At the Magical Hour Where Is Becomes If

Last night I had the pleasure of helping Tony Kushner explain to Maya Lin the eytmology of "blog," after I introduced myself at the reception for "Poetry & the Creative Mind," the third annual celebrity benefit for the Academy of American Poets (having admittedly forced the issue by revealing my affiliation). I also got to have a minor fanboy moment with Chip Kidd, and finally met Emma Forrest in person, five years after interviewing her. So we chatted a bit about her recent turn in the spotlight, and then she introduced me to her best friend, Minnie Driver, whose readings had been one of the evening's best highlights. (Seriously, if any of you people reading this produce audiobooks, sign her up.) Since Driver had talked a little bit from the stage about reading poems in school as a child, we chatted about her early love of Philip Larkin, including a teacher's explanation of the opening line of "An Arundel Tomb" ("Side by side, their faces blurred") that she recalled years later in the presence of her first serious love.

The evening had begun much earlier with introductory remarks from the academy's executive director, Tree Swenson, and board member Rose Styron, who commented on the "serious and thoughtful" tone of the poems that would follow, observing that for these readers, "the American conscience is the center of our concern." Suzan-Lori Parks led off with the Navajo poem "In Beauty May I Walk," then veered from her scheduled Gertrude Stein selection and instead read "Visits to St. Elizabeth's," in which Elizabeth Bishop records the experience of visiting Ezra Pound at the mental hospital, and Denise Levertov's "Ways of Conquest" (keep scrolling, it's there), the opening line of which--"You invaded my country by accident"--could (perhaps too) easily be interpreted as the night's first bit of political commentary. Meryl Streep followed, delivering Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B" with a hint of a North Carolina drawl, remained in North Carolina for A. R. Ammons's "Easter Morning," and concluded Elizabeth Bishop's Sandpiper" by giggling, "I love this poem."

Dan Rather's introductory comments on Wallace Stevens's "The Death of a Soldier" ran longer than the poem itself did, literalizing for the audience the poem's reminder of the ultimate sacrifices made by soldiers far from home in wartime. He was followed by Minnie Driver, whose excellence has already been noted; for the record, she read Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song," e.e. cummings's "one winter afternoon," and W.H. Auden's "Lullaby."

I thought Maya Lin showed a bit of puckish humor by opening her segment with #14 from John Berryman's Dream Songs, with its declaration that "I am heavy bored," after which she read another excerpt from Berryman, and concluded with T. S. Eliot's "A Note on War Poetry." Then Tony Kushner read a bit of Thom Gunn, including a long passage from "At the Barriers," and then the conclusion of Strange Meeting," and closed with Robert Hayden's rousing "Frederick Douglass."

Former Museum of Modern Art president Agnes Gund read Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy" and Hart Crane's "My Grandmother's Love Letters" (scroll for it). Then NYT cultural essayist Frank Rich contributed lively readings of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and Frank O'Hara's "Ave Maria," the latter of which cracked the audience up. Diane von Furstenburg read Levertov's "The Wings" and Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo," and Sam Waterston closed the evening with oratorical readings of E. A. Robinson ("Eros Turannos"), Robinson Jeffers ("Hurt Hawks), and portions of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," loosening up a tad to close with Robert Lowell's "Epilogue." Finally, Jorie Graham paid tribute to the recently deceased Robert Creeley, reading from "Heroes" and "Goodbye." At the reception afterwards, a few people speculated on the absence of Gore Vidal, who had planned to read selections from Poe and Whitman but withdrew at the last minute; no firm conclusions could be drawn, though one certainly hoped the matter was not too serious (and this even before many of us had heard of the death of Saul Bellow earlier that day).