Bukowski fans packed in to hear open mic readings of his work.

“Are you here for the poetry reading?”, asked the constant stream of people that lined up outside Cornelia Café last Friday. “Yeah,” was the steady response. It’s not often you get lines more akin to those at Grimaldi’s for a poetry reading, but then again, not every poet elicits the level of devotion that Charles Bukowski does.

Into its fourth year, the Annual Charles Bukowski Poetry Reading has steadily grown in popularity. “I think we’re going to do two sets next year, we turned away as many that got in tonight”, said Cornelia curator Angelo Verga.

The night is the brainchild of poets Kat Georges and Peter Carlfates, who emceed the night, “I’m half Greek, half Italian and from the Bronx,” Mr. Carlfates said of himself, “three strikes from birth”.

Inside, the bar staff were kept busy as you’d expect, with red wine a popular—and apt —choice of poison. One smartly dressed inebriated man, noticing our pad, barked at The Observer, while  someone was reciting on stage, “Oh, you gonna do a piece on the the bourgeoisie discussing Bukowski?” The man was shushed. (The gentleman's comment, it seemed to us, said more about his own neurosis (and sobriety) than it did the attendees, who made up as diverse a crowd as you’re likely to find at any gathering; from 19 year-old, street-looking youths to eloquent octogenarians.)

They all jumped onstage full of enthusiasm, the poets and the pleebs, reciting Bukowski's work or paying tribute in their own words. “I don’t actually agree with his advice to not think about poetry, I think there’s a craft to poetry” said poet Bernard Block who recited his own poems; ‘Shit: A Love Song’ and ‘Fuck You:  A Love Song'. Mr. Block cited his “general liberation of language and being able to express yourself on any subject using any language,” as being Bukowski’s great gift.

“He’s real, he gets to me, even though he has poems that are offensive to women,” said poet Linda Lerner, “you can almost taste and drink it, feel and touch it. It’s real and it’s still poetry, even though it’s outside the whole MFA academic establishment.” Which Ms. Lerner is well positioned to comment on, given that she is a part time teacher of poetry at CUNY, “poets don’t teach full time” she said.

“Misogyny was just a part of success in the 70’s, it was this mistrustful edge, it was ‘why should we trust women?’” said Mr. Carlaftes, “Bukowski actually got over that, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist in his world and his writing was his world.” Dana Ullman, originally from San Francisco had similar thoughts, “He’s seen as this kind of lewd guy but in a way it’s his truth in his life, everything he said is something he’s perceiving.”

“He became famous when he was 50, I mean who does that?” said Mr. Carlfates, “Most people know who they are when they are fifty, but he became a new person, who was still important, his words were still universal”

For the man who famously said ‘don’t try’, Bukowski's work has become an industry in itself, with his publishers very much trying; no less than 13 posthumous poetry books have been released. “When he died they just started releasing this stuff,” said Mr. Carlfates, before adding “He had cartons of poems, these are still his poems, but the heart doesn’t seem to be in them like it was in my time. But maybe for the youth it is, so who am I to cut that off?”

“I think he was a much better novelist than poet,” Mr. Verga confessed, “I frankly think he was a middle level maybe not even middle level poet, I know this is heresy, but he wrote great novels. In particular the novel Post Office, I think is the great American novel that people search for but he already wrote it. It’s brilliant.”

Mr. Carlaftes finished off the evening, reciting a rousing version of ‘Poem For a Personnel Manager’, then the clock struck eight and it was time to leave. Bukowski, in the pages of Women pondered on the attendees very dilemma, “That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” Perhaps some in the crowd had that on their mind as they downed the rest of their drinks and readied themselves for the march to the next bar.

sduffy@observer.com

"I regret that I must do this at a particularly difficult time for the Poetry Book Society," he wrote in a statement. "But the business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics. I am grateful to everyone at the PBS for all they have done to promote my work and that of poetry in general." More at the Guardian.

Stephen Boyer and Filip Marinovich (Photo: Marinovich)

If you really want to understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to talk to the poets.

One night last week, late, after ducking out of a birthday party, we wandered down Broadway like we sometimes do now, looking to extend the evening a bit, see what was doing in the park.

Zuccotti was quiet, but charged with energy as it had been for a month and counting. Many of the sleeping bags were already lumpy and zipped tight. Some were moving gently. The library was closed, covered with blue tarps. But two of the librarians, who were also the poets, were still kicking it. They met three weeks ago and are now best friends, they agreed.

These were Stephen Boyer, 27, a former model and paid dominatrix, and Filip Marinovich, 36, a sometime associate professor of poetry.

Not that any of that really matters anymore. “Hierarchies are bullshit,” Mr. Boyer said. In the last three weeks, he had met celebrities, philosophers, politicians—then curled up under a table to await the next unknowable day. “I’m in the most uncomfortable situation I’ve ever been in in my life, and I have more access to the world than ever.”

Sometimes things are their opposites. Mr. Boyer learned this doing his other job, tag-teaming with his girlfriend, dominating people for money. This is physical work, no getting around that, but it’s also psychological. Mostly it’s about power and how to flip it. Good training, actually, for a member of a revolutionary movement.

Mr. Boyer and his girlfriend moved back to the states from London just a few weeks ago, and they were staying in a hotel overlooking ground zero, preparing for a trip to DC, a business trip. Lots of clients down there—all the doms know it’s the best place in the country to beat people and humiliate them and maybe fuck them with a strap-on for money.

When he reunited with his New York friends, they were going on and on about Occupy Wall Street. “I was like, ‘Let’s get a fucking drink. I haven’t seen you in forever.’ Like, whatever. I’ve been to a zillion protests. I really expected nothing.”

The next day, though, he wandered over to Zuccotti Park. After walking around for five minutes, he recalled, “I just started crying. I was like, This is not like anything I’ve ever seen. It’s what we’ve always wanted to be happening but never figured out how to do.”

Mr. Marinovich agreed. “I gave up on this a long time ago, and yet here it is,” he said.

+++

Of course we asked them about what everyone outside this movement—especially members of the media—seems want to talk about, and nobody on the inside is particularly concerned with: What do you all want? What are the demands? How do you know when you’ve won and can go home?

The poets were polite. They tried to answer. They were tired, as everyone is down there. Running on pure adrenaline. But these were the wrong questions, the ones you ask when you don’t yet get it. These were the questions of the world outside the park—the world of prose. Occupy Wall Street is actually, it turns out, occurring in the realm of poetry and spirit. It’s a sort of waking dream. Which is why it’s so strangely powerful and cannot be sneered away or shoveled over with cynicism (not that we didn’t try) or kettled into history, and may even survive the winter in New York.

“Demands will grow,” Mr. Boyer assured us calmly, with a patience we immediately envied, as we had not felt patient like that in a very long time. He was tall and young, and wore mostly black and didn't seem very much like a sadist at all. “Demands will eventually come. But this is a space for learning. I’ve learned more here in the last two weeks than I have in all those years of college.”

That’s not a dig on the University of San Francisco, where Mr. Boyer majored in creative writing and sociology. The degree didn’t get him far, though, so he has done what he had to do for money, some good, some not so good. He walked the runway last year in London for Ziad Ghanem, for instance, the designer widely viewed as the creative heir to Alexander McQueen. Mr. Ghanem placed volumes of Mr. Boyer’s poetry on every seat in the front row, and Mr. Boyer’s picture turned up in British Vogue. That was the good job.

But it seems like a different life now. He no longer knows the person in those pictures.

In his 1985 cult anarchist treatise T.A.Z., Hakim Bey, aka the poet Peter Lamborn Wilson, described what he dubbed the temporary autonomous zone: “a guerrila operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination).” Which is as good a description of Occupy Wall Street as any.

The library. (Flickr/hukdunshur)

Such zones have flourished, however briefly, around the world, often in secret, Mr. Bey wrote, but in in contemporary America he thought such a space would most likely emerge after three conditions were met. First, people needed to understand not only how the State (Wall Street, the One Percent, whatever) had enslaved them but also “the ways in which we are ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us.” When the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek showed up in the park a few weeks back, he compared this process of awakening to the John Carpenter movie They Live, in which the protagonist, Nada, finds a pair of special sunglasses which reveal that  the advertising billboards all around him carry hidden messages: submit, stay asleep, conform, consume. The dollar bill? This is your god. (And spoiler alert: the rich are all aliens.)

The second condition was that the internet would need to evolve into a useful tool of dissent and organization.

And third, Mr. Bey wrote, “The State must progress on its present course in which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss of power.”

Check, check, check.

+++

It was windy. The blue tarps were whipping around. Mr. Boyer was asked another of those questions a reporter might ask, an outside-the-zone question. We were just visiting, after all.

“Ever have any famous clients?”

“I’ve had powerful clients. I’ve also had a lot of middle-class clients and a lot who just lost their jobs and don’t know what to do and are freaking out and they want fetish relief from all the pain. I’m like, ‘Sorry, I didn’t want to take your money, but that’s what it’s about.’”

“Political people?”

“So many times.”

“People you recognized?”

“Sure. I’m not going to give you names. But like, I’ve had clients before who are very close to Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, for instance. And I’m just like, ‘Really? Really? You hang out with them every day?’”

Mr. Boyer suggested his girlfriend come to Zuccotti. She said no. Her room was overlooking the reconstruction of  the World Trade Center site, and at one point, Mr. Boyer stood on the balcony, peering down at what felt to him like a graveyard. Then he turned back to watch her on the luxurious bed in the sleekly minimalist room. “She looked so isolated. And I was like, ‘You sure you don’t want to come to Occupy Wall Street?’” No thanks, she said.

“I think that division of psychic-ness is the main reason why we had to go our own ways.”

It seems clear that the lack of demands is not the problem with this thing but its engine. We ask the usual questions because that is how we understand—or, not understand at all, really, but control and contain, and then dismiss or exploit, according to our individual agenda or cast of mind. Those of us standing outside the park—who could, at any moment, simply step across the threshold—want to flick it aside it or put it to use, because that’s what we have learned to do. Box it up, slap on a label, file it away.

Like Mr. Bey said, “As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind an empty husk.”

Which might be why everyone keeps asking.

+++

Mr. Marinovich is married and has a place on the Lower East Side. He doesn’t sleep in the park but hangs out all the time. He has taught poetry at Columbia and the St. Marks Poetry Project. He had a wild beard, and soft eyes and was wearing a hooded wind-breaker.

He compared Zuccotti Park to Sherwood Forest. “It’s the true Akademia,” he said, referring to the original school founded by Plato in an Athenian grove of olive trees. He, too, struggled to remember the person he was before Occupy Wall Street. “There’s this huge clash and rift between everything that came before and now. It’s so full of danger and possibility and opportunity and ecstasy and everyone’s falling in love and everyone looks so beautiful and you just want to walk through and have sex with everyone.”

Not that either poet had had any actual sex in the sacred grove. Another literal question we had to ask. Truth be told, we too were falling in love with this movement, but we remained affixed to the other zone, ever alert to the clickable headline.

Anyway, the point was not about sex, both poets agreed, laughing. “There’s a tremendous psychic eros going on here, this connection that we feel together,” Mr. Marinovich explained. “It creates this courage to stand up to whatever happens.”

“The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild but gentle,” Mr. Bey wrote, inspired, to a large degree, by the great Sufi poets. It's “a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.”

Mr. Marinovich added that most interactions in the world outside are money-centered. Not in the park. They had no money, and yet they were well fed. Nobody mentioned Jesus, or the communities of early Christians, but you have to think those disciples had a brightness in their eyes that these poets would recognize. They, too, had crossed a threshold between then and now. The followers of Jesus had abandoned their families, had given up concerning themselves with money or anything practical, feeling certain the messiah was coming (to ask whether he did or not is to miss the point). They had loaves and fishes that fed a multitude. The occupiers have pizza—sometimes 300 pies a day—that somehow just arrives. They trust that they will be O.K., that fellowship will sustain them, and so far they are O.K.

Mr. Marinovich marveled at the “immediate, urgent intimacy” he felt in the park, among the occupiers. “It’s completely natural and unforced,” he said, “and it has so much to do with the absence of money as a center, because when that’s not in the center, what is in the center we don’t know, and into that opening everything can flow.”

+++

Mr. Marinovich views Zuccotti Park as sacred space. Mr. Boyer’s description of ground zero as a “graveyard” seemed apt, he said. There was a reason, maybe subconscious, that they were occupying this place. Close to Wall Street, yes, but closer to where the towers fell.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he said. “The dead have been used for ten years as fuel for this war. I don’t think that’s anything they would have wanted. To hijack the spirits of the dead and use them to create this permanent state of war is one of the vilest things you could possibly do.” (One thought of Mr. Boyer’s clients, who might have been in that Pentagon basement when the decisions were made, plans drawn up. Or maybe that’s just what johns inside the Beltway always tell their young boy poet–dominatrixes.)

“I feel like this is the real tenth anniversary of 9-11,” Mr. Marinovich continued. “It’s weird what was leading up to this. The whole commemoration, but before that Hurricane Irene, which was like this cleansing thing. All that happened. And being here on the periphery of ground zero, so loaded with spirits....”

A year ago, he’d been walking around the area, and he’d felt that the spirits were walking with him. Telling him things. Which he wrote down in a poem that is now in the Occupy Wall St. Poetry Anthology, which Mr. Boyer and Mr. Marinovich created together, out of contributions from people in the park and others who sent in work online and keep sending more, so much they can hardly read it all. Contributors include Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, Michael McLure, Elliott Katz, but anyone can contribute by sending their work to stephenjboyer@gmail.com, with "occupy poetry" in the subject line.

Two copies of the anthology, which are in binders so they can grow each day, are kept in the Occupy library and are not online. But you can borrow them—there is no checking out or checking in—or hear them at the weekly poetry assembly, every Friday at 9:30 p.m. Or you can just ask, like we did. Mr. Marinovich went first, reading the piece he’d written a year ago, when the spirits of the dead had whispered to him. “This is called ‘Wolfman Librarian and the Trembling Pair of Actor Hands,’” he said, and noted that it was long. The beginning went something like this: “Tell me this grove will protect me / From World Trade Towers Lightning forking the brain / Mine! Mine! / Why are there trains under the grass / And my butt is wet / Why do you constantly interrupt yourself? / My rhythm is the rhythm of interruption.”

Mr. Boyer went next, with a poem he’d put down in a rush on one of his first giddy nights in Zuccotti Park. Again, an except: “We need a sex space in the park, a space surrounded by tarps, held by the people, so we can get naked and fill each other with ourselves,” he read. And a few lines later: “I want to moan as the bankers and men on Wall Street watch with their binoculars, and in this way we shall win. They’ll come, demanding our naked bodies, and we’ll share ourselves. Sasha Gray, where are you? Get down here and gang bang for democracy. And show them just how beautiful our bodies, and the way we glow when we make one another radiate.”

+++

Mr. Boyer used to suffer from anxiety. He used to do drugs, sometimes hard ones, and drink every day. In his three weeks in the park, spending hour after hour meeting people, talking about ideas, reciting poetry, he’s felt free of that. “There’s this hunger inside for the kind of community that I am now having access to,” he explained. “Since that wasn’t available to me, I’d partake of drugs to kind of numb that desire, because there was such a void in me. A lot of people are in the same mindspace.” He added, however, that some were actually using more, maybe because they’re so disoriented and exhausted. Who knows? It was hard to pin down exactly what was going on for the people who’d entered into this experiment.

Mr. Marinovich jumped in. “This is nonlinear time, saturated now-time,” he explained, “‘time shot through with the presence of the the now,’ as Benjamin called it.” We had to look that up. Now-time was a long time ago for us. The reference was to Theses on the Philosophy of History, which Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish literary critic, wrote in January 1940, as the Nazis prepared to invade France. Eight months later, after fleeing to Spain, Benjamin learned that Franco had decided to return the refugees to Paris. He swallowed a handful of morphine pills.

Anyway, that was history. This was now-time. Jetztzeit. The revolutionary moment, the messianic age, which might extend forever, or not that long, but was somehow ever-present.

It seemed inevitable somehow that in the eyes of the outside world, at least, that the Occupy Wall Street movement would eventually flame out. People would begin to bicker. Splinter groups would form. January would be colder than anyone imagined. It all seemed very fragile. But by a different measure, the occupiers had already won. Their lives felt meaningful, were meaningful, in a way they hadn’t been before, which is a treasure that does not trade on the stock exchange and that most of us, whatever our percentile, rarely get our greedy hands on.

“Look around,” Mr. Boyer said. “We just slept through three days of pouring rain and everyone is still smiling.”

It's a big win for independent publishing house New Directions, which published the new collected poems of Mr. Tranströmer in 2006, Graywolf Press, which published his "Best Poems" in 2001, and Ecco, which published another collected poems in 2000. In the Publishers Weekly review of the New Directions collection, which received a starred review, Mr. Tranströmer was described as "a perennial Nobel Prize candidate." Destiny fulfilled!

And this, from Poets.org:

He has read at many American universities, often with poet and friend Robert Bly. Tranströmer is a respected psychologist, and has worked at a juvenile prison, and with the disabled, convicts, and drug addicts. He lives with his wife Monica in Vasteras, west of Stockholm.

While the mayor's decision was controversial (New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was none too happy about his soliloquy), the selections proved rather telling, especially since the mayor also banned religious leaders from speaking at the event. This meant that the only prayers said were those of the president and the mayor's predecessor.

*President Barack Obama, 8:46, Flight 11 strikes the north tower, Psalm 46.
*President George W. Bush, 9:02, Flight 175 hitting the south tower, Abraham Lincoln's letter to Lydia Bixby.
*Governor Andrew Cuomo, 9:37, Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, passage from Franklin Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech.
*Governor Chris Christie, 9:59, Collapse of the south tower, Mary Lee Hall's "Turn Again to Life."
*Governor George Pataki, 10:03, Crash of Flight 93 near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, "The Names" by Billy Collins.
*Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, 10:28, Fall of the north tower, Ecclesiastes 3:1-9.

Interesting that the two conservative governors read the most progressive pieces.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

A crayfish

A few days ago, Philip Levine was named the next poet laureate.

Yesterday, the New York Times picked up a New Orleans journalist's revelation that Zabar's lobster salad was not made of lobster but was, in fact, made of crayfish, prompting Zabars to change the product's name to “seafare salad.”

This convergence of events can only mean one thing: it is time to listen to an MP3 of William Carlos Williams (who was once appointed poet laureate, but didn't serve) reading his great poem "Seafarer" at the 92nd Street Y (right across town from Zabar's) in January, 1954.

Good news! We've located this MP3 for you.

Here it is.

This poem, which is not very widely known, has, in The Observer's humble opinion, one of the best last lines ever, one that is  even better in the poet's own recitation of it.

Happy seafaring.

The Poetry Foundation responds that it has dozens of Philip Levine poems available for free, and Philip Levine recordings, and Philip Levine videos, so don't despair.

Lincoln Debates

Not all is well at Lincoln Center--the City Opera finally bolted for greener (hopefully more acoustically sound) pastures, and the City Ballet's season was described by our venerable dance critic as "schizophrenic." Plus, they have a theater named after a tea-partying Koch brother! But the site's ongoing redevelopment continues apace, and the latest step is unveiled this afternoon when Reynold Levy, president of Lincoln Center, presides over a ribbon-cutting for the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. The new theater will include two screening rooms, an amphitheater and a cafe. It's been designed by architect David Rockwell, in case it reminds you of one of his Nobu restaurants. The theater officially begins screenings on June 17 with the New York Times documentary Page One. We just hope it's in 3-D, so we can all witness David Carr pounding out copy in his full glory! ... Meanwhile, super-duper-model Iman hosts the Gordon Parks Foundation Dinner. The late Parks was, among his many other accomplishments, the director of Shaft, and his foundation is meant to honor those "who have contributed their lives to the arts." Naturally, the honorees include legendary performance artist Arianna Huffington, as well as fashion alien Karl Lagerfeld and TED impresario Sir Ken Robinson.

Lincoln Center ribbon-cutting ceremony at 4pm, 144 West 65th Street, closed to public; Gordon Parks Foundation Dinner, Gotham Hall, 1356 Broadway, 6:30pm cocktails, 7:30pm dinner, visit gordonparksfoundation.org for tickets and information.

Thursday, June 2

Health and Wealth

Cipriani is positively crawling tonight with world leaders (seriously, do not drop a bomb on this place!) in town for the Global Business Coalition Conference and Gala Awards: Ted Turner! George Soros! Gordon Brown! Whoopi Goldberg! We know, the former Hollywood Squares Center Square and View hostess isn't quite on a par, powerwise, with former prime ministers or Bilderberg Group members, but she's a seasoned hostess, and she'll keep the proceedings running smoothly. Honorees were selected for their dedication to global health--try to catch one during the creatively titled predinner "networking reception." All receptions are about networking, of course, but the chance to catch up with Mr. Soros and ask him to float you a $50 is something special.

Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street, 6pm networking reception, 7pm dinner with musical performances by Natalie Merchant, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, and Vusi Mahlasela, visit conference2011.gbcimpact.org for tickets and information. 

Friday, June 3

Cheek by Howl

I saw the greatest minds of my generation ... gathered for a party in Tompkins Square Park! The poet Allen Ginsberg may be gone, but his acolytes grow in number--once you've been played on film by James Franco, you're on the poetry A-list. Ginsburg groupies of all ages gather tonight for the commencement of the Howl Festival, a three-day celebration of all things Allen. Tonight brings a group reading of Howl, the poet's signature work--happily, times have changed, so presumably the attendees won't be prosecuted for vulgarity! Saturday and Sunday's events include a children's carnival, just in case you want Junior to get inculcated into Beat culture very, very early.

Howl Festival begins tonight at Tompkins Square Park, group reading 5pm-7pm, free, visit howlfestival.com for information.

Saturday, June 4

Buck You!

What would you like to do on your weekend in the Hamptons? If you're anything like us, you're ready to duck into a movie theater (the beaches have their fleeting charms, but it's so hot outside). The documentary Buck--which recently earned itself a private Tom Brokaw-hosted screening in New York--continues its race to become the most widely seen-among-socialites film of the season with a screening at the Hamptons International Film Festival's SummerDocs series. (The film profiles a brilliant horse whisperer, so go ahead and wear your jodhpurs.) After the screening, James Lipton interviews the salty if handsome equine expert--hopefully asking him those great Liptonian questions about curse words and turn-ons. Whoa, Nelly.

Guild Hall, John Drew Theater,
158 Main Street (East Hampton), 8pm, visit guildhall.org for tickets
and information.

Sunday, June 5

Back in the Saddle

Speaking of horses, the smart set gathers on Governors Island today for the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic. It's an afternoon of Champagne, sweltering heat and thrilling riding. The Australian dynamo Hugh Jackman is to preside over the event (replacing absentee star Prince Harry--sorry, you would-be princess brides!). Other big names in attendance include bona fide horsey lady Georgina Bloomberg, Fiat heir Lapo Elkann, Washington senatorial scion Chet Lott, and Top Chefstress Padma Lakshmi. Before the polo begins, we'll be trying to sneak our way onto Ms. Lakshmi's picnic blanket for the afternoon's outdoor repast-- if anyone would know what food to pack for an afternoon picnic, it'd be her! (For all those less connected, Danny Meyer's restaurants have set up outposts to provide sustenance. Be sure to ask for a sugar cube for the ponies!)

Governors Island, ferries depart
from Battery Maritime Building at
10 South Street, gates open 11am, polo begins at 2:30, awards ceremony at 4pm, information, maps and tickets available at vsseason.com/polo.

Monday, June 6

Fashion Plates

Anderson Cooper has serious ties to the fashion industry; after all, his mom used to design our favorite jeans! Tonight, the denim heir--who's pretty dapper himself!--hosts the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards. Unlike certain bloated ceremonies we could mention, the CFDAs have only three nominees per category (Alexander Wang, those Proenza Schouler boys and Marc Jacobs face off for Womenswear Designer of the Year), so Mr. Cooper's hosting job will be a bit streamlined, just like the sleek menswear he prefers. Some categories have already announced their winners: Lady Gaga will pick up the Fashion Icon Award (expect her to don something simple and tasteful--a nice blouse, perhaps, and chic slacks), and Celine's Phoebe Philo will nab the International Award. We'll be watching Mr. Cooper's hosting efforts closely--the guy can handle hurricanes, but you don't get to be the next Oprah without facing down Marc Jacobs ...

Alice Tully Hall, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, arrivals and cocktail hour, 6:30pm, event to follow, visit cfda.com for more information.

Tuesday, June 7

Naturopathy

Summer means time outdoors, naturally--but does it have to be so natural? (We prefer the Hamptons, or, if we're slumming it, Sheeps Meadow.) Well-meaning vegetable gardens--intended to help students eat healthfully and live off the land--aren't simply limited to the White House lawns! Earlier this year, a farm unexpectedly sprouted up in the Battery, under the auspices of the Battery Conservancy, and now this "Urban Farm" is the setting for an outdoor shindig. The Battery Conservancy's "Farm to Feast" gala honors legal eagle Robert Morgenthau with a big-tent blow-out right next to the farm ... For those unafraid of venturing to Brooklyn, the Botanic Garden is preparing a Spring Gala with Champagne in the Herb Garden, cocktails in the Rose Garden and dinner on the Cherry Esplanade. Even the after-party is outside, though we hope the only ones "making it rain" are the high-spirited and generous attendees.

Battery Gala, tent on Battery lawn next to Urban Farm (enter at State and Pearl Streets), 6pm cocktails, 7pm dinner, call (212) 344-3491 x21 for tickets and information; Brooklyn Botanic Garden Spring Gala, 5:30pm Champagne, 6:30pm cocktails, 8pm dinner, 9:30pm after party, visit bbg.org for tickets and information.

Wednesday, June 8

Teenage Dreams

It's prom season for the city's teens, who are flooding florists and packing tuxedo rental shops. And for one night, at least, it's prom night for the rest of us, too, at the Urban Arts Partnership's so-called Prom benefit, a do-over of sorts for those of us who spent the big night weeping in our bedrooms back in high school. This "Prom" boasts all the high-school-y trappings--hors d'oeuvres, dancing, romance--as well as cocktails (though sadly, the spiked punch will be obtained legally)! Vanity Fair's saucy interlocutor George Wayne, Social Network socialite-in-training Jesse Eisenberg, and the artiste Alan Cumming are among those who'll don blue ruffled tuxes to benefit the Urban Arts Partnership, which promotes arts education for citified youngsters. Save us a dance, Jesse!

Edison Ballroom, 240 West 47th Street, 7:30pm, call (212) 966-5881
for tickets and information.

Scads of potential poetry fanatics, on Mr. Orr's view, are as lost in the wilderness of contemporary poetry as they would be if they were suddenly transported to--well, Belgium is Mr. Orr's analogy. Yes, Brussels is a forbidding place, but The New York Times Book Review's "poetry columnist" is here to teach you which is the salad fork and which the thorn of life upon which you fall and bleed. In his recent and inevitable Times weigh-in on O: The Oprah Magazine's "spring fashion modeled by poets" issue, Mr. Orr delivered himself of his eternal lament: "for an overwhelming majority of the culture, almost every poem has an inscrutable ending, even the ones that aren't actually inscrutable." Beautiful & Pointless is intended to change that (or at least to convince Mr. Orr's editors that they have the right man in position to do so).

But a book that undertakes to educate "general readers" about contemporary poetry is handicapped by the uncomfortable truth that there is no such thing as a general reader.

Mr. Orr commits the usual liberal fallacy of assuming social phenomena are rooted in the individual, rather than the other way around. A Russian cabbie once recited a lengthy passage of Pushkin to me, providing a rough-and-ready translation. It's difficult to imagine many Americans who are not themselves academics or poets (the first set contains the second)--whether cabbies, Wal-Mart cashiers, lawyers or neurosurgeons--reciting Whitman or Dickinson, or even being able to quote one or two of their most famous lines, much less managing to name a single living American poet. People would read poetry if poetry were valued by the culture: That seems tautological only if you assume that "culture" is simply an agglomeration of individuals. The culture, however, does value books that purport to teach you how to master a laborious, intensive process in the time it takes to read 190 pages.

Beautiful & Pointless divides Belgium into six "concepts": "The Personal"; "The Political"; "Form"; "Ambition"; "The Fishbowl," about the sociology of poetry; and "Why Bother?" The first section addresses the knotty question of who is speaking in poetic speech, but it does so in a cursory way typical of the volume. Mr. Orr appears to believe that the crucial question for "general readers" is whether the poem is a direct record of the biographical person's experience and feelings, so he spends a lot of time discussing karaoke and the poetry of Jewel.

The section on "the political" reduces the complexities of its subject to the notion that politics and poetry are inspired by analogous "visions." The affinities between these forms of representation have been noted at least since Plato, but Mr. Orr treats them in a programmatic fashion, reproving a platitudinous poem by Robert Hass called "Bush's War" for quoting Goethe. (The "general reader" has no German.)

The chapter on form advises readers seeking a detailed explanation of meter to look elsewhere. In his discussion of "ambition," Mr. Orr informs the ingénue that poets seek to develop a distinctive style within which they might produce something "difficult to forget." The chapter allegedly on "sociology" is a collection of gossip, from which one may learn that poets can be egotistical jerks.

Ultimately, Mr. Orr cannot provide much of a reason to "bother" with poetry, and who can blame him? You don't fall in love with poetry because someone provides you with reasons. Something that is already within you--something that probably must be cultivated in childhood--responds to a line, a cadence, a strange use of language. Mr. Orr knows this: He is at his most convincing when describing how, in college, he discovered Philip Larkin's poem "Water," whose "deliberately offhand tone ... was practically the opposite of what I'd thought poetry was supposed to sound like." Mr. Orr's reaction to Larkin's lines "Any-angled light/ Would congregate endlessly" is instructive: "'Any-angled light' doesn't actually make much sense, I thought, but at the same time it made perfect sense. It sounded right. To read it, to say it, made me think (as Larkin himself once put it), 'That's marvelous, how is it done, could I do it?'"

This is right; the experience it describes can't be taught. Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading (which remains the most useful text on the subject precisely because it is the most idiosyncratic) wrote the only sentence one need consult: "The proper METHOD for studying poetry ... is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another." Pound won't tell you what an anapest is, either, but he includes very little about Foetry.com.

 I am not suggesting that this is a bad book of its kind, but that this kind of book is usually bad. Mr. Orr is a capable critic; his reviews are always worth reading. What he's not, ever, is a risky critic, and a book like this requires something of Pound's bilious irony if it is to avoid lapsing into the bland public-service antics that always accompany well-meaning attempts to get people interested in poetry. (At the book's nadir, Mr. Orr is tallying Google hits for the phrase "I love poetry.")

Mr. Orr has taken to heart Pound's admonition that "Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man," but I'm afraid Mr. Orr thinks he is funny. And he just isn't. Nothing here approaches the badness of the laughless parody of The Paris Review's Culture Diaries he wrote last month for The Awl (Google it--you can actually hear the crickets), but most of the jokes reminded me of a professor trying to be hip. About a Jennifer Moxley poem that bemoans the way poets read one another, Mr. Orr asks, "What if we think that this particular injustice ranks significantly below jaywalking, and maybe one tick above bogarting the nachos?" Elsewhere he says that Pound "was sort of the Courtney Love of his day." A little of this goes a long way, but like Dave Fleischer in the early Popeye cartoons, Orr has to have a gag in every scene.

All of which makes it somewhat unfortunate that the final pages of Beautiful & Pointless are so affecting and finely drawn. They contain an account of Mr. Orr's attempts to introduce his father to the pleasures of poetry as he was dying of cancer. It sounds like the sort of treacly resort to intimacy that Mr. Orr rightly derides elsewhere, but he is too smart not to realize that, to defend against it by letting down his defenses. He writes for the first time in the book as if he means it. His father resisted Robert Frost but fell for Edward Lear. "'I really like,' said Dad, 'the runcible spoon.'" These last few pages are enough to make you wish Mr. Orr had written a different kind of book. Certainly they tell the reader far more than anything else here about how beautiful poetry can be, and why that beauty is often to be found in poetry's very pointlessness.

editorial@observer.com

Coffee Talk

We're betting Tina Brown likes her coffee the same way she likes her copy: "V. v. hot!" Guests will find out tonight as the High Beastess herself throws a private book party at her Upper East Side townhouse for Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's memoir, Onward (we hear it's full of beans). Expect plenty of Ms. Brown's beloved "buzz"--especially after those lattes start flowing. ... Meanwhile, Rob Pruitt will reveal his Andy Monument, a larger-than-life-size statue of the late Pop pioneer Andy Warhol, in Union Square near where the Factory was once located. Chloë Sevigny-who was 12 when Andy died but seems as good a choice as any-will perform the unveiling, which is to be followed by a private cocktail reception and dinner for the likes of happily married Peter Brant and punky princess Hope Atherton (we hope she never grows up!).
Tina Brown residence, private event begins 6:30 p.m.; Unveiling of The Andy Monument at Broadway and 17th Street, 6 p.m., private cocktails near the old Factory, 6:30 p.m., dinner hosted by Interview magazine in Union Square, 8:30 p.m.

Thursday, March 31

Making Bank

Turns out Muhammad Yunus, the Macher of Microlending, is also a movie star. Screening for one night only, To Catch a Dollar, a documentary about Mr. Yunus' attempts to bring his style of teensy-weensy loans to Queens, in 2008, will unspool at two theaters, under the auspices of Screenvision. Yes, this is also the service that brought moviegoers Suzanne Somers talking about her vitamins for two hours! The Nobel Peace Prize winner was recently relieved of his duties at the institution he founded, Grameen Bank, so if he's looking for a new home, we hope he'll consider New York. We spent all our money at Starbucks--Tina told us to--so maybe he can float us a little scratch?
Chelsea Cinemas, 260 West 23rd Street; 86th Street Cinemas, 210 East 86th Street; both screenings begin at 7:30 p.m. with taped appearances by Suze Orman, Matt Damon, Hugh Jackman and others; go to tocatchadollar.com for tickets.

Friday, April 1

Tokyo Stories

We can hardly believe the multiple tragedies unfolding in Japan right now. And yes, it seems a very awkward time for a tribute to "five Japanese divas" of the silver screen. But Film Forum's long-planned series offers numerous reminders of the nation's incredible resilience, not to mention the sublime beauty of its movies. The series begins tonight with Kenji Mizoguchi's Life of Oharu, a heartbreaking 1952 melodrama starring Kinuyo Tanaka. After the movie, head up the street to the Maritime Hotel, where Matsuri restaurant is hosting the Sachiyo Ito dance company. Ten percent of the restaurant's proceeds go to the Japan Society's Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.

The Life of Oharu plays at 1:10, 4:20, and 7:30 Friday and Saturday at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, buy tickets at filmforum.org or at the box office. Matsuri, 369 West 16th Street; Sachiyo Ito performs in 20-minute sets, go to dancejapan.com for more information.

Saturday, April 2

Le Geek, C'est Chic

Somewhere along the line-probably around the time we elected a new-media billionaire mayor-we became a city of geeks. The whole town! (We hear Lady Liberty is even sporting a pocket protector.) Last month, we all lost our heads anticipating Rupert Murdoch's iPad app-then, appetite sated by the bananas-looking weather page, we went back to flinging little birds around and cultivating virtual corn. Now the Brooklyn Academy of Music is taking it to the "next level" (gamer humor) with a two-night festival of the music from Final Fantasy. Yes, the video game. (Think Super Mario meets Pagilacci.) Premium tickets, which are going for $175 (almost enough for your very own real-life Sword of Nero!), include a meet-and-greet with the game's composer and the conductor as well as that Comic-Con hallmark: an autograph opportunity.

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Avenue (Brooklyn), Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. (two-night program), tickets available at ffdistantworlds.com (BAM ticketing policies do not apply).

Sunday, April 3

Damn Yankees

Baseball's opening day was Thursday (we know, you were busy trying to secure that microloan), and today the Yankees conclude their opening series against the Detroit Tigers. Warning: This is an athletic event. Some people-you know who you are-find such displays to be mindlessly absurd. But if you find yourself dragged to a sports bar, remember this: It's also a human drama. We hear Minka Kelly's boyfriend is playing. ... Speaking of human drama, mega-miniseries The Kennedys begins tonight on ReelzChannel-and if you get ReelzChannel, welcome to the most exclusive party in town! The show was booted from the History Channel for not being historical enough-or was it too historical?-but who cares! You'll come for the year's most tragic and protracted game of dress-up (Katie Holmes is Jackie Kennedy) but stay because you lost the remote!

Yankee Stadium, 1 East 161st Street (the Bronx), game begins at 1:05 p.m., tickets available at yankees.com; part one of The Kennedys airs at 8 p.m. on ReelzChannel.

Monday, April 4

Some Turnout!

The weather's finally getting halfway decent, but some like it cold, right? At least, so hope the good people behind the Skating With the Stars benefit in Central Park, which helps fund Figure Skating in Harlem. High-rollers can join the likes of Evan Lysacek for a ladies'-choice whirl around the rink. Too bad our ankles are weak-we'll have to sit in the stands, sipping hot cocoa with co-chairs Kenneth Cole and the Tisches. ... Meanwhile, the National Dance Institute's well-trained tykes show off their pliés to donors at its annual gala. The event honors a bunch of corporate types-and Alec Baldwin (who plays one on TV)-for their commitment to the arts.

Skating With the Stars, Wollman Rink, Central Park, 6 p.m., call 212-675-9474 or visit figureskatinginharlem.org for details; National Dance Institute Gala, Best Buy Theater, 1515 Broadway, cocktails at 6 p.m., dinner and performance by the children of National Dance Institute at 7 p.m., call 800-807-1787 or visit nationaldance.org for details.

Tuesday, April 5

Scotch, Neat

We still owe Mel Gibson a debt of gratitude-loony-bird that he is--for igniting the whole men-in-skirts trend (bless his little Braveheart). Gibby won't be attending the the "Dressed to Kilt" fashion show tonight-we promise!  Instead, Sir Sean and Lady Connery (yes, there's a Lady Connery) will host the knee-baring runway peepfest. Kyle MacLachlan, our pick to replace Charlie Sheen, is dropping by, along with celebrities ranging from quasi-Scottish (Mike Myers) to not-Scottish-at-all (model Selita Ebanks). And for the kiddies, Gossip Girl's Matthew Settle will be modeling, too. Publicity--it knows no tartan!... Meanwhile the Brits (Scots' sworn enemies) will be recalling their own glories at a Lincoln Center gala for the opening of West End wonder War Horse. The show is followed by dinner with the cast and Steven Spielberg's producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, surely taking notes for Mr. Spielberg's film adaptation. Who knew the Great War was so much fun?

Dressed to Kilt, Hammerstein Ballroom, 311 West 34th Street, cocktails at 7:30 p.m., fashion show at 9 p.m.; for tickets, go to dressedtokilt.com or call 408-206-6051; War Horse Gala, Lincoln Center Theater, 150 West 65th Street, 6:30 p.m. performance, 9 p.m. dinner with cast, 10:30 p.m. "carriages" (or depart
ure).

Wednesday, April 6

Poetic Justic

The FSG Reading Series--a two-author evening for which we can thank current Paris Review party boy-in-chief Lorin Stein--welcomes former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky and Maggot man Paul Muldoon (that's the title of his latest book; we actually think he's lovely) to the Russian Samovar. "The space itself is so appealing-it's a good place to spend a couple hours," co-organizer Mark Krotov told us. "And the vodka doesn't hurt." (Don't worry, it's infused, so no hangovers!) The FSG organizers take the authors out to dinner afterwards as thanks; stay in the hood and you might be able to chew over free verse--or your favorite limerick!--with Mr. Pinsky. (Stalkery?)

Russian Samovar, 256 West 52nd Street, bar opens at 6:30 p.m., reading begins at 7 p.m., $5 entry fee

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_