This is the 8th post from my memoir project, an account of my 30 years in the NYC artworld. This post continues a recounting of the researches I made in late 2019, during a two month stay in the city.
Image: Jorge Brandon, El Coco Que Habla, as painted by Bobby G aka Robert Goldman in 1982
I’ve always thought poetry was a bad bet. It’s the high road to invisibility, a demanding discipline and an impossible life course. To make it you’d better be a genius, rich, or die young. All three is best. Still I was corrupted early by an over-qualified junior high school teacher who wanted us all to write sonnets. I was the only one who could.
Poetry in New York City is a strange scene, entwined all at once with academia, bohemia, rock ‘n’ roll and art in many mysterious ways.
My relation to the New York poetry scene has been tangential. I’m a fan. And after my brief stint as an avant-garde text producer in the later ‘70s, that’s all I’ve been. Good poetry is oxygen for writers in other genres. Even the bad stuff, viewed live, is a glimpse into motivation, drive, the expressive impulse that makes the words appear. Readings are a chance to hoist a brew in congenial company. Even if you don’t know them, the poets are friendly, especially if you aren’t claiming a spot to read.
The Unbearables
Michael Carter, my partner in the MWF Video Club, introduced me to the Unbearables group. He loved their elaborate mythology, which seems lifted from a novel by Roberto Bolaño (or vice versa?). Rooted in the camaraderie of early spectacular actions, [cite below: Bollen, 2012] the untangling of the ganglia of this writers and poets collective would reveal a lot about the LES culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
In addition to Jim Feast, with his ties to the Autonomedia publishing project, it includes Ron Kolm, a peripatetic bookstore manager whose collectings and promotions formed the nucleus of the NYU Fales Library’s downtown collection. As the story is told, Ron convinced the librarian Marvin Taylor to change his focus, and the stodgy research collection of Victorian English literature bloomed into a major scholarly resource on the history of the district the university helped destroy.
I allude to the relentless expansionist real estate policies of NYU, which has gobbled up Washington Square Park as its de facto campus, and sited new dormitory buildings on the once-cheaper lands to the east. Sure, the inexorable processes of capitalism bear the responsibility – that is to say, nobody. NYU has been all in on that, and the school has picked over the juicier bones of the neighborhood. Filmmaker Nick Zedd, who sold his archive to the NYU Fales Library, remarked: “NYU destroyed downtown, but at least they paid me to get out of town.” He lives today in Mexico City.
RIP Steve Cannon
After Malena and I settled into our tiny flat in Crown Heights in the fall of ‘19, one of the first sojourns we made was to the Clemente Soto Velez cultural center on Rivington and Suffolk street for an evening memorial to the writer and animateur Steve Cannon. CSV is in an old gothic-style public school building ceded to a Puerto Rican organization which runs it as a cultural complex. It houses theaters, galleries, artists studios, and offices. Among them is the office of ABC No Rio “in exile”, during the period when their new building is being constructed. Director Steven Englander was sitting there nearly every day. ABC’s zine library and archive are also temporarily housed there.
Steve Cannon at Tribes. Photo by Sarah Ferguson
Steve Cannon died in early 2019. The apartment of the blind novelist, teacher and poet was a famous locus for bohemian poets, writers, musicians and artists, a public salon he called A Gathering of the Tribes. After all the other hot spots had faded away and all the places to go had closed, there was still Steve’s. His memorial at CSV was a big affair. Poets read, and musicians performed. Steve’s musician friends, Billy Bang and Butch Morris, are also no longer alive, but a set by the Sun Ra Arkestra rounded out the night. They’re the big band backup for the late Afrofuturist composer. They did that thing with the costumes, and the weird space-age noises, but for their final numbers they sat back and romped like Duke Ellington, doing “Stranger in Paradise.”
Ubiquitous on the poetry scene, Mitch Corber was front and center with his camera, alongside Sylvia, recording the poets. At one point the flimsy chair he sat on collapsed, and he grinned ruefully at the crowd behind him.
The poet Steve Dalachinsky circulated, handing out cards for the readings and performances that would continue throughout the fall in the gardens of the LES to honor Cannon. Dalachinsky – a scenester, a back patter, hand shaker, a connector, and animateur; poet, deeply learned jazz aficionado and skilled bohemian hustler… I didn’t know that would be the last time I’d see him. He died a week after that gig.
Then there was a round of memorials for him.
The Stuck and the Drifting
Functionally blind, Steve Cannon was stuck in his apartment. Dalachinsky was everywhere. The outpouring of memorials for him was even greater than for Cannon. Penny Arcade wrote: “With the death of Dalachinsky there is a line of demarcation like where the trees get thinner and thinner near the shore. Who now will rail against the politics of art? Who will represent, who will model the life of the living poet?”
That night he kind of annoyed me. I was lumbering towards Jim Feast, who was on his way out when Steve grabbed him first. Jim is one of the venerable Unbearables group of poets with Steve, and part of the Autonomedia publishing collective After I’d stood there for a time, Dalachinsky turned, gave me a firm handshake and walked off...
Steve Dalachinsky in his studio in New York May 15th, 2019. Photo by Fernando García Delgado
ABC No Rio Then
When we began at ABC No Rio in 1980 we were lucky to stumble onto an important clutch of poets to begin the readings series there. Josh Gosciak couldn’t bring the old anarchists from the housing projects, but he did organize Amiri Baraka, Miguel Piñero, Miguel Algarín, Bimbo Rivas, Pedro Pietri, Jorge Brandon and more of the Nuyorican school poets to read at our place. Some of the white poets’ music bands also played ABC, like the Avant Squares, Homer Erotic, and Jill Kroesen. (There’s a book about them: Daniel Kane, "Do You Have a Band?": Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City, 2017; haven’t seen it.) This push started ABC as an important poetry venue for the decades to come.
Josh, who is today at Medger Evers CUNY where Steve Cannon once taught wrote a text on poetry on the Lower East Side for the ABC No Rio book. (Part of it is online, along with some of the poetry we published then.) He ran Contact II magazine, and published the only chapbook of the incendiary Native American talent Diane Burns.
Perhaps because there’s no money to be made, the downtown NYC poetry scene has always been an indiscriminate bohemia. In case it isn’t clear yet – the poetry scene is where artists of color have been hiding in New York City for a long time.
LINKS
MWF Video Club
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/
See Katrien Bollen, "Guerrilla Warriors on the Brooklyn Bridge: A Case Study of the Unbearables’ Poetic Terrorism
(1994-2000)" in ZAA Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 2012
here and there on the internet
Curiously, no one really wants to write about this – a rare exception: Anonymous, "NYU hasn't destroyed the West Village... yet"
https://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2013/01/nyu_hasnt_destroyed_the_West_Village_yet
A Gathering of the Tribes
https://www.tribes.org/
Mitch Corber's Thin Air Video catalogue online
http://www.thinairvideo.com/Welcome.html
He is also on YouTube at mitchcorber2
A Tribute to Steve Dalachinsky (1946–2019)
https://brooklynrail.org/2019/10/in-memoriam/A-Tribute-to-Steve-Dalachinsky
Jim Feast recently interviewed for Fifth Estate
https://soundcloud.com/davidrovics/fifth-estate-live-with-jim-feast
ABC No Rio book online, poetry
https://98bowery.com/return-to-the-bowery/abcnorio-poetry
Diane Burns, "Riding the One-Eyed Ford"
https://digitalcollections.poetshouse.org/digital-collection/chapbook-collection/riding-the-one-eyed-ford
see also Josh Gosciak, “Contact II, 1970s – 1990s: When Poetry Mattered More”
click “publisher” at the link above
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