It is likely that in nearly three decades since the Poetry Project has held its New Year's Day poetry marathon at the little church in the Bowery, there has never been a better moment for the all-day gathering of poets in lower Manhattan than this year's at St. Mark's Church.

With all New York still licking its wounds from 9-11, Patti Smith stepped up to the microphone to take her turn as one of the marquee names among dozens of performers to strut their stuff at the 28-year-old marathon.

Like many of the others who preceded or followed her, Smith performed a piece which reflected on the events of that day, and on the circumstances surrounding it. In a music and word performance several minutes long, Smith reached beyond polemic and revelation of personal trauma to some higher place, delivering her audience a hypnotic moment of compassion and catharsis.

Smith's appearance was one of a very select number of enormously compelling moments in the day-long affair. But it was also characteristic of the tone, urgency and timeliness of this year's version of a poetry event in downtown Manhattan that has become a landmark in the literary community.

How timely? No poetry community of the stature and duration of the downtown Manhattan scene even comes close to being able to claim what they might: direct impact from the events of September 11, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center a few blocks away … and turned the sanitized glitter of Mayor Giuliani's post-millennial New York City into a smoke- and grief-filled nightmare.

Only a few blocks from St Mark's Church unfolded the sudden sequence of events at what has come to be known as 'Ground Zero,' events which struck to the heart of America.

In the process, Mayor Giuliani was transformed in the public eye from anal-fixated ruler to Churchillian symbol; policemen from precinct bullies to heroes; and Manhattan from the capital of Big Apple glamour and cynicism to America's poster boy for the resurgent patriotic psyche.

What then, of the non-academic, socially alternative poetry community which calls downtown home? This year's marathon New Year's reading was a kind of barometer of that.

Like other progressive communities -- only more so, perhaps -- many people here have been grappling with an internal debate between, on the one hand, traditional criticism of American foreign and domestic policies; and on the other, a sense of violation, a deeply felt solidarity and determination we shared with our neighbors, our neighborhoods, and our city.

Understandable, then, that the traditional downtown gathering of the tribe would attract so large and eager an audience as did this year's New Year's Day Marathon Reading, if only to see what the poets had to say.

Verdict? Across the spectrum, this year's marathon, put on by the Poetry Project of St Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, was "just what the doctor ordered" for hundreds of those who felt the need to see and hear those in the poetry community whose voices have helped them define their world view during less stressful times.

Fact is, I was a couple of hours late for the event, delayed by visits to Beat-oriented bookstores from Providence RI to Brunswick, Maine, on a three-day junket which culminated with a blasting New Year's blues night out in an old Maine milltown with poet Gary Lawless. It was a night which began with Lawless, who has worked with Gary Snyder, and who has read a great deal in Italy and in other communally-oriented poetry milieux in Europe, lamenting the lack of poetry events in America approximating those he has seen overseas.

"The poetry events can be so alive there," said Gary, stroking his long white beard thoughtfully. "People show up with their whole families. There are picnics and wine and everybody is spread out everywhere. There's not much like that in the United States."

One place there is such an event, as anyone who has attended it knows, is St Mark's on New Year's Day.

Take last year, when I volunteered in the kitchen, and there was Bob Rosenthal stirring a pot of chili so big you could take a sitzbath in it. In the lounge area in the back, the famous and the unknown sat with their backs against the wall, legs stretched out, reading or sleeping or chatting or looking at the books for sale, or just getting ready for their turn at the podium. The marathon read is just that sort of event, the kind of place that you're likely to meet a wandering poetry friend you haven't seen in years; say hi to someone you've known only from their books; or find someone entirely new walking up and introducing themselves.

This year was much the same, though the sense of the moment was a quantum or two more intense. From 2 p.m., when the first reader took the stage in the old fashioned church, with its center-facing pews converted to informal seating galleries and carpeted for the comfort of loungers, and its row upon row of audience seating -- until nearly midnight, when the last artist left the stage, a palpable sense of the moment pervaded the gathering.

Gary Lawless would love it.

St Mark's Church has become a kind of hallowed ground for beat, bohemian and alternative culture in America; not solely because of the marathon, to be sure--nor simply because it is the only place where Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell ever read together. A host of readings, workshops, publishing ventures, and gatherings have made it a vortex of sorts for alternative American poetry. (Take a look at their website at poetryproject.com.) But especially on New Year's Day, it has become a place where readers, volunteers, and poetry-lovers mix with the curious and the converted through an exceptional day-long downtown celebration of the artistic spirit.

Altogether, it is an exceptionally friendly place too (for Manhattan); from the surprisingly hip literary celebrities wandering the book room, hanging about in the audience--or even taking their turn at stirring the infamous New Year's Day chili--to the unknowns. The day seems to elicit a type of communality you might think disappeared with the 1970's upstate farm commune movement.

Add to that an enormous line-up of talent, you've got the makings of an institution--which the event unquestionably is. As in most years, the line-up ranged from new talent to true underculture luminaries. Poetry Project headliners such as Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll, Tuli Kupferberg and Patti Smith were on hand; crowd-pleasers like Emily XYZ, Hal Sirowitz, Maggie Estep, Penny Arcade, Eliott Sharp and Robert Hershon took their turn at the microphone; plenty of surprisingly good emerging talent showed off their work; and everyone waited to see whether legends and near-legends such as Pedro Pietri and Bob Holman would show up at their appointed time.

As might be expected among the dozens of listed poets, the themes ranged widely, with a decidedly street-wise stand-up flare to many of the performances. A fine venue for patented New York humor, witticism and flip, cynical playfulness, the event had its more serious moments too. Sirowitz read from one of his "Mother Said" poems, a wry chicken pox poem; Sharp read a particularly affecting poem called "Siena"; John Giorno and Vicki Hudspith read with charm and wit; Yoshiko Chuma's harrowing mixed media with dance piece on Hiroshima nearly brought the house down.

But of particular interest were the number of performers who focused on issues surrounding September 11th, across the political spectrum and often to great effect.

Two of the most potent performances in this regard were those of Emily XYZ and Patti Smith. At this performance, XYZ offered up a polished version of her poem depicting the terrorists in the air, her pendular voice cutting through the darkness with a seer-like authority, taking haunted jabs at the terrorists with deference to the "new urban post-apocalyptic aesthetic" of anger and defiance amid solidarity and mourning.

And as suggested earlier, Smith provided a climactic moment for the day-long event, mesmerizing the audience with an impassioned plea for non-judgmental humanity, in a piece that was threaded with hypnotic Middle Eastern music. Smith played on a clarinet, her feet planted widely apart and long hair falling from under a fisherman's knit cap. The piece quite completely gets past facile bi-lateral political platitudes and ideological automatism, to reach to the humanity in her listeners with a plaintive song of pain and longing she wrote when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1980. "I hoped I wouldn't have to play it again," she said, and then did.

The effect on the audience was enormous, perhaps the strongest of the day.

The truth is that the potential for that kind of special moment exists in many a venue, but when it happens at the Marathon Reading of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's in-the-Bowery, it has the feel of a rare and historic moment. That's why I keep coming back to St Mark's on New Year's Day.