READINGS (& AUDIO)

Just figured out a way to put a recording of a short poem of mine from the 1960s on my profile, check it out, or go to the source, a web site that has the only spoken word recording out there of mine, from a 1978 reading I did at The West End Bar, the old Beat hang out up by Columbia University, unfortunately, that reading isn't very emblematic of my usual readings for that time, except it was packed, standing room only, which they often were, this time because an alternative newspaper, The Soho News, had done an article on me with a very seductive photograph taken by my then mate, the photographer and composer Rain Worthington, that attracted an even larger crowd than usual. But the only people in the audience I focused on were the few who were creating a new force in the poetry world with the magazine L=A-N=G=U=A=G=E they were just starting, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, the latter I was reading with as at the time I was promoting his work to a lot of fellow poets who weren't interested until I insisted they check him out, and reading with him made that even more of an imperative. But to impress what would become "the language poets" (or "language-centered" or other similar terms) I read poems of mine that were more in that style, rather than the crowd pleasers I was known for, so, all that to say the reading on that site isn't typical, but the site also contains a recording I made in the early 1990s, from which I excerpted the short poem on my profile.

And for those in the New York area, I have the honor of reading with the great "People's Historian" Howard Zinn on February 20th at 6:30 in The Great Hall at Cooper Union in downtown Manhattan. Check it out if you can, Zinn is in his eighties so catch him while you can.