Beyond Wicked: Arts off The Beaten Path, 4/22/08

BEYOND WICKED
Exploring the Arts Off the Beaten Path

Poetry In Bloom

By Anna Becker

It’s April and literary festivals and poetry readings are springing up all over. It’s no surprise to you, I’m sure, that New York City is home to some of the most important and inspiring literary organizations this world has to offer. Here are a few suggestions of events that will transform, inform, and revive your spirit after a long winter’s rest…

The theme for this year’s PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature is Public Lives/Private Lives, which couldn’t be timelier. How do we draw a line between our private and public selves? When must we tell private stories for the public good? How, as readers, writers, and citizens, do we confront threats to our privacy? What is still considered private in the Internet age? The writers in this year’s Festival – which

include Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Adam Gopnik, Umberto Eco, Jennifer Egan, Andy Borowitz, Annie Proulx, and many more - will mine this rich theme in a variety of literary conversations, panels, readings, and performances. Here is a sample of some of them: Theater and Poetry: Visions and Metaphor; Crisis Darfur: A Conversation with Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Levy; Adventures in the Skin Trade: A Conversation with Colum McCann & Michael Ondaatje; and The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture by Umberto Eco. The Festival runs from April 29th to May 4th at various locations throughout the City. Visit www.pen.org or call (212) 334-1660.

The Mercantile Library on East 47th Street offers a wide range of literary events and book groups throughout the year. Here’s a look at some upcoming treats: This Saturday, April 26th, go on a Dashiell Hammett walking tour with Hammett expert B.J. Rahn as she leads you through midtown Manhattan, visiting locations influential to Hammett’s life and work. Prefer to keep your investigations indoors? Then plan for the Hardboiled Detective Fiction panel with B.J. Rahn, Otto Penzler, Keith Alan Deutsch, and Chris Knopf or join The Odyssey discussion group with Lehman College English Chair Walter Blanco beginning April 30th. Visit www.mercantilelibrary.org or call (212) 755-6710.

Poets House will hold its annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge on June 9th. Join Martín Espada, Galway Kinnell, Thomas Lux, Marilyn Nelson, and special guest, actor Bill Murray, in a New York tradition that, according to Time Out New York, "could just make you fall in love with New York all over again." This literary pilgrimage over the bridge that inspired Hart Crane, Walt Whitman and generations of poets begins near One Centre Street and stops en route for readings under Roebling's famous arches. Upon arrival at Brooklyn's historic Fulton Ferry Landing, Pulitzer-prize winning poet Galway Kinnell recites Whitman's immortal "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" as the sun sets over the waterfront. Poets House is lauded for its children’s programming too. On Saturday, May 10, take your kids to the Mulberry Street Library for Wondrous Light, Wondrous Air, a poetry and art-making workshop that explores the magical elements of light and air, accompanied by a performance of Play, Said the Air to the Earth by dancer Clea Rivera and musician Harry Mann. Admission is free for this one. If you just can’t mobilize to the city, Poets House is coming to us as part of Poetry Westchester! Head for the Mount Pleasant Public Library on May 18th for a poetry reading by Tom Sleigh, the author of Space Walk, who was hailed by Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney as a poet of "lyric absolution." Visit www.poetshouse.org or call (212) 431-7920.

So spring past your backyard and just a little Beyond Wicked to a field of literary blossoms.