“THE POEM I TURN TO” READING

It was supposed to be in Bryant Park, but got rained out and moved to an old library room in The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen building on 44th St.

An interesting group of folks showed up, both to read and to listen. The anthology (which I’ve written about already on this blog) is a selection of poems chosen (one or two each) by a diverse group of people in mostly the movie business (the subtitle of the collection is “ACTORS & DIRECTORS PRESENT POETRY THAT INSPIRES THEM”).

The reading was organized by Michael O’Keefe, a longtime good friend, who did a great job as Sidney Pollack’s henchman in MICHAEL CLAYTON but is best remembered by older viewers as the teenage boy in THE GREAT SANTINI who Robert Duvall (playing his father) bounces a basketball off of to provoke him (and for which I believe Michael was nominated for an Oscar) and the caddy in CADDYSHACK.

But he’s also a terrific poet and writer (and I remember some great songs he wrote and sang back in the day as well) and has directed and produced. His selections were as personal and kind of quirky as everyone’s in the book (which is what makes it a pretty fascinating collection, I’d like to see more anthologies like this, say poems musicians turn to, or painters, or plumbers or electricians or etc.).

They were a short poem of Pound’s, “In a Station of the Metro” (misprinted as “at” instead of “of” in the anthology), and one of Dennis Johnson’s, “Passengers,” who most folks know as an incredible novelist, but who I first knew as a poet back at the U. of Iowa.

Carol Muske-Dukes, the well known poet and poetry teacher read a poem to her late husband, the “actor’s actor” (as O’Keefe put it) David Dukes, (this poem is also in the anthology) and dedicated it to the editor of the anthology, the poet and teacher Jason Shinder, who passed away just as the anthology came out. (O’Keefe was an advisory editor with Lili Taylor.)

In fact the entire reading was a tribute and kind of memorial to Jason who was a fine poet, but also a beautiful spirit, and who is much missed by his many friends.

The other readers were Matthew Maher, who you’d recognize from one of my favorite recent movies GONE BABY GONE and elsewhere; Alix Lambert, a documentary film maker who is one of those creative people who seems to do everything and do it all not only really well, but uniquely (one of her best known documentaries THE MARK OF CAIN was nominated for a Spirit Award); and Melissa Leo, who’d you’d recognize from TV (e.g. HOMICIDE) and who I’m told gives an Oscar-worthy performance in the recent film FROZEN RIVER, which I haven’t caught yet but intend to.

Their selections were unexpected and choice, as we used to say. Maher read Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and an “Eskimo” (I think that’s now Inuit) poem by Nakasak (translated by Edward Field) called “The Invisible Men” that’s about as unique a poem as you will ever read, or hear.

Lambert read a poignant but realistic poem by her uncle Stanley Kunitz, “Touch Me.” Leo read her two choices, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 64” and Sylvia Plath’s “Point Shirley”—both about love and death but in entirely different, of course, ways, and she threw in a little poem by A. A. Milne as an extra.

I read the two poems I selected for the anthology, William Carlos Williams’ “Danse Ruse” and Terence Winch’s “Faith” (from his most recent collection BOY DRINKERS).

The conversations afterward were, like the reading, lively and funny and creative and smart and deeply interesting, It was one of those perfectly satisfying gatherings from start to finish, at least for this participant, and I wish you could have joined us. Maybe next time.