Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part XI)

By the winter of 1979-80 Barbara and I held a full season of Waterways poetry fairs and readings. Most of the events had been in the city. My hope was that we could arrange a series of Waterways readings and fairs along the Hudson River and then west along the Erie Canal to Buffalo. I also wanted to explore the possibility of holding readings at the Finger Lakes in the west and Lake George in the north. With preparations under way for the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, I thought we might be able to bring small press poets to that event. We contacted the planners and were invited to submit ideas for a New York City poetry event as part of the countdown to the Olympics.

We thought of a readings at Carnegie Hall and the old Custom’s House. Larger poetry publishers, Norton and Viking/Penguin, joined us for this event. We met with Grover Dale, who had helped in the early days of Ten Penny Players and had gone on to become a successful Broadway director. In the end, we were not able to find the backing to produce the large scale event we were imagining.

We decided to go ahead any way. I was a graduate student at NYU, and able to get space to hold the poetry fair in the student center. The Olympics did not fund us, but recognized us as an official countdown event. A third grade class of students from PS 41, a Greenwich Village school, joined the poets who read in the student lounge. The poets were Barbara Fisher, Hal Sirowitz, Susan Kronenberg, Phyllis Stern, Emilie Glen, Mary Lou DiPietro, Hilda Morley, Zoe Rita Anglesey, France Burke, Zizwe Ngafua, Patricia Fillingham, Sandra Maria Esteves, Madeline Tiger Bass, Virginia Scott, Alan Green, David Katz, Linda Stern, Carole Stone, Dorothy Friedman, Rose Sher, David Ferguson, Donald Lev, Enid Dame, Lucy Angeleri, Harry Smith, Sidney Bernard, Louise Jaffe, Ellen Marie Bissert, Roberta Metz, Concieri Taylor, Ellen Aug, Chuck Nechtem, Philip Shultz, Barbara Holland, Richard Davidson, Stanley Barkan, Carol Polcovar, and Richard Aland Spiegel. Exhibit tables were set up in an adjoining gallery. Kirby Congdon came into the exhibit irate that a publisher was exhibiting a recent book by Ted Hughes. That Olympics event was a test run for future New York Book Fairs at Loeb.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 9

Supplement to Waterways December '79