During the reception after Tuesday night’s “Poetry & The Creative Mind” event at Lincoln Center, I was able to take a few moments of jazz singer Dianne Reeves‘s time and ask about how she had first discovered the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, whose poems she had read to such stirring effect. When she was in college, Reeves told me, Brooks came to her college and read from her work, and the impact on the young woman was tremendous:
Reeves’ reading of “Queen of the Blues,” along with James Weldon Johnson‘s “Go Down Death,” was one of the highlights of the evening—although, as Tim Murphy noted in Vulture, Graydon Carter reading Dorothy Parker‘s “Our Office: A Hate Song” has its own sort of entertainment value, too. And then there was Candace Bushnell reading Gertrude Stein, and John Guare‘s enthusiastic rendering of an excerpt from William Carlos Williams‘s “Asphodel,” along with several other celebrity guest stars, all leading up to Meryl Streep closing the show with Wallace Stevens‘s “Sunday Morning.”
It’s funny that the lead in Murphy’s item is Streep’s pre-show comment that “we only talk about dead poets here,” as historian Robert Caro went off-program halfway through the show to read some poems from his friend Edward Hirsch‘s new collection, Special Orders, which earned him a playful rebuke from Streep during the closing remarks. But all was smiles during the lobby reception afterwards, as the stars mingled with poets like Sophie Cabot Black and Lucie Brock-Boido and various patrons of the arts. As one source explained it to me, the “ban” on living poets is really just a nod to the belief that poets are (or ideally should be) the best interpreters of their own work. But, honestly? Caro’s Hirsch is pretty solid.