Into The Fire A Poet’s Journey Through Hell’s Kitchen

by Mary Clark

Dedicated to Richard Spiegel, founder of the Poetry Festival,

for his clarity of vision and inspiration

Thanks to Poets & Writers

for fair and generous support of the Poetry Festival

CHAPTER 1 Poetic License

1978

Talk about miles to go, miles of snow, a transfigured night and all in sight covered

in a winding sheet of white. Stopping by a snowy Ninth Avenue, face and hands

wrapped against the wind, I contemplated the divide before me. Ice-crystals glittered in

streetlights and snow fenced sidewalks. The city streets were deserted, and I was alone

in the canyoned silence. On the avenue’s arctic slope, deep within the haunting sound of

a muted city I could hear gypsy cabs snorting dragon-breath in the dark, and I would

have stayed to watch fringes of icicles on fire escapes glow in the dying light.

Crossing Ninth Avenue, I heard the wolf howl in the wind. Into a cumbersome gap

hacked in frozen snow I pioneered, and westward to find a narrow trail past four and

five-story buildings. Bare choirs of trees fell silent, only ticking now and then in frozen

despair, until a faint glow, just the slightest cinematic glimmer, fell on the crooked path.

I leaned back, one hand on a rack of ice, to see a living painting: a red brick building

with tall arched windows of earth and sky-colored glass. Indigo peaked gables and

copper crosses with a patina of green sprang like a frieze from a breathing, luminous

city-lights gray sky.

Double wooden plank doors painted in vertical stripes of chipped and tattered red,

white and blue were shuttered against the cold and any vagrants or visitors who might

venture in. Hiking up the steps, kicking footholds in rime-encrusted snow, I peered

through wire netting at an empty stairway to heaven. Tracking again through

Technicolor traces from the lighted windows, I discovered a second set of steps and a

brightly lit hallway.

A royal blue and white plaque with a strident red cross sparked through a crust of

frost: Welcome to St. Clement’s.

A bare bulb in a metal cage hung above the steps. Up and down the street of

tenements and brownstones, and on windowsills and steps festooned with snow, there

was no other light.

On the far side of a railing, steps led to a single recessed arch, and winding down

and up again, I began knock-knocking-knocking on heaven’s door.

A small round bell bolted to the brick caught my eye. I heard the buzz resound and

die.

Richard Spiegel, the director of the Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s, opened the

door. “Mary?”

In his early thirties, Richard’s long, wavy chestnut hair and trimmed beard shone

with a soft gleam of mahogany and substrata strands of red.

I stepped inside. “I promised I’d come one day.” My eyes pulsated with red and

white light as I thawed from the glacial trek.

I was one of only three. We read wine-poetry and drank red wine in cups from St.

Clement’s kitchen.

In the news the next day I read a man had been murdered while we were breeding

poetry, in one of the buildings behind the church, hacked to pieces and carried in bags

to the corner trash can. A trail of blood in the snow marked the way to Ninth Avenue.

When the frost cleared, I

returned to Hell’s Kitchen. Jeff

Jones, the administrator of the

church and Theater at St.

Clement’s, welcomed me to his

office. He was tall, the office small.

He enormously filled the room, like

a scene from Alice in Wonderland.

“I came to a poetry reading

here. I know Richard Spiegel from

another reading series he ran in

Midtown several years ago. I’ve

been thinking about working in a

theater, behind the scenes. Is there

anything part-time?” Seeing his reaction, I amended, “or volunteer?”

Jeff asked if I would like to help Richard with the poetry program, but I said, no, I

wanted to do something different, to “work with a group of people and get away from

writing.” Writing, writing, all the live-long day.

“There’s lots to do,” Jeff said. “There’s nothing paid at this time.” He added, “But

it’s a place to start, and you might find something you can do.”

Stage-managing? “I like lighting,” I said. “I would like to learn how to do that.”

“Would you be interested in helping build the set?

I perked up. “That sounds like fun.”

Jeff said to talk to Steve, the Technical Director.

We talked about days and hours. I came to grips with the idea that I was working as

a volunteer. I was on SSI Disability, enabling me to leave home and live in a Single

Room Hotel; this was job training. I had to forge my own life, and this was a big

decision for me.

Jeff asked again, “Are you sure you don’t want to do something with poetry?”

No, I nodded, I want to try this.

I had my poetic license in the back pocket of my blue jeans; I had borders to cross. I

went to work on the set for the next play. Steve Cramer, the Technical Director, or TD,

was an Abe Lincoln look-alike, from Illinois or Indiana, and just as judicious and fair.

Steve and I positioned wooden platforms to form a stage and seating area.

“How do you lift these all by yourself?”

Moving one end, he placed it on the top edge of another. “Don’t lift when you can

leverage.”

Some platforms had rows of red seats bolted onto them. “Old Roxy seats,” he said.

“We salvaged them when they tore down the theater.”

We secured scrims in place to create a black backdrop and obscure the machine

shop backstage. He showed me how to repair holes and tears in the set’s walls with

fabric and glue. We tested the doors and windows.

“If you have to move furniture or other props, mark where they belong with small

x’s in white chalk.” The poetry program and the church both used the space, but they

had to replace anything they moved to its original location.

I watched the lighting crew work, clipping lights on the exposed grid. There were

different kinds of lights, and colored gels that fit on them. I picked up a light.

“Fresnel,” I said.

“Fer-nel,” the lighting director said.

Steve returned and he gave me the job of finishing nailing down the carpet.

I attended the first night and was thrilled when the actors came out and walked on

that carpet!

Jeff said at St. Clement’s “liturgy and the arts collide and divide” and sometimes

“coalesce” to create new life forms. If it came together, it was transcendent, but if not,

chaotic.

He worried that Richard was trying to do too much: benefits for causes, poets

theater, weekly readings. “Richard could use some help with the Poetry Festival.”

I wavered. After all, I was trying to put space between me and the Emily Dickinson

syndrome. But did Richard need help? He had been running poetry readings for some

time.

Would he want me to help out? “I don’t know if he wants help.”

“I think he will.”

With ambivalence: excitement, caution, curiosity, anticipation, wondering if I fit in

and if this was what I wanted to do, I sat with Richard as the poets came in for the

Monday night reading. “Would you want me to help out with the poetry program?”

He answered with a quiet but emphatic yes. He started talking about scheduling

readers.

At the next Monday night reading, I greeted people and collected donations at the

door to the downstairs theater. Afterwards, Richard, and poets Rochelle Ratner, Jim

Bertolino, Maurice Kenny, and I went out for coffee. We had a wonderful time and I

did not get home ’til 2 a.m.

A compact, intense but friendly older man, Maurice was co-editor with Josh

Gosciak of Contact/II, a Bimonthly Poetry Review. I noticed that he was selling

postcards of American Indian women and artwork. Maurice said he was Native

American, a Mohawk from upstate New York. The postcards were from his Strawberry

Press, bringing out the work of diverse Native Americans.

In the front office of the church, I scanned the newsletter. It proclaimed that the

vicar, congregation and arts staff “explored changes in America’s social and moral

values.”

Talk about a mission!

On the church’s printed weekly program, a pen and ink drawing of the church

building depicted St. Clement’s sailing into a gale with all its gables and crosses flying.

Are we at sea?

In the front office, Richard held up a poster of whales

serendipity-ing across a blue-white expanse and the poetry

program’s name bending in synchronicity. “A friend of mine did

this,” he explained. “What do you think?”

“It’s beautiful. But whales?”

“I know.”

On the other hand, are poets whales? St. Clement’s a ship at sea, and whales

sporting about, safe from the harpoon?

Michael Hadge, the Theater at St. Clement’s director, hot-booted in, carrying an

armful of scripts. As he charged about in tight dress blue jeans, tailored cowboy shirt

and polished boots, scripts went flying to the four winds. Mike had studied at the Actors

Studio on West 44th Street and one of his friends from those days was Al Pacino. He

and Anita Khanzadian, the theater’s second chair, were planning the next season of Off-

Off Broadway plays for the Theater at St. Clement’s.

Jeff Jones lounged behind his desk in the

windowless middle office, conducting

meetings with panache.

The Board of Managers at St. Clement’s

attended the meetings along with the arts

program directors. Yes, we are all managers.

On Monday nights Richard and I sat at the

door to the downstairs theater while destitute

poets dropped change into a Poor Box to hear

other equally starving poets. Richard used the

money to pay the poets and print flyers. And

of course, buy wine.

We met several times a week to plan

readings and write press releases. He

proposed that I take over the readings during

the summer months so he could take a

vacation. It all seemed too much too fast.

My friend Sally, who wanted to be known

as Kip, asked if I could get in touch with Muriel Rukeyser.

Muriel Rukeyser! Is that all?

Kip said she wanted to protest the policies of the American Poetry Review.

“Her number’s in the phone book,” Richard told me. “She’ll talk to anyone.”

I never thought to look there. I forwarded the information to Kip.

One day, Richard approached me in the blue hallway, with a Cheshire grin. “I want

you to meet a friend of mine, an old man who lives in the Village near me.” He ushered

me down the hallway toward Jeff’s office.

A tall thin, elderly man with long flowing white hair and short beard and mustache,

in a wrinkled Arrow shirt, was setting out paintings on the filing cabinets, chairs and

desks. He greeted me with a smile, blue eyes paranoid but twinkling.

“PJ,” Richard said, “this is Mary. She’s going to help set up the display.”

PJ placed several pieces of artwork on a table. “I call these Impressions, my textile

art.”

I reached out to touch them. Tactile, textile.

After the exhibit opened, PJ invited us to visit him at his home in Greenwich

Village. His apartment was crammed with boxes of clippings, letters, typewritten pages,

books, newsletters, leaflets. Window frames

crumbled at the touch. Electrical sockets hung loose

in the walls. The walls were covered with what

looked like soot.

Touching long grimy tendrils above the stove, I

said, “There must have been a fire.”

“No,” PJ replied. “There was no fire.”

Oh. My hand wavered.

“In a way,” he said, “there was a fire.”

CHAPTER 2 Ladders of Flame

Upstairs in St. Clement’s sanctuary’s vast open space, rows of tall arched windows

resembled trees, and their mosaics formed branches, flowers and leaves. The peaked

roof with hewn beams two stories high was Noah’s Ark come to rest upside down on

Manhattan Island, filled with seminal winds and sounds of the flood.

A red carpet on the stairs and in the offices was worn but still warmed to the glow

from the windows’ mosaics of glass. These were not primary colors and depictions of

saints or scenes from the Bible, but Longfellow’s forest primeval — lichen gray and

green moss on fallen trees, clouds streaking into blue.

Watty Strouss, a member of the church’s Board of Managers, said, “Oh, they’re

actually not stained glass. They’re leaded glass.”

“There’s beauty under the grime.”

“We’d like to restore them, but it’s very expensive. Each piece needs to be cleaned

and re-set with new binding.”

A heavy wire mesh covered all the street-front windows, crisscrossing the muted

mosaics of glass. The protective mesh made the church look almost medieval.

“Oh,” Watty said, the word “oh” a major part of his vocabulary and depending on

the inflection, having different meanings like the Chinese language. “Someone didn’t

like our being an anti-war church and threw a Molotov cocktail through an upstairs

window.”

In the 1960s, he told me, Joan Baez was married in the church. Later she referred to

it as “that funky little peace church on the West Side.” Watty sighed. “She couldn’t

remember our name.”

The upstairs space was both the Sanctuary where services were held and a theater.

In the 1960s it had been remodeled to accommodate the American Place Theater. After

American Place left for new digs in the basement of a high-rise on West 46th between

Sixth and Seventh Avenues, another Theater at St. Clement’s was born. That

incarnation had a good run, but collapsed amid questions of missing funds. The current

Theater at St. Clement’s started in the early 1970s and operated in the downstairs space.

The church’s main income came from renting the Upstairs Space to outside theater

groups. Every Sunday church services were held onstage, making use of the current

play’s set to match the sermon’s theme. Vestry members with corduroy jeans beneath

their robes rolled out the altar and pulpit and lowered a large crystal cross from its

station in the light grid high in the beams.

Alone at the massive gray metal desk in the front office I heard sounds in the

church: voices, stories, pieces of song, wind in the sanctuary, birds in the oak tree, the

organist practicing hymns, tales of the flower fund and the trust for burying the poor.

From where I stood on the church steps I could see lines of tenements ride out of the

setting sun: full-tilt railroad flats roaring toward midtown Manhattan, skyscrapers rising

in Pyrrhic tower after tower, while the river sings through the streets of its power,

scarlet mist fills the air, diffusing over playgrounds and bars, vacant lots, delis, schools

and cars. I could see fire escapes flare the red of steel mill fires, flames slashing across

tenement faces.

I walked into the street:

This is the fire, this is the glow as flames rise in the core, heat rises ethereal, takes

on new forms, almost human, they flow along fire escapes: angels, angels walking on

ladders of flame.

Denise Levertov’s speech, “The Education of the Poet.” at the Donnell Library, was

thrilling, incredible. It startled me so many people would turn out for a talk on poetry.

The Poetry Festival reading featuring Susan Axelrod, Linda Stern, Kathryn Cullen

DuPont, Keelin Curran, and Amy Roth drew eighty people, almost a full house. There

was a notice in the Daily News “Leisure” section, put in by the readers.

Soon afterward at a Poetry Festival reading I met Dan Stokes, who looked like a

young, roly-poly Bacchus. He was the editor of the East River Review, a series of poetry

pamphlets, and the New York Culture Review, publishing articles on poets and writers,

especially those who broke with tradition. He asked me if I would like to read

manuscripts that had been sent to him. “I’m way behind.”

I said yes, and he gave me the address of the New York Culture Review bookstore,

and we set a time for me to pick them up. Daniel M.J. Stokes lived in the back of his

bookstore on East Fourth Street near First Avenue.

He was a post Beat poet with a brusque exterior but an affable heart. His poems

about the tortures and joie de vivre of love, poverty, crime, and freedom, made him part

of the François Villon tradition.

PJ was free in a way that seemed to have nothing to do with society. “I have a

theory,” PJ said, “that intuition is a motivating force in our lives.”

“Intuition? Isn’t that just a way of sensing things?”

“No, it’s more than that. The intuition is a program we build ourselves, and it’s

linked to every part of our nature and the environment. And it begins in infancy,

unconsciously, as we build up a memory storage of amiable and hostile experiences.”

This intuitive program leads us to act and respond in either a positive or negative way,

instantaneously, before we know it.

“And it is based on what. . .”

“What is valuable. A person evaluates every action for its worth.”

In my Single Room Occupancy (SRO) room on the Upper West Side for working

and indigent women, I was reading The Aesthetics of Silence by Susan Sontag, and Film

Form by Sergei Eisenstein. One of the best books I ever read on film was Negative

Space: Manny Farber on the Movies: modern film “involves a struggle to remain

faithful to the transitory, multisuggestive complication of a movie image and/or

negative space. Negative space, the command of experience . . . an artist can set

resonating . . . so that there is a murmur of poetic action enlarging the terrain of the

film, giving the scene an extra-objective breath.”

Extra-objectively, “Loba; Part 2” by Diane di Prima was lighting up my nights.

Sharing its love of adventure, with all its risk and elation, the wildness of the words

brought me back to my beginnings in Florida. Henry Miller said Paris was his mother.

Florida was both my mother and father.

My long poem about Florida and childhood was in Richard’s hands.

Waves half dark, half light leap and spin

flashing hooves and windswept manes

sleek black flanks and spinning wheels

of a chariot carrying the moon

wings of darkness flutter and fall

palms bow and bend and arc in the wind

as the surf sings

strength and renewal

strength and renewal

Richard suggested I read part of it in May with Duane Locke, an Immanentist poet

from the University of Tampa. I lost my breath and could not speak. I was too shy to

read my own work.

In a 1976 issue of Dan Stokes’ New York Culture Review, Locke wrote about

“Immanentism.”

It is a linguistic reality engendered by a heightened and intensified

awareness, a quality of consciousness different from the habitual and

ordinary consciousness . . . The immanent poem results from a fusion of

the subject and object, the inner and the outer, the knower and the known

into a qualitatively different and new substantial reality.

Richard asked me to schedule June and July.

At Womanbooks on the Upper West Side, I heard two good poets: Akua Lezli Hope

and Audre Lorde. It was raining cats and dogs, overwhelming umbrellas and street

drains. After the reading, I hung around, trying to work up the courage to ask Audre

Lorde to read at St. Clement’s, but I was too miserable about my own life: needing love,

work that earned money, success as a writer, to approach her. She left suddenly and the

woman from the bookstore said she had not been feeling well but came to read that

evening anyway.

Early on a Monday evening, Dan Stokes came into the downstairs space before his

reading. Richard and I and Dan and another poet began drinking the wine.

“Not going to be an audience,” Dan assured us. “No one ever comes to my

readings.” He belched.

The poet Barbara Holland came in. She was not amused. A small audience filtered

into the seats. They were not amused.

I started work on a new piece, “Buffy,” about a child who lived on an island. The

view was subconscious, subliminal. It had an odd style. My style.

Her father, absent, an enemy or stranger, fluttered his long silky

wings when passing through windows and doors, weaving in and out

magically, always in mid-flight, then settling a moment on the back of

her mother’s chair. . . . He was her bird now, a bird of prey.

Kip said she thought it should be a mixture of poetry, prose and dialogue. “You

could be the Henry James of psychological poetry.”

Sid Bernard said my writing was too dense, with a confusing concentration of

images. He was right. I was being true to the direction my writing, and my life, were

taking me in. I had more work to do.

It was a full house in the 99-seat downstairs theatre for the chamber theater

production of “Travellers,” directed by Maurice Edwards. This “concert piece for

theater” set Ilsa Gilbert’s words to music by Jim Green, with musical director Skip

Kennon. The singers performed eight pieces, including “Lizzie Strata,” “Sarah Lee

Cake,” “Lawrence of Astoria,” and “Mama and Papa Ionescu.” The program was

funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA, called “nisca” by

all those affected by this government agency.)

Ilsa Gilbert’s poetry and lyrics evoked the constants in our lives: feelings for home,

musings about family, suffering and overcoming, often with humor. As a poet,

playwright, lyricist and librettist, she was active in the 1960s and 70s Off-Off Broadway

avant-garde

theater in

Greenwich

Village. In 1967,

her play, “The

Bundle Man,”

with composer

and counter

tenor Marshall

Coid, ran at The

Old Reliable

Theater Tavern

in the East

Village. She

worked with

many musicians

and composers

on her particular

brand of

chamber opera.

As we talked, I found her to be sweet and funny, but also reserved, cosmopolitan,

driven, and savvy: a vintage New Yorker.

Steve Cramer saw me scribbling in the front office. “There’ll be work to do on the

next production,” he told me, on “Voices,” by Susan Griffin. Susan Griffin was a poet,

and this play was unusually subtle word-work for the Theater. Estelle Parsons directed

the cast of Catherine Burns, Susan Greenhill, Rochelle Oliver, Anne Shropshire and

Janet Ward. The actresses were appearing, as with all TASC and Poetry Festival

productions, with permission from the Actors’ Equity Association. This, I learned, was

because actors were to be paid for their work under union rules, and these were either

low paying or unpaid performances.

On the program’s back page, the Theater’s mission was described in more detail:

“Ultimately, we choose plays that reckon with moral conscience. What is the

responsibility of an individual to his or her self and to others? Of an individual to

society at large? Or, on the corporate level, of the faceless conglomerate to the

anonymous citizen?”

Yes, we are pioneers on the moral and ethical frontier.

Copyright by Mary Clark 1978-2013. All rights reserved.