#12 / 2003 Peace Tour: NYC People's Poetry Gathering, Ground Zero

GROUND ZERO

#12

We went to New York to attend the People’s Poetry Gathering, but a visit to Ground Zero was my first priority. It was Palm Sunday, so first Beatlick Joe and I took communion in St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, and then hopped the subway to Battery Park. After a perfunctory glimpse at the Statue of Liberty across the waters, we walked up the few blocks to Ground Zero.

My friend Ameilia says, “I went when you could still smell the death.”

I know it doesn’t have the same impact it did at first attack, but it is still a moving experience. The city has constructed covered platforms with a chain-link, fenced-in area to gaze through. It would seem like any other construction site now, if it weren’t for the walls of photos, condolences, prayers, and remembrances to the victims of 9/11.The city also displays large posters of the Twin Towers as they were and the memorial light display that followed. People from around the world gather there, I guess just as people from around the world died there.

The attack changed me, even while I was still in Tennessee. It’s turned me into a global person, now. So many Americans are too busy, too oppressed by debt and stress, to think past their front doors. But I want to understand this hatred against me as a US citizen. That’s why I am reading and gleaning through so many newspapers and periodicals.

And the truth hurts. I’m ashamed of America’s duplicity and treachery. I’m in some sort of deep mourning, not only for my mother’s death, but also for the idealistic American I used to be, for the America that I grew up in, as opposed to the America I live in now.

That is politics, but we came to New York to LIVE FOR ART as well.

#12 People's Poetry Gathering

The 2003 People's Poetry Gathering was a weekend of readings, panel discussions, music and other events that took  place at various Manhattan sites including Poets House, the sponsor of the gathering, 72 Spring Street, SoHo. Other major sites were Bob Holman’s Bowery Poetry Club; Cooper Union Building and other spots in the East Village, where we stayed.

One of the important moments for me was “Music in the American Century: An Alan Lomax Tribute; Documenting the Folk I,'' with early recordings by John and Alan Lomax. John Lomax III is an old friend of mine in Nashville and there were numerous tributes to his family, lectures and acknowledgements.

In the Cooper Union Building there was a reading with Anne Waldman and Patricia Spears Jones. I so well remember Anne Waldman warning us that with Bush starting the war in Iraq, he could very well halt any more elections, claiming a state of war.

Joe got lucky. He is always volunteering and so his mission was to host the green room during a concert featuring Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Odetta and the New Lost City Ramblers in their tribute to Alan Lomax, billed the ballad hunter. Joe got to hobnob with all the talent and came back to our b&b with all the leftover wine and cheese.

On Sunday we went to St. Mark’s church and Bob Holman’s Bowery Poetry Club. Bob greeted us warmly and we spent time remembering our visit at the Taos Poetry Bout a few years before. Joe had a chance to get up and read one poem and he got great applause.