The drinks at the 2nd Poetry & Cocktail Slam at Back Forty were designed to have a bite, to sneak up on partakers – like the seven paired poems, like any good poem.
Drink in hand, Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club read each poem in front of the NYC bar or restaurant alchemist who invented the cocktail. Poet and performer, Holman read with his own magic: softly, slowly for “Somewhere I Never Traveled” by E. E. Cummings or booming for “Crossing the Bar” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The benefit for the Academy of American Poets was hosted by Peter Hoffman at his East Village restaurant with tasty treats from his kitchen. This year’s cocktail recipes and some of the poems will join the inaugural ones at www.poets.org/cocktails.
Tom Macy from Clover Club in Carroll Gardens paired his berried and bubbly drink Clever Girl with the Emily Dickinson poem that begins "NATURE rarer uses yellow." Like many a Dickinson poem that lulls by surface sublime from the natural world, Macy floated a yellow pansy in the drink. All the better to heighten the punch.
“Just like me,” said Jessica Knevals ordering a Clever Girl, wearing yellow heels as bright as the flowers.
“I’d be lying if I said you were the first person to say that,” Macy replied.
Bar banter fueled by alcohol is likely more interesting to the bar patrons than the bartender. But pack in poetry lovers on a sunny spring Saturday afternoon and a drink based on Dorothy Parker Gin from the New York Distilling Company prompts replies to Holman in full Parker poems.
The longest Parker recitation was from Christopher Michel, also the only living poet on the menu at this year’s slam. His Poem in which I am an asshole as a poorly behaved poet guest inspired a rye drink with the longest lines of the afternoon, A drink which can make you an asshole, mixed by Tom Richter of the Beagle. “Because it will sneak up on you,” Richter said. Holman and Michel read the poem together while the Beagle owner covered his eyes.
”They truly are mixologists,” Holman praised those to mix, shake and pour the libations. "And they make more money than poets.”
Catherine Woodard has played coed, pickup basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. In 2011, Woodard was a featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University.
