Comments on: Some Thoughts On Poetry Readings: Part Three (Legendary Gigs)

By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:59:38 +0000

Thanks to all for the stories – esp. Gary and his serialized episodes. Wonderful, radio-ready stuff.

And thanks to those LCD fans, Michaels R. and G., and Nick, none of whom have lost their edge.
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By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 23:39:28 +0000

Yeah, I’ve learned how few Harriet posters keep up on contemporary dance music! They’re losing their edge!
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By: Michael Gushue

Michael Gushue — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:04:33 +0000

But are not the two subtexts to this (a la LCD):

1. I’m losing my edge.

and

2. You don’t know what you really want.

Me, I’m North American scum.
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By: Evan Jones

Evan Jones — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:57:59 +0000

I was there in 1947 or 1948 when André Breton read some very bad verses from a collection of Paul Éluard’s to a young Odysseas Elytis. With fire and brimstone, Breton finished by throwing the book across the room, uncomfortably close to Elytis’ head. I caught it and in doing so touched the back of Elytis’ left ear, which led to a meeting of eyes and a moment of quiet confusion (Elytis hadn’t even realised I was there, camouflaged as I was against Breton’s idiosyncratic collection of objects). Later, at Bar Sertà in the Arcades, we agreed and lamented that, despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979, he would never be properly translated into English and that his reputation would suffer because of this.
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By: Lemon Hound

Lemon Hound — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:09:20 +0000

Allen Ginsberg, Hall Building, Concordia, Montreal circa 1995. Theatre full to capacity, overflowing onto de Maisonneuve. Someone hooked speakers up out in the lobby because people would not disperse. A big stage, wee spotlight,squeezebox and no texts that I recall, Ginsberg had us in the palm of his hand for well over an hour. Amazing. He read like he was hearing every word for the first time himself. A strategy that keeps on giving.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:23:00 +0000

My girlfriend and I hailed a taxi after one of Ashbery’s readings at the 92nd Street Y circa 1980, but then Ashbery showed up and took the taxi from us. We didn’t mind, much.

My girlfriend (same one) introduced me to Elizabeth Bishop after she gave a reading at Bennington circa 1977-78. I shook hands with Elizabeth Bishop.

These are true stories.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:03:32 +0000

“I was there when someone made the mistake of calling Cummings “Ed.” (He was Estlin to his friends.)”

I beg to differ. Cummings idolized his father and was quite proud to be called Edward. Can you cite a reference?
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By: dylan

dylan — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:32:43 +0000

I was there when John Ashbery and James Merrill argued about the nature of the double sestina. The air was positively electric with excitement.
I was there when Lord Herbert of Cherbury wrote his sonnet to Black Beauty. I suggested the spark/dark rhyme.
I was there when President Eisenhower sat on a park bench reciting dirty limericks of his own composition.
I was sitting next to Miss Marianne Moore when Drysdale pitched his perfect game.
I saved Hart Crane from getting his nose broken by a tough man in uniform.
I was there when someone made the mistake of calling Cummings “Ed.” (He was Estlin to his friends.)
I was there when Hecht and Hollander invented the double dactyl. I contributed the crucial word “sesquipedalian” to one of their efforts.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:31:57 +0000

I had a feeling Scott and Zelda were gone by that time, and I was going to say something. Great writers are only great when we don’t see them; otherwise they roll around in the filth like all of us.
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By: nick

nick — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:57:10 +0000

you must be losing your edge, Michael…….
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:00:25 +0000

At any rate, Zelda arrived unannounced and unexpected. She had read about the Waldorf brouhaha in the paper in Alabama and took the next flight out of Montgomery.
She went looking for Scott and the fireworks started when she found him…alone in the bar with Denise Levertov. It was an odd thing, though, because Scott had already been dead for twelve years and Zelda for four.
Dylan and Hemingway swore off the drink that same day.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:51:53 +0000

Gary,
Yes!
Thomas
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By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:36:58 +0000

Wait, am I the only other LCD Soundsystem fan here?
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:07:04 +0000

Dear Mr. Brady:
Please forgive me. I am old. It was a long time ago and I got things a little mixed up. I guess it wasn’t such a fair fight, after all (which would explain why Dylan had such a time with Jackson). Jackson was only forty then and Ed was fifty-eight. But fifty-eight isn’t all that old, you know. I had more than one tussle at that age. Hell, Franz Wright is only fifty-six. Dylan was thirty-nine that year and I was still basically just a kid at twenty-two.
Do you want to hear about what happened when Zelda flew in?
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:32:27 +0000

Gary,
How could Jackson have been 20 years older than Ed, as you say?
E.E. Cummings would have been nearly 60 in 1952. Are you saying Jackson Pollock was almost 80 years old in 1952?
Thomas
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:07:46 +0000

As I turned out, Hemingway was a big fan of Dylan’s and quite pleased to meet him. We got a big table and things went pretty smooth for a while. Ernest took Dylan up on his challenge. I don’t recall how many rounds went by but by eight o’clock we were all goners. Dylan was standing on a table giving an impromptu poetry reading, Pollock was unconscious on the floor (he preferred scotch to beer), and I had forgotten what my name was.
We would probably had been there all night if the cops hadn’t shown up when the hotel people called the ambulance. Apparently, Ezra had called Hemingway something on the order of a “chickenshit liberal” and Papa laid him out right there. Lee and Scott dragged Pollock up to Scott’s room to sleep it off while Dylan and I high-tailed it back to the Chelsea.
The next day Dylan was livid! The newspaper story mentioned everybody except him.
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By: john

john — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:11:10 +0000

I used to hang out with the Gawain-Poet (her name was Brooklyn, by the way; I don’t remember her last name!) and listen to her read “Sir Gawain” to the Earl of Chester. That was a party!
Li Bai and Du Fu were a blast to listen to too. We three seldom got together, as you know, so it was always a treat.
A reading I’m sorry to have missed: The recitation of Nasi’s long sound-poem as described in David Antin’s poem “the structuralist.” (Does anybody know Nasi’s name, by the way? Fascinating character — maybe Antin invented him.)
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By: Annie Finch

Annie Finch — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:03:16 +0000

Restaurant poetry reading stories:
I was working in the restaurant with Edna St Vincent Millay’s sister when the young Millay read “Renascence” there and won the scholarship support from Caroline Dow that changed her life.
I was in the audience when Vachel Lindsay read aloud the poems that Langston Hughes, working as a busboy in the hotel where Lindsay was staying, had left next to his dinner plate that evening. I was an early part of the nationwide buzz that resulted.
And I really WAS in the audience to hear what was probably one of Agha Shahid Ali’s last readings. I’d give a lot to hear Shahid again–his reading was a gourmet experience.
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By: Desmond Swords

Desmond Swords — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 04:32:35 +0000

i was in Coleman’s Hatch and Stone Cottage with Pound and Yeats.
Heard Willy bellowing in chant the day Eliot walked up the unpaved
lane, came South from the crossroads by a parish church, to meet
our trio standing by birch and heath in a place of retreat for deer
and swine the Venerable Bede wrote of and Thomas Pentecost’s
“healthy waste of huts and dens/ where human nature seldom ends”
written in the nineteenth century. Then turning to the nothingness
who should come upon us but the magi with their painted stones
bones bleached to cerelium hue and in the distance, Five Hundred
Acre wood, leery louts with stick on smiles and fresh tatoos on cold
arms revealing an amulet, a charm to keep the djin at bay beyond
the trees and in the fields where Jack and Al had Cassidy bent
intonating Blake’s Tirel and Songs of Innocence and Experience
as Ginsey howled and Corso mainlined in moonlight his heroin
Ah ! peace it was when gathered there, the party in hieretic pose
declaiming verse from every age, conferring wreaths and sending
out upon the roads sweet and sour voices singing of the Highness
where all spumes fold and flit into one thought of reality Homer
had woven and Hesiod wrought for poets who claim Theogony
as their own true form of anima mundi and God, fashioning us.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:04:27 +0000

So here we are in the bar at the Waldorf-Astoria, all pretty much snockered at 10:00 am on a Monday morning. The place was deserted. Thomas and Pound got into a loud debate about on one thing or another. Scott and I actually moved to another table so the barkeeps wouldn’t think that we were associated with them.
And who walks in but Jackson Pollock, still pissed off and looking for Cummings. He remembers Dylan’s headlock, though, and confronts him. Scott leans over and whispers “Look how red his face is. See, he’s clenching his fists.”. “Who?” I replied. Scott lifted his head towards the table.
There, standing right behind Jackson, is Papa himself. All he said was “Are you bothering my guests?”.
That very moment, thankfully, Willem de Kooning spies Pollock and come up to say hello and starts shaking his hand. Ernest looked up at the ceiling and shook his head, then went over to the bar to get a beer.
Scott looked at me and said “Close call.”
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:07:57 +0000

The next morning we got Ed to Idlewild on time, but Dylan had learned that Hemingway was in town. He wanted to meet him and was planning to challenge him to a drinking contest. So, we all ran over to the Waldorf to find Hemingway and who did we run into in the lobby but Frank Fitzgerald. He and Ernest were in town for some big meeting with Scribner’s.
We never saw Hemingway, but Dylan did introduce us to another guy he met in the bar named Ezra.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 00:31:40 +0000

Fantastical, you say?
Ed had to leave for Boston the next morning and Dylan had a reading at Columbia that night, so we had to drive them all the way back to NYC from Oyster Bay. They argued the entire way. We ended up sleeping on the floor of Dylan’s room at the Chelsea.
What started the fight was Lee Krasner insinuating that Ed was being less than moral because he was out flirting in the bar while his wife was back home in Massachusetts. Ed got a little snotty with Lee and Jackson took exception (one to talk, eh?).
Now, as I’m sure most know, Cummings was a very prolific painter himself. He may actually have produced more paintings than poems. The fisticuffs started after Cummings told Pollock that he could make a better painting than him just by pissing in the snow.
Poor Ed got a bloody nose for that one.
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By: Jason Guriel

Jason Guriel — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:01:38 +0000

Jane and Mary, thanks for the suggestions. And Mary, I appreciate the links.
Bill and Gary, thanks for sustaining the fantastical nature of the post.
Ron, many thanks for your useful clarifications. Given my Dylan and Pound examples – and the subtitle “Legendary Gigs” – I hope it’s not entirely unclear I’m defining ‘poetry reading’ pretty loosely (if also sloppily). But, for what it’s worth, I was aware of the lecture, and did take care to write, “Eliot spoke” (italics mine, of course), to leave room to suggest something other than a poetry reading. But thanks for clarifying. As for the baseball stadium, I’m going, for what it’s worth, on Craig Raine in The Guardian, but if he’s wrong, and it sounds like he may be, the error only speaks to the mythology surrounding this near-mythical event.
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By: Ron Hart

Ron Hart — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:17:00 +0000

Eliot didn’t give a poetry reading in Minneapolis in 1956 — it was a lecture on modernism. And wasn’t it at Williams Arena (U of M basketball stadium), not a baseball stadium?
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:10:52 +0000

I don’t mind mentioning that even though Jackson was almost twenty years older, he trounced Ed pretty good. Gave him a bloody nose. Poor Dylan died that very next year, but he was in good form that night. He had Jackson in a headlock until Lee intervened.
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By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:07:29 +0000

I went to hear Yevtushenko read at McCarter Theatre in Princeton in the early seventies. There was a bomb scare, and we all had to leave the building.
Some dream readings would be:
H.D. – “Helen in Egypt” – excerpt here:
http://poem.oftheweek.org/?p=186
Jackie Kay – “There’s Trouble For Maw Broon”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/poems/kay.shtml
Virginia Woolf – two papers read to the Arts Society at Newnham and the Odtaa at Girton in October 1928 – here’s an excerpt from an interview-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/woolfv1.shtml
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:24:48 +0000

Beat this. Blood sugar.
http://possumego.blogspot.com/2008/03/kent-johnson-seized-by-marvelous.html
It happened as I was reading from the poetry of the mystical Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz. I got back up and finished with three paramedics in the room.
Kent
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:33:52 +0000

I can’t think of any great readings I wish I’d seen, but Dylan Thomas and I were the ones who broke up the fistfight between Jackson Pollock and E.E. Cummings at Uwe’s Bar & Grill out on Long Island back in ’52.
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By: Bill C

Bill C — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:20:17 +0000

I was there wihen Gary Snyder read excerpts from Turtle Island to the ghost of Li-Po on top of a mountain in Northern California.
I told him to keep going, even as the ghost, laughing, rolled up the hill into the clouds.
But I WAS there when Alice Notley read from Descent of Allette at the University of Pittsburgh Frick Fine arts building, and I lost my memory. I want Alice Notely to come back……come back?
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By: Jane

Jane — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:37:15 +0000

Any reading by Joseph Massey…
I hear he’s a bit of a nutcase, if not an entertainer.
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