Three weeks ago I was in New York City to visit family and do a couple of “salon” poetry readings, one uptown at a friend’s apartment to a group of thirty or so of her literary friends, the other a 9/11 anniversary reading of eight poets in a loft in Brooklyn. Both readings were pleasant literary punctuation to visits with our two sons, now New Yorkers.
These recent readings were very different from my first trip to the city in 1978 when I was just a year out of college, a Southern boy from the suburbs of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Back then, New York City was Oz for me, an Emerald City mostly imagined through the lens of Hollywood films, Bohemian poetry, and urban novels. When my first visit to the city finally happened it was anchored by a real reading before a crowd of literary strangers at a smoky bar.
My youthful reading at Chumley’s Bar & Grill in the West Village was the first big public event of my life as a poet. Back then Chumley’s had quite a long and colorful history. Opened in 1922 by Leland Chumley, former stage coach driver, the bar operated as a speakeasy /gambling den through Prohibition. There was no sign at the entrance, a oddity still in place when I read there in 1978.
During Prohibition days the bar became one of New York City's leading literary dives. There were portraits of writers lining the walls. All the great ones drank there: of course, Dylan Thomas, but also Djuna Barnes, John Cheever, Ring Lardner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck, James Thurber, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s said the Fitzgeralds ended up there after their wedding party at the Plaza, and after drinking at Chumley's consummated their marriage in one of the booths.
Besides being a literary hangout, back then Chumley’s had a regular poetry series run (it’s strange to remember such a little detail) by a woman named Sara. That particular Chumley’s event was a special one (at least for me) called “Carolina Poets Night.”
I have no idea how the reading came about, who got in touch with Sara or what. All I know is that it happened and I read with poets Susan Ludvigson and Chuck Sullivan.
I didn’t know Chuck at all except through his fine poetry book Vanishing Species, published several years before. I’d met Susan a year or so earlier when I’d been invited as a college senior to a workshop/reading by the poet Donald Hall at Wintrop College.
Reading in the Village in a famous old Speakeasy was as good as it could get for a 23 year-old poet from the provinces. I think I took the train up and I arrived a few days early. When I got to town a big blizzard had just hit. I was staying uptown near Columbia University with high school friend. Jim was in graduate journalism school at Columbia and he’d given me directions to his apartment: come into Grand Central and take one of the lines to Harlem. The train comes out of the ground up there and when I got off I had to walk down this huge steel staircase into the street below and the city scape was still snow covered. The first thing I witnessed on that first morning in New York was a car sliding on the ice into the back of a taxi and the taxi driver jumping out, pulling the driver out the window by his shirt, and slapping him two or three times in the face, getting back in the cab and driving away. New York in the 70s!
That January there was also a Wofford College interim up in the city led by philosophy professor Walt Hudgins. A day or so before the reading Walt took me to eat at the Algonquin hotel where we sat in tables that were back to back with other diners, including the actor Peter Boyle. I was close enough to him to listen in on his conversation. Walt told me to order anything I wanted on the menu and not knowing much I ordered Welsh Rarebit, thinking I was getting a nice wild meat entre. Walt laughed at the surprised look on my face when the egg dish arrived.
Funny, but I don’t recall very much of the reading. I think it was late afternoon, maybe a Saturday. There was a big crowd and I remember admiring the way Chuck (a native New Yorker) was dressed like my idea of a real poet, with a turtleneck and a big scarf he kept twirling back around his neck as he read.
I was sad to hear that Chumley’s closed a few years ago. Instead of searching for a literary bar we sailed on the Hudson River with our sons and walked The High Line with our friend Cathy and exited near Poets House in TriBeCa.
We went inside at Poets House and upstairs in the stacks I found a book of my poems lodged deep in the shelves among thousands and thousands of slender volumes deposited there. Seeing my presence at Poets House made a nice footnote to my reading thirty years earlier.
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Tomorrow I plan to continue my literary nostalgia about my early years as a poet by writing about my apprentice year at Copper Canyon Press—“Poet in Port Townsend, 1979.”
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