Within a year after opening in 1999, Makor had become the unofficial literary adjunct to the arts campus known as Lincoln Center, a complex comprised of the Metropolian Opera, Avery Fisher Hall, NY City Opera, NY City Ballet, The Vivian Beaumont Theatre, The Performing Arts Library, The Walter Reade Theatre (film), Alice Tully Hall, and The Juilliard School. Only Barnes & Noble's Lincoln Square monolith separates Makor's double brownstone on 67th Street from direct discourse with the complex.

One of the best representatives of quality programming at Makor is the Poetry & Mentorship series, curated by poet Eve Grubin, who last season booked Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Agha Shahid Ali, among other majors, to appear with emerging poets whom they had mentored. [See Archive for Series Reviews, Jan and Apr '01.] With Ms. Grubin's move to the PSA in June, Education Director Elliott Rabin (Ph.D. Comp. Lit.) took over curating the series, just as Makor became a satellite of the 92nd Street Y, one of the country's premier poetry centers, which itself got a lively and erudite new director, poet David Yezzi.

The mentorship dynamic was optimized at the 10/25 session, as Feirstein acknowledged his debt to Weiss, a Princeton scholar of Ancient Literature and author of ten books of poetry, and Newman credited Feirstein's influence for his use of formal metrics with the vernacular.

Wade Newman gained notoriety with the publication in 1989 of an essay in which he called for greater accessibility in poetry, and advocated the use of traditional meter and narrative. He has since produced acclaimed work which he and his school term "expansive poetry." While modern metrical storytelling may tend to broaden audiences for poetry by reaffirming their preconceptions about what proper poetry should do, how it should look and sound--based, likelier than not, on vague recollections of Longfellow--this take on expansion could work to restrict the play of technical innovation or complex thought, leaving, say, a Jorie Graham or a Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge wholly unread. Newman's own work presented at the event was metrically and narratively unremarkable, even banal, featuring tropes on 'bargaining with evil' (Hitler and squirrels), the muse (lunching with her editor), and particulars drawn from chess-playing (a knight 'astride his steed' . . . 'a blare of bugles blowing') and divorce. By the end of his segment, many in this Makor audience had sunken in their seats.

Feirstein, a joke-teller and psychoanalyst, provided the vocal edge to right listeners in their seats. In an ambitious work-in-progress called, "The Twentieth Century," his mother sees his unborn face in a taxi cab and hails it; his father had him grieving before he could breathe. Hard-knocks educated and scrappy, this writer appears accustomed to having people at key junctures in their lives trust his authority, and the result is a firm poetic voice, yet he is awed, pen in hand, when he conjures Dickinson, Whitman, Einstein, "all those geniuses," and tries to live up.

Theodore Weiss confided that he was 85, but felt...like 100. Elegant, if somewhat fragile, he read only briefly, but movingly, from his own work, preferring to speak of Yeats whose pretensions to aristocracy he let underscore his own humble beginnings and the influence of family in "The Heir Apparent", the grandmother who 'never admitted America,' the Depression-era grandfather who peddled, lugging a heavy satchel which gave him 'permanent muscles.'

When the session opened to questions, the audience was eager to hear the gentle Weiss, who first responded to Rabin's invitation to identify some aspect of Judaism that had been important in his writing. "I'm a poet who lives from handout's from the world. That sounds Jewish. . . . He was a primitive god. They cleaned him up as they went along." Asked about Wallace Stevens's conviction that there was a fundamental poetry that existed before the world began, Weiss readily agreed, saying, "I have less and less awareness about what poetry is. The mystery grows plainer." Asked about how poetry had changed for him, he smiled: "I used to write it with both hands, but now am writing more prose. I'm surprised that I'm not sadder about it."

Noticing Samuel Menashe in the audience, Weiss asked him whether he was still writing these days. "Yes," said Menashe. "I've just had a new book come out [See review of Library of Congress reading, immediately following.]--but I'm still waiting to hear about a piece I sent you thirty-two years ago."

Feminist pioneer Enid Dame appears for this Makor series on January 24, together with others who credit her influence. Updates on upcoming features will appear here, in the 92nd Street Y's catalogue, Makor's catalogue, and on the web site: www.makor.org.

-- MH