Benefit Film

Last year Tim Congdon, a renegade poet and impresario who lived for a while in Ithaca, contacted me about participating in a poetry project to aid in the reconstruction of New Orleans. The concept was simple: poets from around the country would either go to their local Public Access TV station or get a friend with a video camera and read a poem. Tim would take all the poems and edit together a reading. Proceeds from sales of the disc would go to Common Ground, a grass roots organisation working in New Orleans to rebuild the lower 9th Ward and provide relief to people living and working there. Tim, through doggedness, persuaded Amiri Baraka to participate and from him went on to get many of our best and most interesting poets to sign up. He went around the country taping poets, using one poet contact to reach another, and now has enough raw footage to complete the job. Here is a link to the trailer (edited by associate producer Laki Vazakas): New Orleans Poetry Relief. I was very happy to be asked for the obvious reasons: I am disgusted and ashamed by what happened after Katrina (is Brownie in Myanmar?), and because it’s always great when poetry, which Marianne Moore also disliked, and which Auden said did nothing, can accomplish a little good in the world, and finally, because I’m not ever going to have another opportunity to read with these guys! By the by, Tim has been working on this while fighting to survive 2, count ’em- 2 lymphoma’s, one that is very rare and incurable, for which he has undergone an experimental stem cell transplant this last winter. I have no doubt Tim’s more ornery than his cancer. I just don’t know anyone else who could put together such a thing under such circumstances. Thank you Tim.