Thursday evening, my friends Amy, Lisa, and Ed and I went to see Sweeney Todd, Lisa and I for the second time, Amy and Ed for the first. Lisa felt that it was a less intense experience from Row N than from Row F, which I mostly agreed with, though I did also appreciate from an aesthetic perspective the opportunity to see the entire stage clearly at once — for such an intimate production, there’s a lot going on. Also, I was fascinated by some of the changes they’d made to the text, particularly the added lines of dialogue in “A Little Priest” and the improvements to Act 2. It’s nice to be reminded that theater, as a live art, is also an art that changes over time in ways that we the audience, who attend one performance and leave, don’t usually get to see.
This is not, however, the point of my post.
The point of my post is that after seeing Lisa and Ed off to the subway and helping Amy negotiate a cab fare back to New Jersey, I started walking to the Times Square subway station, remembered I had an early-morning appointment on Friday, and decided to treat myself to a taxi. A car pulled up almost immediately, I got in and gave the driver directions, and I slumped back into my seat.
“You come from theater?” the driver asked in a heavy Russian accent.
“Yes,” I said.
“You go to theater often?”
“Not as often as I’d like to,” I said honestly.
The driver then explained that he was hoping I would know something about the theater, because he wanted to rent a costume for a poetry reading he would be participating in on Saturday, and he hoped I might have some idea of where he could go for it.
“What sort of costume?” I asked.
“An SS uniform,” he said.
Please feel free to imagine how freaked-out I was by this. I slid a little closer to the passenger-side door, mumbled something about the large number of costume shops across the borough of Manhattan, and prayed for no traffic all the way home.
“Oh,” he said, a few moments later, “don’t worry! I’m Jewish too. I should have said. I’m sorry.”
“Then why do you want to dress up as an SS agent?!?”
The story as it eventually came out over the course of the next couple of miles was this: the cabdriver was a formalist Russian poet (the word “iambs” in a Russian accent is just a joy to hear, by the way) who had a fairly fraught relationship with the editors of this avant-garde literary journal sponsoring the reading, who would occasionally publish his work but mostly looked down on him as boring. For the reading, they had set up a series of rules for the readers that included every reader having to be onstage during the entire evening — which both he and I agreed defeats half the purpose of a literary reading, which is to hang out with your friends and drink — and every reader having to come dressed in only black and white. I at this point mentioned Capote’s 1960s Black and White Ball, of which he had not heard, and we considered this data point together.
Anyhow, his idea was to come to this reading dressed in his SS uniform, sit on stage in it all evening long, and when it was his turn to read, he was going to read one series of poems that used a lot of slang and curse words, and another that was “pornogrrrapheek.” Sort of a you think you’re more shocking than me? I’ll show you shocking! gesture. I suggested that perhaps the people who are already coming to avant-garde poetry readings are the people least likely to be shocked, and he countered with a commentary on the self-regard of the Russian-language avant-garde in America. I admitted that English-language literary movements tended to the same self-regard, with, I have to admit, several pointed examples that I chose not to share coming to mind.
As we crossed the Manhattan Bridge, he launched into a critique of American culture and the marginal role assigned to poetry within it. Come on, I said, it’s always been the case that poetry is a minority taste. Think of Sir Philip Sidney, circulating his poetry in court! Look at Virginia Woolf, founding the Hogarth Press so her friends could have a place to publish!
“No, no, you go back too far,” he said. “Think of Allen Ginsberg.”
“Allen Ginsberg!” I said. “Allen Ginsberg would have been a star whatever he did. The man had incredible charisma. Did you ever get a chance to hear him read?”
It turned out that not only had my poet-driver heard him read, he had co-translated “Howl” into Russian in the mid-90s. There had been a few places where the meaning escaped them, so they’d called Ginsberg up and he’d met with them at Brooklyn College and explained it to them. He was still very grateful for that. He admitted that as he had gotten older, he liked Ginsberg’s work less than he once had, but still “there is a place in every poem that just speaks to me.” I told him I knew exactly what he was talking about.
We shared reminiscences (and in my case, a second-hand story from Ian) about Ginsberg as he negotiated the local turns that led to my corner. When he dropped me off, I did the only thing I could do, which was to give him a fifty-percent tip. “Think of it as my patronage of the arts,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Maybe I will use this to rent my costume.”
