The reopening of Poets House was a festive affair November 9th and 10th. Friday evening was a party hosted by Stanley Kunitz, a toast to the New York institution he'd helped to found. Actually, it surprises me that Paul Zweig is no longer credited with the original idea of Poets House, as I understood him to be its first initator. I had attended its inaugural celebration and Paul Zweig poet and professor of literature at Queens College--when he died young of cancer--had left some funding for the idea of a Poets House in New York, like the ones he visited in Europe. Kunitz and Kray took up the initiative from there. The event was greeted with an overflow crowd. On Saturday, November 10th, the atmosphere was one of a bustling poetic community. A marathon five-hour reading from 4 to 9 p.m. with fifteen poets reading for 15 minutes each marked the fifteenth year of Poets House on the second day of celebration in the newly remodeled library and office spaces at 72 Spring Street.

The directors had looked for some years for a larger space and were happy to be able to expand directly across the hall from their old headquarters--a fact that no doubt made life simpler for everyone. New office spaces and a video room are now outside the library room which seems far more spacious now that it no longer has to house photocopy machines, desks of the staff, and other office equipment. How good to see more space at Poets House in the library which now has shelving with room for more books. Poets House accommodates a Showcase every fall of every poetry book published in America [1300 last Spring] and its shelves were stuffed beyond capacity prior to the new renovation.

Saturday's festivities included readings by some of America's most noted poets and a few poets one was hard-pressed to remember hearing from before. The liveliest readings were given by tried and true poets, Gerald Stern, Galway Kinnell and Sharon Olds. (I was sorry to miss hearing Donna Masini who read in the earliest group of three and who usually gives a good reading.) Jean Valentine's soft-spoken style has rarely engaged me, with her quiet, feminine tone and low-key endings. Cornelius Eady was as intensely imaginative as Regie Cabico was outrageously humorous. Lee Ann Brown used Susan Smith, the mother who drowned her children, for the subject of a ballad as Eady had used Smith's sad story to create an imaginative sequence from the voice of the mythic black man whom Smith had accused of her crime. Eady's use of the true story was far more successful than Brown's. Lee Ann Brown's parody, "Amazing Grits," I found offensive and too facile with its forced humor. Her ballad from Susan Smith's voice was unreal in its monologue form, and showed no pity for the demented and disgustingly pitiful young mother now imprisoned for life.

Sharon Olds knew how to endear herself with her sweet quivering voice singing a "happy birthday" nursery rhyme to Poets House--in a mode which she herself jokingly called "Mary Poppins trying to be Marilyn Monroe." Olds's new poem about September 11th was moving and well-written, though she said it was a work-in-progress. Interestingly, Yusef Komunyakaa gives no patter between his poems as Stern, Kinnell, Olds, and others do. He simply reads rhythmically, non-stop, but I felt he read with more passionate energy than usual. His poems have always worked better on the page for me than when he's read them aloud. Emily Chang reads well, but one grows tired of the same old "men are rotten" angers of the 70's which she expressed for the man whom she portrays as a prejudicial predator. I've heard so many poems in this mode since the 1970's. Dave Johnson was charming reading his children's poems from his workshops with energetic zeal.

Kimiko Hahn's poetry is well-crafted with surreal horror, and she, like Yusef Komunyakaa, offers little patter in between her poems. She began artfully with an ancient Japanese poet, Ono Nakomaki, of the 7th century, as Sharon Olds had read two 7th century Arabic poets before launching into her own work. Hahn read a horrifying poem about "pre-mature burial" which curdled the blood more than any Hollywood horror film with its sensational theme, but one was not sure of the point of the horror. Hahn faces squarely the visceral world in all its vulnerability in her work, and that may well be her point: that life as a biological phenomenon of extremely precarious nature, is mysteriously horrifying.

Thank goodness Poets House Library space is now airier with its ceiling fans whirring soundlessly above and its sound system working well without a hitch, as it was full to the rafters with standing room only. Kate Rushin described how squashed with bustling staff activity the room had been prior to its renovation. She read energetically, but went on too long past her allotted time as all were anxious to hear the two star poets of the evening. Gerald Stern and Galway Kinnell were the finale following Rushin. Marilyn Hacker's esoteric poems filled the room with a polite silence as sigh-filled as Regie Cabico's reading had been with laughter, earlier on. Hacker reads with careful diction and clarity, though her poems might be beyond the patience of some listeners, but then, she asked for no applause until the end.

Gerald Stern explained how important the library had been to him when he lived in the neighborhood years ago on Van Dam Street. He regaled the audience with laughter when he described how he'd been evicted from his fifth floor apartment. All speakers agreed that the library would now provide a quieter space for contemplative reading by those who use it. Stern offered the patter of a "stand-up" comedian drawing much laughter from the crowd. He gave a generous reading of others, beginning with "Crazy Jane" by Yeats and going on to e.e. cummings's "Buffalo Bill's Defunct." He touched me by reading a poem by John Logan, "Three Moves in Six Weeks," which was certainly one of the very best of the evening. Logan's exquisite music lived in Stern's mouth. Stern read mostly poets other than himself and possessed the most natural charm of the evening. When he closed with one of his own poems aptly with "how the pigs have taken over doomsday," one could not but help nod in agreement. I believe the poem was titled "Apocalypse" and was followed by "American Heaven," full of references to other poets, David Ignatow, Rose Graubart-Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, and James Wright.

He attempted a recitation of Dylan Thomas's emblematic, "My Craft and Sullen Art," but unable to finish it from memory, left its recitation to Galway Kinnell who often recites it at his readings. Kinnell aptly began with Whitman's poem regarding a poet's struggle with financial matters and fund raising, perhaps due to the to-do at The Academy of American Poets where William Wadsworth had recently been asked to resign due to fiscal problems. Ethridge Knight's poem, titled, "The Idea of Ancestry," was movingly offered next by Kinnell, who also read Lucille Clifton's "It Was a Dream." Like Stern, Kinnell was generous in presenting other poets, and he read a poem of his own dedicated to the memory of Richard Hugo, titled "The Oregon Coast," in which the need of 18th century poets to personify natural phenomena was discussed in apt poetry. He offered a poem-in-progress titled, "When the World Trade Towers Came Down," which he said he was not sure of, but the comparisons to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were compelling and the poem, quite successful, I thought. He followed it with a section from his poem, "Lastness" ("as empty space / must have bent / over the newborn planet / and smelled the grasslands and the ferns").

Lee Briccetti, who graciously hosted the marathon, thanked the Board of Directors, Margo Viscusi, president, and Frank Platt, Myra and Harold Shapiro, in particular, and the much-loved Annie Wright, widow of the great American poet, James Wright, for their help with the proceedings. Everyone buzzed about with friendly communion to close the reopening ceremonies of a newly renovated Poets House--a home to poets everywhere in the country, to poets passing through, and to poets who live in the stricken, but thriving "Big City" of literature and art.