And All the Stars Came Out Tonight

Louis Menand passed along a story from his old classmate, Billy Collins, about a poetry reading in medieval Italy. "Hi, my name is Dante," said one of the participants. "Tonight I'll be reading three poems."

Things never got that out of hand at "Poetry & the Creative Mind," a benefit for the Academy of American Poets held Tuesday night at Alice Tully Hall that drew a packed crowd which probably held just as many celebrities as the stage did. I'm terrible at spotting these folks, but I did notice Mike Nichols (whose wife, Diane Sawyer, read from Sondheim and Phyllis McGinley), Harvey Weinstein, and Calvin Trillin--whose friend called out to someone named Chip, which leads me to believe Chip McGrath was enjoying a little post-editorial night out.

Quite a few people went off the scheduled agenda, starting with Senator Edward Kennedy, who followed his reading of Frost's "The Gift Outright" and a portion of Benét's "John Brown's Body" with a poem Jackie wrote to celebrate a wedding anniversary with JFK. Then Meryl Streep replaced the T.S. Eliot poem announced in the program for a Delmore Schwartz composition she thought would go better with Randall Jarrell's "Next Day." And Samantha Power reminded the audience that they were all together on the tenth anniversary of the start of the Rwandan massacre, to which the United States government had responded so feebly, and inserted Joseph Brodsky's "Bosnia Tune" into a selection that already included Stephen Crane, Denise Levertov, and James Wright. Those of us who noticed might well wonder if there was any connection to Sen. Kennedy's discreet departure as soon as Power left the podium--or maybe he just knew how long Menand's introduction to Gertrude Stein's As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story" was going to be--not that it and Kenneth Koch's "The Circus" weren't enjoyable; they were among the night's best poems.

Wynton Marsalis really got the crowd moving with his rendition of James Weldon Johnson's "The Creation," after which he played a few bars on the trumpet then sang an a capella version of "John Henry" that made it hard for the following readers to compete. Mary-Louise Parker came pretty close to getting back into the groove with Anne Sexton and W. H. Auden, but it wasn't until Kevin Kline declaimed Howard Nemerov's "Boom!" as the last poem in a portfolio that also included works by Marianne Moore and John Berryman.

The final reader was Vanessa Redgrave, and when she announced that she was abandoning the scripted program, I braced myself for God knows what. But after lashing out at the British government for its suspension of habeas corpus, she settled into a poetic groove that started with "To Foreign Lands" and "Walt Whitman's Caution" from Leaves of Grass, progressing to Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay before concluding with Allan Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" (scroll down; it's there). Her point about poetry as a form of political protest was effective, infinitely more compelling than opening remarks by Academy board member Rose Styron, who commented that current events put her in mind of the suffering of poets like Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova. To which I could only respond silently, you know, as bad as things might be in this country, and they're far from perfect, I still think we've got a long, long way to go before what poets in the United States experience could be legitimately compared to Soviet oppression. Redgrave's choices reminded us, in fact, that American poetry has a long tradition of providing us with a voice of dissent, a tradition many poets carry on today, and which one has every reason to hope will continue for decades to come.