Poets Find Voice in Tribeca Venues

 by Barbara Aria

Jean Norman did the rounds last month. In a single weekend, she read her poetry at four open mikes, from the hip Bowery Poetry Club to the Cornelia Street Café, a venerable West Village literary hangout. Her final stop was in Tribeca. Norman, a psychoanalyst in real life (“same thing as poetry,” she said), had heard from another poet about the biweekly Phoenix Sunday reading series at the tiny Bengal Curry restaurant on West Broadway, and wanted to check it out. She found herself in the company of six semi-regular Phoenix readers, plus their friends—a diverse, all-ages group bound only, it seemed, by their membership in the community of poets.

Jean Norman delivers a poem about relationships at Bengal Curry on West Broadway.

Series host Michael Graves, a James Joyce enthusiast, teaches writing at several area colleges and was the original editor of the now-formidable literary journal, Rattapallax. He and other poets would stand and deliver their sestinas and sonnets and free-verse forms, oblivious to the smell of curry, the stacks of takeout coffee cups that formed the poets’ backdrop, the limo driver wandering in for a takeout, the hum of the microwave or the couple sitting at a corner table, chewing in silence.


Likewise, Ahmed, who works behind the Bengal Curry counter, took the scene in his stride. “I like it,” he said. “All the time it’s work, sleep, work. This is something different.”

Graves calls this spot the Casbah. He settled on it a couple of months ago, after searching for yet another new venue to hold the series, which has wandered from space to space since it was founded in 1995.

“I’d been coming here on and off for years,” he said. “One night, I was sitting here, eating, and I thought, This place might work!”


If a curry shop seems like an unlikely spot for iambic meter, the Orange Bear on Murray Street, around the corner from the Bengal Curry, is even odder. This cavernous uberdive bar, whose most striking features are its crudely painted erotic murals and a pair of gorgeously decadent chandeliers, is the venue for another biweekly series, Poet to Poet, which meets on alternate Sundays to Bengal Curry’s. It’s hosted by Thomas Catterson, a Vietnam vet and retired switchboard operator who has a highly technical passion for an esoteric, classical Chinese verse form called shih. At the reading last month, he presented his poem about poets that combines the shih form with the triolet, an eight-line French song poem.

At a time when hip-hop-inflected spoken-word poetry

has found its way to Broadway, the Phoenix and Poet to Poet series belong to what seems like an ancient world of chapbooks and metered verse.

Not that all the poets reading are of the same ilk. Open mikes, after all, exclude nobody; whoever wants to hand over a few dollars to help pay the two featured readers of the week can get up and read.

Last month, Naomi Foil, a visitor from England, saw the Orange Bear event listed in a magazine and took her chances reading her poem “Cunt.” A featured poet of the week, Robert Dunn, delivered “Peanut Butter Bomber” and some other humorous torn-from-the-headlines verses from his new book, Cannon Fodder. He also read at the open mike at Bengal Curry, where, in the company of poets far more formalist than herself, Jean Norman stood, took a breath and launched into a spoken-word–style poem about relationships: “I feel like a bombed-out building/a devastated planet.” At which the couple at the corner table looked up from their plates and stopped chewing.

For more information on the Poet to Poet series, write to peppersdance@juno.com.