks. The demolition of beautiful old buildings that were still in use, like the Norfolk Terminal Station and the Monticello Hotel. [Laughing] I even called for a one-lane Midtown Tunnel.

But that didn’t happen.

My one-lane tunnel, in a roundabout and ironic manner, gave my plan the push it needed toward verisimilitude. I had flagmen, see, on the tunnel’s either end to halt the traffic. Someone mused that a wider tunnel would be cheaper in the long run, due to the flagmen’s salaries. The comment sparked a debate that set a precedent for taking my plan seriously. Because my laughter was growing difficult to stifle, I excused myself to the restroom. While I was gone, things sort of snowballed, and I missed my chance to come clean without angering my fellow councilmen.

You’re saying all the bad urban planning in Norfolk stems from a practical joke you played in your twenties?

I was twenty-four.

Why are you coming clean today?

In Crime and Punishment Sonia tells Raskolnikov, “You must accept suffering and redeem yourself by it; that’s what you must do.”

But you’ve waited sixty years.

In the 1950s I was raising a family and didn’t want to rock the boat.

Did you fight the demolition of the Norfolk Terminal Station and the Monticello Hotel when they were happening?

Other council members did, but I was through with government by then. I wrote a poem about it.

The poem is about demolition?

If you insist on reducing it to its literal meaning, yes.

Did your strategic plan contain any suggestions that weren’t disingenuous?

Your question zeroes in on another tragic result of my joke. Originally I had written a very progressive plan! Dare I say a precocious one, full of elegant solutions to Norfolk’s problems. I threw it away upon the fake plan’s success.

What was in the real plan?

Saving and preserving the city’s streetcars. Subsidized water taxis. Elevated parks near stretches of waterfront that were permanently blocked by industry. Greenbelts. Traffic circles; other traffic-calming patterns. Far more mixed-use developments. A form-based code.

That does seem sad.

Of course, we didn’t call them form-based codes then, but they existed. In 1681 William Penn said, “Only let the houses be built on a line, or upon a line as much as may be.”

Did any good come of your joke?

Is Bogart buried here? Why not?

Included in my plan was a list of luminaries I proposed we lobby to choose Norfolk as a final resting place. King George VI. Eleanor Roosevelt. Agatha Christie. Humphrey Bogart. The mayor was a Bogart fan. Weren’t we all! But Duckworth, he could recite Key Largo by heart. Every day at City Hall he wore a replica of Rick’s fedora from Casablanca. If you showed up unannounced, Fred Duckworth doffed that fedora and asked, in an abrupt, gravelly voice, “Your unexpected visit isn’t connected by any chance with the letters of transit?”

Is Bogart buried locally?

The mayor was rebuffed by Bogart’s people the very day news broke of Truman’s dismissal of General MacArthur. Which got him to thinking. Hence the MacArthur Memorial.

You make city planning sound so arbitrary.

That’s why I quit. I wanted my work to be anchored in causality.

By work you mean engineering in the private sector?

I mean poetry.

Talk about your poetry.

It speaks for itself.

Why did people trust you?

I was a civil engineer with a master’s degree. I’m Swedish. There is this stereotype of Swedish design.

Today you seem to hope that Norfolk achieves the opposite of what your plan called for. How can we do that?

We can try harder to attract what Richard Florida calls “the creative class.”

Any specific ideas?

One method is NYC-style abbreviations like Tribeca, Soho, DUMBO, and SoBRO, which revitalize neighborhoods within months of their being bestowed.

We’ve got SoNo.

A halfhearted effort. One must foster an environment where the name can thrive. But if Norfolk wants to get serious about this, I’ve devised more. Ward’s Corner: Waco. Naval Base: Naba. Thirty-Fifth Street: ThiFi. Lambert’s Point: Lamp.

Any advice for how everyday citizens can transform our city?

Dostoyevsky says that “[Raskolnikov’s] new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.”

Olaf, thanks again for speaking to me.

Ask Lauren Bacall where she intends to be buried.

Olaf Rislop lives in Waco. His poems are available on his website.