NO ENERGY

I figured I’d blog today after I ran but then I just wound up on the bed. It’s May here (I know it’s May everywhere else too) and for catholics it’s the feast of the Ascension and that’s also true to New Yorkers who move their cars from side to side for alternate parking. Today is a holyday off.  It’s soft here. May is the most tremendously soft month in New York and even though a lot of things are happening this month nothing nothing compares to June when everything has to happen before summer begins. So everything is happening in June and today in May I have so little energy maybe none. The silent reading is heating up. That means many things. Going up to 155 St. three times this week basically pacing the upcoming event out like a duel. So far only I think

five Buddhists have signed up. We need more. There will be forty school children performing. Julie Patton and Christine Hou are on top of that scene. The two opera singers (Juliana Snapper and Polly Noonan) will be perched right here. Not exactly on the stone railing looking down on the lower plaza but on two little tiny boxes of a stage right next to it. Safety, safety. The twenty-five poets will be reading and performing silently, the opera singers will gesture then grow still, the Buddhists will sit, and the dancers will do something but I’m not choreographing so I don’t know. But at 8:15 the moment when the whole thing ends the singers will hit one incredible note, the kids who have just performed their poem silently will now perform it out loud and all the other poets will chime in at the same time, a performance not so much of dubious value but of singular intent. Simultaneity is its name. And then everyone will begin talking drinking and laughing. That’s the plan. But for now it looks like a lot of yellow ‘x’s on a big 11 X 14 map. I heard Vito Acconci speak last week about how he had initially been a writer and then he realized floors and ceilings and walls were spaces to place his ideas on too and then he realized that his ideas didn’t have to be words. Without even writing poetry I think many people who admire Vito Acconci’s work think of him as one who hails from our hometown. I mean he has poetic roots. Now he’s moved beyond sculpture and performance art and does architecture. His presentation last week was called Unbuilt Roads and it was about all the buildings he didn’t make. One of his studio’s proposal didn’t fly he told us because they didn’t get it to the post office on time. Him telling us that moved everyone enormously. He told it with a smile. Yes what a poet I thought. Not that I equate poetry with failure necessarily. But the withheld piece I think has everything to do with beauty. It’s the immense and vastly unsaid.