THIS IS THAT PLAZA

The exercise in silent poetry rages on. I drove in my truck up to The Hispanic Society on 155 St. on Sunday morning to do a walk through with a few of the future silent performers. I wonder if anyone’s read a great book called The Art of Memory by Frances Fitzgerald. Among other things (I’ve never finished it though I have assigned it to students...) it describes the practice of the study of rhetoric in the ancient world and how one would create a memory house to learn long speeches. To practice you would go to some public plaza at night that had lots of columns and lion statues to basically attach your memory tracks to these items and then when you delivered your speech you would move in your memory through the plaza you’d rehearsed in picking up cues from each staircase and statue you touched as you walked in the night.

The point of this mention is that THIS IS THAT PLAZA. It’s utterly where you would build a memory house. We are kind of creating a physical score to perform our pieces from. Today’s goal is to pick a spot from which five poets could perform silently for ten minutes and then move on to where another group had just performed (there are five groups) so being a fan of self regulation I’m hoping each group captain (I’m calling them captains  of silence – c’mon we’re building an imaginary here…!) will choose their own starting point.

But it’s New York or the world so only one captain could make it, Stephanie Gray and her poet Nathaniel Siegel and Barbara from Dia and Christine Hou who is working w the kids along with Julie Patton. And you know what – it was pouring. And the gates to the plaza were closed and they never are said Christine and Barbara. We peek through the bars till the museum opens, not long. I had a big wad of cash in my shorts, well about $100, from hand-selling books in El Paso. It’s the part of being a poet that’s like waitressing. The bulging pockets you go home with. And somehow between the bodega I bought my diet coke in for the ride and the café we fled to in the rain and the subway (store not real subway) that let me used their bathroom I have lost my wad. Did I tell my compatriots. No I tell you.

After going up and down the steps of the plaza, enjoying the stone balustrades and El Cid sculpture by the wife of Archer Milton Huntington who endowed this place we go inside the museum to explore the possibilities for the alternate indoor silent reading that would take place if it rains on June 30th the night of our performance. It was very easy to imagine it today.

The inside of the museum had many marvels, does -- paintings and maps, a bust of a man whose throat was slit, but the library is sensational. A strange and wonderful map of the world by Amerigo Vespucci’s nephew, a map of the world that’s all coast. Think of it, a big profile, and then we turned and beheld these lovely signs on the table and we knew we were in the right place.

This entry has been long. Next: a very short piece about the unpoetry of John Updike.