The only time I ever attended the St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s Annual New Year’s Day Marathon Reading was the year the Church had a fire and they ended up having to hold the event elsewhere in the Spring instead. This does not make me an expert. But it was a lot of fun & I got to see many poets whose names I was only vaguely familiar with for the very first time – I recall John Giorno going on & on, but maybe it only seemed that way. In any event, I hope that the folks in New York this year have all had a very good time & gotten a chance to hear to some great performances appropriately compacted for mass consumption.

 

The one giant reading I attended during the holidays was another annual mini-marathon – the off-site MLA poetry reading, held (as was the MLA) this year in Philadelphia at the Highwire Gallery. Where the Church’s roster promised 157 poets over a 13-hour period, held not at the church but at the Theater for the New City on First Avenue, the Philly gathering offered 45 poets – it turned out to be 47 in actuality – over two hours. And the event came in at just 2:05, with really only one or two readers going noticeably over, say, three minutes. The poets included all 42 listed here the day after Christmas, plus three others added to the roster prior to the event – Alicia Askenase, Denis Barone & Lee Ann Brown – and two others not listed at all. One, whose name I believe is Bridget Byrd, read for the second half of Camille Martin’s two-minute slot at Camille’s invitation. The second, Gil Ott, read from beyond the grave via the CD Frequency, put out by C.A. Conrad & Magdalena Zurawski. Gil’s poem, “Stingere” – a “made-up” word related to the Stinger & Cruise missiles – proved to be one of the high-points of the evening for me – he was a great reader & the few recordings he made during his life are all we have now to commemorate that.¹

 

In theory at least, the MLA reading is a national, if not global, affair, with Loren Goodman coming all the way from Japan. Yet of the 47 readers, 18 live locally, 19 if you include Gil, and four others – Louis Cabri, Kristin Gallagher, Mike Magee & Chris Stroffolino – are former Philadelphians. Maybe therefore it’s not surprising that only four really were really new to me – Martin & Byrd, Kazim Ali (whom I know has had books out, just none that I’ve read) & Goodman, a one-time editor of Kiosk, a magazine I’ve praised highly here more than once, who also seems to have survived winning the Yale Younger Poets Award. He read his poem, “Yeast,” with a dead-pan presence that reminded me at once both of Norman Fischer & Steve Benson:

 

I am Yeast, a great poet

I live in Ireland

Some say I am the greatest

Poet ever

My poetry makes bread grow

All over Ireland and the world

In glens and valleys, bread rising

In huts, clover paths, and fire wood

There will always be critics

Who deny Yeast

But you can see

The effect of my poetry

Through the potato fields

And the swell of the Liffey.

The amber coins and foaming black ale

 

One other poet – Will Alexander – was somebody whom I’ve read for years, but had never actually seen before. His reading – like Goodman’s – made me wish that poets had more than two minutes’ time in which to present their work. The limitation is just part of the form of the marathon: the folks at St. Mark’s may have 13 hours, but at 157 performers, that still comes in at a smidgen under five minutes. The real question is just how many different voices can you really hear at one time? The actual number, for me at least, is something under 47, let alone 157, so I tried, as best I could, to attend to the people with whom I was least familiar.

 

But that really wasn’t so many people. Part of what surprised me most about the reading was simply the idea of being able to go to an event like this and having some idea of the work of all but four of the writers involved. There were readers I’ve known since college (Rae Armantrout, Michael Davidson), someone I’ve known since before I went to college (Barrett Watten), even someone who attended my high school (Greg Djanikian, a few grades behind me tho he knew my brother). If I was getting a very strong sense of poetry-as-community, it was reinforced by the presence of other familiar folks like Jack Krick, Francie Shaw, Bob DuPlessis, Alan Golding, Norma Cole & Barbara Cole in the audience (the crowd was upwards of 150, but realistically a third of them/us were performers).

 

In contrast, of the 157 folks scheduled at St. Marks, some 70 are people with whose work I have no familiarity at all. Is that simply the Philly/NYC distinction? Actually, I suspect that there will be fewer “out-of-town” folks at the Church than were at the Highwire Gallery in Philadelphia – tho half of the six poets who are part of both events come from Philadelphia (C.A. Conrad, Frank Sherlock & Tom Devaney – I hope Devaney brought enough blindfolds for everyone at the Church & read his “Abu Ghraib” piece). Maybe some – like sax great Marty Erlich – are people from other disciplines. Or maybe there is just such a density of poets in & around New York that it’s not possible for anyone really to get that same sense of community (alternate possibility: it may even be far greater for being larger). At what point does community become crowd? How does one tell?

 

Not that one would ever confuse the MLA with a community as such. Even as a large portion of both readers & audience are drawn from the geographically diverse attendees from the conference, the whole idea of doing a reading off-site is itself very much a statement about the community of poetry as an alternative to the institutional world of “the profession.” Ironically, it was Chris Stroffolino who may have emphasized this most in what was consciously the “least poetic” performance of the evening, using his two minute slot not to read or perform, but to recite when & how he had met most of the other participants.

 

Afterwards, tho, it was Rachel Blau DuPlessis who pointed out the formal theme of the evening – ballads – from Lee Ann Brown singing a cappella with her daughter Miranda in her arms, to its appearance tucked inside the “half of Drafts 64” that Rachel read to Charles Bernstein’s unforgettable “Ballad of a Girly Man,” a train wreck of a poem perfectly suited for the train wreck that is the polis these days, the genre was invoked or audible at least six times in less than two hours. Why the resurgence of a template that is nearly 400 years old I’ll throw out here as the first open question of 2005.

 

 

¹ Somewhere there exists a video of Gil reading while walking over the Ben Franklin bridge, one segment of a series of poets profiled as a show for the local PBS outlet, WHYY. Maybe Daisy Fried or one of the other poets who participated in that project knows how to get hold of that. PENNsound or the EPC should put it up in a downloadable or streaming format.