Brooklyn may be in the throes of trying to select a new Poet Laureate to replace Ken Seligman who died last month but the de facto poet laureate of Brooklyn on Tuesday night was Katha Pollitt, poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation, who read and signed her new book, The Mind-Body Problem at Bookcourt in Cobble Hill.
Pollitt may not be a regular visitor to Brooklyn these days but she grew up on Sidney Place in Brooklyn Heights and attended Packer Collegiate Institute, where she studied Latin with a Miss Rose Smith and translated Virgil as a teenager. She lived on Garden Place in the 1970's where, she says, "she could lie in bed
and see the harbor with the Staten Island ferry."
A reading by Katha Pollitt is an enjoyable exercise in lateral thinking. Her poems are at once fiercely intellectual but also personal and highly accessible. They convey a wide swath of knowledge about literature, politics and religion but are also full of sensory images that pop in the mind. As the owner of Bookcourt said in his introduction, "Pollitt's poems are subversive modern parables that are profound and accessible; they put her in the first rank of modern American poets."
I enjoyed Pollitt's patter between poems almost as much as the poems themselves. Complimenting the bookstore's recent expansion Pollitt remarked, "I plan to buy a lot of books. Not my own. I already have enough of those."
She introduced the poem, "Lives of the Nineteenth Century Poetesses" with: "I've said that I don't like political poetry. But this is a feminist poem."
"As girls they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
Their mother saw right away no man would marry them.
So must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer as governesses out of Chekhov,"
Introducing a poem about walking around the city and seeing what isn't there anymore (a topic dear to the heart of this native New Yorker) she said. "Someone asked why all of my poems are so sad. But I don't think they're just about loss and sadness, they're about a love of things."
"and the drugstore where we went afterward for ice cream's
gone, too, and Mama's gone and my ten-year-old self,
I admire more than ever the ancient Chinese poets
who were comforted in exile by thoughts of the transience
of life."
Introducing another standout poem called "Mandarin Oranges," which was first published in the New Yorker, Pollitt recalled her time at Packer, where, she says, she was miserable. They did, however, serve mandarin oranges as "a special treat of our high-school lunchroom."
"Saw that silly geisha flirt her fan
against the flat, insipid turquoise sea
and wanted mandarin oranges more than
I've ever wanted anything,"
A section of her new book is devoted to a series of poems based on the Old Testament, which Pollitt said she prefers to its sequel. Introducing a poem about Martha, the sister of Lazarus and Mary, Pollitt called her the "patron saint of housewives."
"Well, did he think the food would cook itself?
Naturally, he preferred the sexy one,
the one who leaned forward with velvet eyes…"
A poem called "Silent Letter" brilliantly riffs on words like wriggle and writhe where you don't hear the W.
"It's what you don't hear
that says struggle
as in wrath and wrack
and wrong and wrench and wrangle"
After the reading, Pollitt called for questions from the crowd of fifty or so friends and admirers and the discussion was illuminating. One person asked about "the anxiety of influence regarding Philip Larkin, who's political views are starkly different from yours."
Pollitt, whose ability to wax fluidly intellectual on the spot is non pareil, jumped in with: "Chekhov said: you can't ask a writer to come up with answers; they come up with the questions. With Larkin, I sift past the things that I don't like. He was conservative, racist and reactionary. But the way he describes modern life, isolation and the dissolving connection with history is brilliant."
Another audience member compared Pollitt's work to the poetry of C.V. Cavafy (1863-1933), a modern Greek poet who lived in Egypt, which led Pollitt to say, "I might as well die and go to heaven now to be compared to Larken and Cavafy."
Pollitt reminisced about being a 14-year-old at sleep-away camp when her mother sent her a Cavafy poem cut out of Vogue Magazine. "How times have changed. I don't think Anna Wintour will be publishing poetry anytime soon."
For starters: Movies under the stars with Brooklyn Film Works. Tonight they're presenting a film that Hugh just loves. It's called What a Way to Go directed by J. Lee Thompson. With Shirley MacLaine, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum It's part of their Downturns & Destiny film series and it's al fresco in JJ Byrne/Washington Park tonight beginning at 8:30. 
To complicate matters: the New York Philharmonic is in Prospect Park this evening. Tonight Alan Gilbert conducts: Mozart Symphony No. 41, Jupitar and Mozart Symphony No. 7. But can you bring your dog? 
And to really make this a difficult choice: there's also a Mid-Summer Evening's Bash in Fort Greene, a joint benefit for the Irondale Ensemble Project and Theater for a New Audience's Brooklyn's Dreamers at Irondale on 35 South Oxford Street at Lafayette from 6:30 until 10 p.m. It should be one heck of a fun party for two VERY worthy and fabulous institutions. Enlarge poster to your left for more details. 
