As has been my custom for the last few years, I spent my New Year’s day at the Poetry Project’s Marathon Reading at St. Mark’s Church. I can never seem to get there for the beginning, and never make it all the way to the bitter end, but still. It is no more a frivolous activity than lounging on the couch watching teevee, and at least as restorative—to the soul if not the body—as a few Advil and a greasy egg sandwich to combat the prior night’s revels.
One comes to see the likes of Eileen Myles, John Giorno, and Patti Smith, but may discover someone fresh and engaging like Paolo Javier. And to see of course the great downtown art stars like Penny Arcade and the shambling, discursive Taylor Mead, tottering to the stage with his cane, plastic bag and cheap tape player, always hilarious and never not irreverent. To hear Philip Glass and Reuben Butchart on the piano. This year’s event was dedicated to the recently deceased Jim Carroll, who’d been intricately involved with the Poetry Project, so there were a lot of remembrances and shout-outs. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain played excerpts of the interviews they conducted with Carroll for the book Please Kill Me…
The bill is crammed with poets and musicians. Musicians reading poems, poets singing songs. There is all manner of verse: polemical, political, nonsensical, profane. Some poems that address plain old Feeelings. Some poems so ____ that they verge on parody. (Or maybe they are?) A good poem being like pornography, I can’t define it but I know it when I see it (or hear it, rather).
Also: the people watching. What a great strange crowd assembles to spend their day listening to poetry in that historic old church. Grizzled old hippies—the purple people. Hipsters in expensive eyeglasses sporting ridiculous mustaches and canvas tote bags. Balding, professorial types with starched shirts and neatly trimmed beards. Screamy, squirmy toddlers and their harried parents.
The day is an exercise in arty indulgence, aesthetic abandon, also a test of endurance—a secular mass of sorts. And if you’re bored you get your hand stamped and leave and wander around the East Village and then come back and try to wrangle a seat again on the floor or one of the carpeted risers. And if you’re hungry there is food for sale in the back, and beer.
It is both solitary and communal. It feels, what with the accessibility of the varied luminary readers, so uniquely New York, and in its mission so uniquely human.
