Into the Fire: A Poet's Journey through Hell's Kitchen

By Mary Clark

Into The Fire: A Poet’s Journey takes place in the rough-and-tumble Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. By 1980, both the arts scene and New York neighborhoods are on the verge of change. The author’s life in the arts weaves in and out of the neighborhood’s narratives. She must make a choice between two possible lives.

The Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s featured many well-known poets of the 1970s and 80s as well as up-and-coming and marginalized poets. St. Clement’s Church has a storied history in the arts, beginning with the American Place Theater in the 1960s to the present day. Cameo appearances in this memoir are made by Robert Altman, Amiri Baraka, Daniel Berrigan, Karen Black, Raymond Carver, Cher, Abbie Hoffman, Spalding Gray, and Al Pacino. Erick Hawkins, June Anderson, and Daniel Nagrin dance through.

Poets and writers include Carol Bergé, Ted Berrigan, Enid Dame, Cornelius Eady, Allen Ginsberg, Daniella Gioseffi, Barbara Holland, Bob Holman, Richard Howard, Maurice Kenny, Eve Merriam, Robin Morgan, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Alice Notley, William Packard, Robert Peters, Rochelle Ratner, Grace Shulman, and Kurt Vonnegut.

The author discovers the arts program and the church are gateways to a vibrant community. She becomes more involved with local civic groups and begins to find her place in the world. Seeking poetry, she finds purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Clark
• Release date: Mar 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215460016

Mary Clark

Mary Clark spent her formative years in Florida where she was infused with awe and respect for the natural world. She was also aware of the lives of migrant workers, segregation, and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. She graduated from Rutgers-Newark College of Arts and Sciences. In 1975, she moved to New York City and worked in the arts programs of St. Clement's Church in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. For many years she worked for community organizations and founded a community newspaper.She is the author of Tally: An Intuitive Life (All Things That Matter Press); Community: Journal of Power Politics and Democracy in Hell's Kitchen; Into The Fire: A Poet's Journey through Hell's Kitchen; the poetry novel, Children of Light (Ten Penny Players' BardPress), and Covenant: Growing Up in Florida's Lost Paradise. In her latest novel, Passages, a young aspiring writer explores sex, gender, fame, poverty, and love in 1970s New York City.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Poets & Writers for its generous support in the late 1970s and early 1980s of the Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s.

Thanks to St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, 423 West 46th Street, New York City, for its support of the Poetry Festival for eight years.

For their encouragement in the writing of this memoir, I thank poets and friends Richard Spiegel and Sally young-eslinger (Kip).

Special thanks to Iris Berman, Ann Folke, Mathew Laufer, Kathryn Nocerino, Kenneth Pitchford, Ann Scaglione, Dan Stokes, and Sheri Sussman for their assistance with the program.

And thanks to performance creators and participants of poets theater, including Roselee Blooston, Jim Curran, Bob Holman, Doloris Holmes, Ulf Goebel, Mike Golden, Judith Heineman, Jon Imparato, Rose Lesniak, Kaye McDonough and Sara Croft and the cast of Zelda, the Masque Ensemble, Elissa Napolin, William Packard, Mark Stevenson, and Paul Zaloom.

Preface

At the back of this book, you will find a list of the New York Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s poetry readings and events from 1978-1983. Other events of interest are also listed. Poets who appear in the narrative with more than a mention are in bold letters.

Main Characters

Martha Blacklock, Vicar, St. Clement’s Episcopal Church

Michael Hadge, Artistic Director, Theater at St. Clement’s

Paul Johnston (PJ), artist and writer, Greenwich Village Bohemian

Jeffrey M. Jones, Managing Director, Theater at St. Clement’s

Anita Khanzadian, Script Coordinator, Theater at St. Clement’s

Alexandra Palmer, West 46th Street Block Association member, St. Clement’s parishioner

Supporting Cast

Iris Berman, Laura Boss, Enid Dame, Cornelius Eady, Vincent Ferrini, Barbara Fisher, Ilsa Gilbert, Jana Harris, Barbara Holland, Bob Holman, Edward Kaplan, Maurice Kenny, Richard Kostelanetz, Susan Kronenberg, Donald Lev, Kaye McDonough, Kathryn Nocerino, Rochelle Ratner, Hal Sirowitz, Richard Spiegel, Daniel Stokes, Sheri Sussman, poets

J. Watkins Watty Strouss, West 46th Street Block Association, St. Clement’s parishioner

Henry J. Sturtevant, Vicar, St. Clement’s Episcopal Church

Ann Folke (Wells), Liturgical Production Manager, St. Clement’s

Larry O’Connell, Sexton, St. Clement’s

West 46th Street residents

Cameo Appearances

Robert Altman, Karen Black, Cher, Allen Ginsberg, Spalding Gray, Abbie Hoffman, Raul Julia, Paul Simon, and Kurt Vonnegut

1978

1 Poetic License

Miles to go, miles of snow, a transfigured night and all in sight covered in a winding sheet of white. Stopping at a snowy Ninth Avenue, face and hands wrapped against the wind, I contemplated the divide before me.

The city streets were deserted, and I was alone in the canyoned silence. Ice-crystals glittered in streetlights, snow camel-backed cars and fenced sidewalks. On the avenue’s arctic slope, deep within the haunting sound of a muted city I could hear gypsy cabs snorting dragon-breath in the dark, and I would have stayed to watch fringes of icicles on fire escapes glow in the dying light.

Crossing Ninth Avenue, I heard the wolf howl in the wind. Finding a gap hacked in frozen snow I pioneered westward to a narrow trail leading past four- and five-story buildings. Bare choirs of trees fell silent, only ticking now and then in frozen despair, until a faint glow, just the slightest cinematic glimmer, fell on the crooked path. I leaned back, one hand on a rack of ice, to see above me a living painting: a red brick building with arched windows of earth- and sky-colored glass, indigo peaked gables, and copper crosses with a green patina; the canvas a luminous smoky sky curling up from hidden heat.

Double wooden doors painted in vertical stripes of chipped red, white, and blue were shuttered against the cold and any vagrants or visitors who might venture in. Hiking up the steps, kicking footholds in rime-encrusted snow, I peered through wire netting at an empty stairway to heaven. Tracking again through Technicolor traces from the lighted windows, I discovered a second set of steps and a brightly lit hallway. A bare bulb in a metal cage hung above the steps. I looked up and down the street of tenements and brownstones, and on windowsills and steps festooned with snow, there was no other light.

A royal blue and white plaque with a strident red cross sparked through a crust of frost: Welcome to St. Clement’s.

On the far side of a railing, steps led to a single recessed arch, and winding down and up again, I began knock-knocking-knocking on heaven’s door.

A small round bell bolted to the brick caught my eye. I heard the buzz resound and die.

Richard Spiegel, the director of the Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s, opened the door. Mary?

In his early thirties, Richard’s long, wavy chestnut hair and trimmed beard shone with a soft gleam of mahogany and substrata strands of red.

I stepped inside. I promised I’d come one day. My eyes pulsated with red and white light as I thawed from the glacial trek.

I was one of only three. We read wine-poetry and drank red wine in chipped cups from St. Clement’s kitchen. Poets in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.

*

When the frost cleared, I returned to Hell’s Kitchen. It was a risk, a life in the arts, but I wanted to write the script for my own life.

Jeff Jones, the administrator of the church and Theater at St. Clement’s, welcomed me to his office. He was tall, the office small. He enormously filled the room.

I came to a poetry reading here, I said, and told him I knew Richard Spiegel from another reading series he ran in Midtown several years ago. I would like to work in the theater. Behind the scenes. Is there anything part-time? Seeing his reaction, I amended, or volunteer?

Jeff asked if I would like to help Richard with the poetry program, but I said, I want to do something different, to work with a group of people and get away from writing. I meant to say writual was not enough, and little that was new and unexpected seemed impossible.

There’s lots to do, Jeff said. There’s nothing paid at this time. He added, It’s a place to start.

I was on the dole and living in a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel, where residents lived in furnished rooms with kitchen and bathrooms down the hall. This would be on-the-job training.

Do you know anything about stage managing?

No.

"Would you be interested in helping build the set?

I perked up. I think I could do that.

Jeff said to talk to Steve Cramer, the TD, which he explained meant Technical Director. As I was leaving, he said again, Are you sure you don’t want to do something with the poetry program?

No, I nodded, I want to try this.

Down, down, down the stairs I tumbled, into the shadowbox of the theater, a hall lit by hanging lamps with tall windows in one red-brick wall opening on a garden. By the windows, long plywood boards painted black were ready to be set in place to block off any light during performances. All the other walls were painted light-absorbing matte black.

Into this dark space, with its vision of a secret garden, filled with roses in summer, a tall, gangly man, Steve Cramer, a young Abe Lincoln look-alike, appeared from another portal.

Steve and I positioned wooden platforms to form a stage and seating area.

How do you lift these all by yourself?

Moving one end of a platform, he placed it on the edge of another. Don’t lift when you can leverage.

Some had rows of red plush folding seats bolted on.

Old Roxy seats, he said. We salvaged them when they tore down the theater.

We secured scrims in place to create a black backdrop and obscure the machine shop backstage.

If you have to move furniture or other props, mark where they belong with small x’s in white chalk. The poetry program and the church both used the space, but they had to replace anything they moved to its original location to keep the actors from being disoriented.

I watched the lighting crew work, clipping lights on the exposed grid of cables and pipes.

And I bloomed in the small space, as the roses did, and carried the secret garden within myself.

In the office, I talked to Jeff.

At St. Clement’s, liturgy and the arts collide and divide, he said, and sometimes coalesce. When it comes together, it’s transcendent. He paused, But when it doesn’t, catastrophe.

He worried that Richard was trying to do too much. Benefits for causes, poets theater, weekly readings. Richard could use some help with the Poetry Festival.

I wavered. After all, I wanted to escape the fate of Emily Dickinson. I wanted to be out in the world. Did Richard need help? I don’t know if he’ll want my help.

I think he will.

Wondering if I would fit in and what the future would bring, I sat with Richard as the poets arrived for the Monday night reading.

After a while, I asked him in a small voice, Would you like me to help with the poetry program?

He answered quietly, but emphatically, yes. And began immediately to talk of scheduling readers.

Richard Spiegel and Stephen Cramer in the Downstairs Theater at St. Clement’s

At the next Monday night reading, I greeted people and collected donations at the door to the downstairs theater. Afterwards, Richard and poets Rochelle Ratner, Jim Bertolino, Maurice Kenny, and I went for coffee.

A compact, intense, friendly older man, Maurice was a poet and publisher. He co-edited a literary magazine, Contact/II, a Bimonthly Poetry Review, with Josh Gosciak. I had noticed that he was selling postcards of Native American poetry and artwork at the reading. Maurice said he was Native American, a Mohawk from upstate New York. The postcards were from his Strawberry Press, publishing the work of diverse Native Americans. Among them were Joseph Bruchac and Wendy Rose. Bruchac published Joy Harjo. (In 2019, Harjo was named the United States Poet Laureate.)

I had a wonderful time and did not get home ’til 2 a.m.

In the days to follow, I began exploring the wonderland of St. Clement’s. The church newsletter proclaimed that the vicar, congregation, and arts staff explored changes in America’s social and moral values.

A pen and ink drawing of the church building depicted St. Clement’s sailing into a gale with all its gables and crosses flying. *

Were we at sea?

In the front office, Richard held up a poster of whales serendipity-ing across a blue-white expanse and the poetry program’s name bending in synchronicity. A friend of mine did this, he explained. What do you think?

It’s beautiful. But whales?

I know.

On the other hand, perhaps poets were whales? St. Clement’s a ship at sea, and whales sporting about, safe from the harpoon?

Michael Hadge, the Theater at St. Clement’s director, hot-booted in, carrying an armful of scripts. He was a Shiva dancer in tight jeans, tailored cowboy shirt and polished boots, scripts flying to the four winds. He and Anita Khanzadian, the theater’s second chair, were planning the next season of Off-Off Broadway plays for the Theater at St. Clement’s (TASC).

Anita Khanzadian and Michael Hadge in the Theater office

Mike had studied at the Actors Studio on West 44th Street. Al Pacino was one of his friends from those days.

Jeff Jones lounged behind his desk in the windowless middle office, conducting meetings with panache. The Board of Managers (the vestry) attended the meetings along with the arts program directors.

Yes, we are all managers.

On Monday nights Richard and I sat at the door to the downstairs theater while destitute poets dropped change into a Poor Box to hear other equally starving poets. Richard used the money to pay the poets and print flyers. And of course, buy wine, red, red wine.

We met several times a week to plan readings and write press releases. He proposed that I take over the readings during the summer months so he could take a vacation. It all seemed too much too fast.

My friend Sally Young, who wanted to be known as Kip, asked if I could get in touch with Muriel Rukeyser.

Muriel Rukeyser? Was she kidding? (I had come to a benefit reading at St. Clement’s in which Rukeyser appeared a year before. Her presence onstage had a massive force, Buddha-like.)

Kip said she wanted to protest the policies of the American Poetry Review.

Her number’s in the phone book, Richard told me. She’ll talk to anyone.

She will?

Yes, she’s very accessible.

I relayed the information and trotted to the corner store for a cup of tea. When I came back, Richard approached me in the blue hallway. I want you to meet a friend of mine, an old man who lives in the Village near me. He ushered me down the hallway toward Jeff’s office.

An elderly man with long white hair, beard, and mustache, wearing a wrinkled Arrow shirt, was setting out paintings on the filing cabinets and desktops for an exhibit upstairs. He greeted me with a smile, blue eyes paranoid but twinkling.

PJ, Richard said, this is Mary. She’s going to help set up the display.

PJ placed several pieces of artwork on a table. I call these Impressions, my textile art.

I reached out to touch them: tactile, textile.

His daughter came in to help him set up. I retrieved my camera in the front office and, intuitively, took photographs. Impressions.

* Drawing of St. Clement’s by Simon Thoresen, an architect and parishioner

2 Culture Review

Up the wine-red carpeted stairs, passing broken tombstones mounted on the pockmarked brick wall, pilgrims found a landing and swinging leather doors stamped with brass studs opening on a vast space, St. Clement’s sanctuary. On both sides rows of tall arched windows resembled trees where stained-glass mosaics formed branches, flowers, and leaves. The peaked roof with hewn beams two stories high was Noah’s Ark come to rest upside down on Manhattan Island, filled with seminal winds and sounds of the flood.

Treading a red carpet on the stairs and in the offices, worn but also warmed to the glow from the windows’ mosaics—not primary colors and depictions of saints or scenes from the Bible, but Longfellow’s forest primeval of lichen green on fallen trees, earthy orange, and clouds streaking into blue—I came to another path inside/outside space, sensing, questing.

In the Upstairs Space, theater and sanctuary vied within winged walls held aloft, spectacle and service fused, refused, in faith with the fallen, to recombine message and activism.

I praised the windows to Watty Strouss, a member of the church’s Board of Managers.

Oh, they’re actually not stained glass, he said, the word oh a major part of his vocabulary and depending on the inflection, having different meanings as in the Chinese language. They’re leaded glass.

There’s beauty under the grime.

We’d like to restore them, but it’s too expensive. Each piece needs to be cleaned and re-set with new binding.

A heavy wire mesh covered all the street-front windows, crisscrossing the intricate mosaics. The protective mesh made the church look almost medieval, home to armored knights more than avant-garde ministers.

Someone didn’t like our being an anti-war church and threw a Molotov cocktail through an upstairs window. In the 1960s, he told me, Joan Baez was married in the church. Later she referred to it as ‘that funky little peace church on the West Side.’ Watty’s sigh had a reality bite. She couldn’t remember our name.

In the 1960s it had been remodeled to accommodate the American Place Theater. After American Place left for new digs in the hermetic basement of a high-rise on West 46th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, another Theater at St. Clement’s was born. That incarnation had a good run but collapsed amid questions of missing funds. The current Theater at St. Clement’s started in the early 1970s and operated in the downstairs space, which was also called the downstairs theater.

The church’s main income came from renting the Upstairs Space to outside theater groups. Every Sunday church services were held onstage, making use of the current play’s set to match the sermon’s theme. Vestry members with corduroy jeans beneath their robes rolled out altar and pulpit and lowered a large crystal cross from its station in the light grid high in the beams.

So, the Upstairs Space had several names, depending on its current use and who was using it: the Upstairs Space, the Sanctuary, and the Upstairs Theater.

Alone at the massive gray metal desk in the front office I heard sounds in the church: voices, stories, pieces of song, wind in the sanctuary, birds in the oak tree, the organist practicing hymns, tales of the flower fund and the trust for burying the poor.

*

Denise Levertov’s speech, The Education of the Poet at the Donnell Library, was thrilling, incredible. When I walked into the packed auditorium, I was amazed at the auditory surge of anticipation and urgency in people turning out for a talk on poetry. Her presentation was musical, flute-like, resonance and eloquence. (I recommend her poem, Another Spring.)

At St. Clement’s, the next Poetry Festival reading drew eighty people, almost a full house. A notice had appeared in the Daily News Leisure section, using a press release by the readers. The poets: Susan Axelrod, Linda Stern, Kathryn Cullen DuPont, Keelin Curran, and Amy Roth.

With a bow to Linda Stern’s Music of the Spheres poem: five women moved across the stage as though on one wheel, carrying a spherical instrument that vibrated inside with music, a murmur traveling across the universe and back.

There was always music playing in my head, connecting the spheres of my life. In my SRO hotel room in an Upper West Side residence for women, I was reading The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag. The old myth about art was that it was an expression of consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself. This consciousness could be noble, inspiring, affirming itself. The new myth was anti-art, replacing the materialistic with the spiritual, with a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech. Rather than confession, art became a deliverance.

In Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein, I came away with thoughts about literature and film being built on fragments, words or still shots, which represent or reproduce reality and were then juxtaposed in different ways by the artist to create a moving narrative or montage.

Filling my negative space with meaning, creating my own context, I read Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies: modern film involves a struggle to remain faithful to the transitory, multi-suggestive complication of a movie image and/or negative space. Negative space, the command of experience… an artist can set resonating… so that there is a murmur of poetic action enlarging the terrain of the film, giving the scene an extra-objective breath.

Loba; Part 2 by Diane di Prima was lighting up my nights. The wildness of the wordscape brought me back to my beginnings in Florida. Henry Miller said Paris was his mother. Florida was both my mother and father.

My long poem about Florida and childhood was in Richard’s hands. Eliminating most punctuation at the end of lines I hoped the sweep of a reader’s eyes would create negative space.

Waves half dark, half light leap and spin

flashing hooves and windswept manes

sleek black flanks and spinning wheels

of a chariot carrying the moon:

wings of darkness flutter and fall

palms bow and bend and arc in the wind

as the surf sings

strength and renewal

strength and renewal

Richard suggested I read a section in May with Duane Locke, an Immanentist poet from the University of Tampa. I lost my breath and could not speak. I was too shy to read my own work.

In a 1976 issue of Dan Stokes’ New York Culture Review, Locke wrote that the immanent poem results from a fusion of the subject and object, the inner and the outer, the knower and the known into a qualitatively different and new substantial reality.

Richard asked me to schedule June and July.

At Womanbooks on the Upper West Side, I heard two good poets fuse into a qualitatively different and new substantial reality—Akua Lezli Hope and Audre Lorde. Outside, rain overwhelmed umbrellas and street drains. Inside, torrential pain.

After the reading, I tried to work up the courage to ask Audre Lorde to read at St. Clement’s, but I was too miserable about my own life: needing love, work that earned money, success as a writer, to approach her. She left suddenly and the woman from the bookstore said she had not been feeling well but came to read that evening anyway.

Ladders of Flame

Flames slashed across tenement faces and flared along fire escapes. I walked into the street for a better view.

This is the fire, this is the glow as flames rise in the core, heat rises ethereal, takes on new forms, almost human, they flow along fire escapes—angels, angels walking on ladders of flame.

And I thought I saw one of the angels turn to look down at the street, fire flashing from his eyes.

A motley crew of poets in worn jeans filtered in through the vermillion haze. At the Poetry Festival reading, a young, roly-poly Bacchus named Dan Stokes occupied his own defined space. As the editor of the East River Review, a series of poetry pamphlets, and the New York Culture Review, he published articles on poets and writers, especially those who broke with tradition.

He asked if I would like to read manuscripts. I’m way behind.

I said yes.

We set a time for me to pick them up at his New York Culture Review bookstore. Daniel M. J. Stokes lived in the back of his bookstore on East Fourth Street near First Avenue. A post Beat poet with a brusque exterior, his poems on the tortures and joie de vivre of love, poverty, crime, and freedom, cast him into the François Villon camp.

Early on a Monday evening, Dan Stokes came into the downstairs space before his reading. Richard and I and Dan and another poet began drinking the wine.

Not going to be an audience, Dan assured us. No one ever comes to my readings. He belched.

The poet Barbara Holland came in. Lean and clad in black, she was not amused. There was fire under her surface, heating the magma, and her slopes were covered with cinders and gave off a scent of sulfuric ash.

A small audience filtered into the seats. They were not amused by our carelessness.

I started work on a new piece, Buffy, about a child who lived on an island. The point of view was subconscious, subliminal. It had an odd style, I thought: my style.

Her father, absent, an enemy or stranger, fluttered his long silky wings when passing through windows and doors, weaving in and out magically, always in mid-flight, only settling a moment on the back of her mother’s chair... He was her bird now, a bird of prey.

Kip said she thought it should be a mixture of poetry, prose, and dialogue. You could be the Henry James of psychological poetry.

Sidney Bernard, aging Bohemian and editor of The Smith, a well-respected literary magazine, said my writing was too dense, with a confusing concentration of images. He was right. I was being true to the direction that my writing, and my life, were taking me in, but I had more work to do.

*

It was a full house in the 99-seat downstairs theatre for the chamber theater production of Travellers, directed by Maurice Edwards. This concert piece for theater set Ilsa Gilbert’s words to music. The program was funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA, pronounced nisca.)

Ilsa Gilbert’s poetry and lyrics evoked the constants in our lives: home, family, suffering and overcoming. As a poet, playwright, lyricist, and librettist, she was active in the 1960s and 70s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater in Greenwich Village. She worked with many musicians and composers on her brand of chamber opera. As we talked, I found her to be sweet and funny, but also driven and savvy: a quintessential New Yorker.

Her humor was shown in the eight pieces for the singers, such as Lizzie Strata, Sarah Lee Cake, Lawrence of Astoria, and Mama and Papa Ionescu.

*

Steve Cramer saw me scribbling in the front office. There’ll be work to do on the next production, he told me, on Voices, by Susan Griffin. She was a poet, and this play was unusually subtle word-work for the Theater. (I recommend Susan Griffin’s poem, Happiness.)

Estelle Parsons directed the cast of Catherine Burns, Susan Greenhill, Rochelle Oliver, Anne Shropshire, and Janet Ward. The actresses were appearing, I learned, as with all TASC and Poetry Festival productions, with permission from the Actors’ Equity Association. This was because actors were required to be paid for their work under union rules, and these were either low-paid or unpaid performances.

On the program’s back page, the Theater’s mission was described:

Ultimately, we choose plays that reckon with moral conscience. What is the responsibility of an individual to his or her self and to others? Of an individual to society at large? Or, on the corporate level, of the faceless conglomerate to the anonymous citizen?

I was aware of having dropped out of my parents’ way of life. These questions, these statements of purpose, intrigued me. How could people of all races, religions, and various cultures and beliefs, live together in an authentic and respectful way? How could I contribute, in some small way, to the answer?

3 Frontiers

A party at Dan’s East Village store was a drunken revel; it all passed by like a film with each person creating his own resonating terrain, all sizes and intensities, both flux and concrete images, fragments fixed in memory: the smiling rogue Richard, philosopher-cabbie Donald Lev, witchy Barbara Holland, Village Bohemian PJ, word-vet Irving Stettner, keen dark-eyed Kip, and party-on Dan.

We dropped PJ off by the Jefferson Market Library. I envisioned him living as a retired professor in some neat but cluttered modern apartment surrounded by mementos of his inspiring years of mentoring, teaching, and always, learning.

The forward motion was too much for me; at the Port Authority Bus terminal, I was sick, seeing Kip off, and Richard had to bring me home.

The Poetry Festival surged on, even when planned events failed. The Duane Locke reading fell through; immanently, he did not show up. Harry Smith, publisher of The Smith, and others were in attendance for this event and everyone had time to meet new people, greet old friends, and discuss their projects.

The next week, Bob Heman’s reading engaged touch, hearing, and sight. Mild-mannered, acutely intelligent, he let his experimental poetry in designs speak for him. One on white card stock with gray and black print, printed by Clown War, had words grouped into formal gardens, but some words like weeds strayed a c r o s s b o r d e r s.

Another was a poem that created multiple connections called The Dance with instructions to cut it out and construct a dodecahedron on the back.

In the little theater, Ira Lewis’ play, Everyplace Is Newark, began in mid-May. Ira was lean and famished for fame, and his plays were insightful and hilarious in an ironic way.

My father was born in Newark, I told him, and so were his father and mother. I went to Rutgers-Newark for the last two years of college. I actually liked the city.

Yes, he said, but he wanted to show a truism about modern American lives. He was excoriating suburbia.

But Newark is a city, I said, and city life had its stimulations as well as risks for artists. Amiri Baraka lives there.

In a moment like that in Amiri Baraka’s The Ballad of the Morning Streets, I could glimpse high above the window transom a warm blue sky, and hear children shout with laughter, neighbors greeting one another as they pass the church, and to paraphrase, pure love magic comes, blazing, to the people in the streets.

And Dizzy Gillespie.

For me, Newark has a wide arced sky and space enough for hills and crowded streets, jazz pulsating in the city’s heart, ballads sung, and poets writing for the centuries.

*

No one showed up for the Ted Berrigan reading, except Ted Berrigan, Nina Silver, Richard, and me. There was a big reading with Ted Berrigan’s wife, Alice Notley, at the Poetry Project at St. Marks that same night. He joked about his wife’s fame. After an amicable talk, we threw in the proverbs and the towel.

Rich and I and Nina went to her home and talked about our personal problems. Richard was carrying a collection of PJ’s fine printing work.

PJ worked for Egmont Aren’s Flying Stag Press in the mid-1920s and later started his own press. In 1930, his book, Biblio-Typographica: A Survey of Contemporary Fine Printing Style, was published by Covici-Friede. Later, he worked for Van Rees Press, designing hundreds of books for major and university presses.

Richard and I sat on the floor, going through the broadsides, pamphlets, and letters. There were letters to and from Bennet Cerf, Ward Ritchie, and other publishers, printers, and typographers. Richard said he hoped to help PJ find places to sell or donate his collection.

After his art exhibit opened, PJ had invited Richard and I to visit him at his home in Greenwich Village. We climbed the narrow stairs to his third-floor apartment, an artist’s garret on the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich Avenue. The main room was crammed with boxes of clippings, letters, typewritten pages, books, newsletters, leaflets. Electrical sockets hung loose in the walls. A desk with a typewriter and chair were set in a cleared space in the clutter.

Making my way through piles of books and boxes, I saw the Jefferson Market Library wavering through a dusty window. Touching a window frame, I felt it crumble.

The kitchen walls were covered with what looked like soot.

Touching long grimy tendrils above the stove, I said, There must have been a fire.

No, PJ said. There was no fire.

My hand wavered.

The instant I became aware he was observing me with a wry smile, he said, In a way, there was a fire.

*

A visit on a warm spring afternoon with a friend, Janice Herbst, was the comic relief I needed: she had been working on her master’s thesis, a page a day, for the past three years.

At the Gotham Book Mart, I bought a copy of POETS. I saw Richard’s review, and poetry by Irving Stettner (of Stroker magazine, whom Kip was so taken with at Dan’s party), Don Lev and Barbara Holland—the whole group. I was happy for them and confident that one day my work would be good enough to be published with them.

In his bookstore, Dan and I drafted a letter to Robert Creeley asking him to do an article for Dan’s lit-crit magazine, New York Culture Review, on Louis Zukofsky, a poet in Brooklyn who had died more than a week ago. I took copies of Dan’s East River Review chapbook to distribute.

*

The Ted Berrigan lack of turnout prompted me to work on publicity: press releases, packets with bios, flyers in other parts of the city, as well in the neighborhood. I gathered a sheaf of flyers and a roll of scotch tape and started down the block toward Tenth Avenue.

From the doorway at the top of the church’s slate steps, I saw a man walking a dog on the flat roof of a ramshackle three-story SRO hotel across the street. An adjacent four-story tenement leaned against the ruin of a five-story brownstone with tinned up windows on the first floor (one framing an irregular whorl of blue spray paint) and empty windows above.

As I taped flyers to lampposts, I came to a gated alley with ivy-covered walls. At the end of a cobblestone alleyway, leafy trees in a courtyard stood in front of another brick building with a second-floor balcony edged by a wrought-iron railing. On one side of the alley, a building was painted cool lime-green offsetting ornate black fire escapes. These buildings, alley and courtyard were a touch of New Orleans, I thought, remembering a trip with my parents to that city when I was eleven or twelve.

On the block, the buildings came in a variety of styles and ornamentation, in shades of brown, red, tan, or green, some well-kept, others derelict or chipped and worn about the edges. There were red brick tenements and coffee-colored brownstones with flights of steps up to the front doors, and modern apartment houses of light brick with street level entrances.

Halfway down the block I peered through a tall black metal fence. What I saw surprised me, even though I could see the fence and trees from the church. A playground cut through the entire block from West 46th to West 45th Streets, a gap about a hundred feet wide. The double gates were open. I ventured in. To my left a full basketball court, and on my right, young men played handball while others looked on. The hard, dusky blue