How I Spent New Year’s Eve, Day, 2020 - 2021

New Year’s celebrations are alway problematic for me — New Year’s Eve is “amateur night” while New Year’s Day is my traditional Open House. But this year, in the Year of COVID-19, my problems were solved: nothing was happening anywhere, nothing was "normal", I stayed home all evening & day. It was odd, quiet, but I stayed negative. I immersed myself in 3 over-lapping events, Highlight House Party out of Vermont, the Poetry Project 47th Marathon in NYC, & Perfect Pitch Extravaganza from Kingston, NY, playing in the background while I made dinners, breakfasts, shaved, changed clothes, etc.

Highlight House Party

I was invited to this event, which ran Thursday (December 31, 220) 1:00PM to Friday (January 1, 2021) 1:00AM, by 3 Guys from Albany co-member Charlie Rossiter, who got me a friend-of-the-band discount ticket. Highlight is Burlington’s new virtual New Year’s Eve celebration, produced by Signal Kitchen & Burlington City Arts. The festival brings "Vermont’s leading artists, doers, and thinkers together to showcase our community’s creativity through lively festivities for all to enjoy," thus says the promotional material. Charlie & his son Jack Rossiter-Munley performed as Big Roads at 7PM — more on that below. I put on the program(s) as background to my New Year’s Eve.

The event was on a platform called “Run the World” which is an all-in-one platform to host interactive online events, workshops, masterclasses, shows, and conferences. There were a confusing array of overlapping acts, shows, etc. at once that you could toggle between, music, of course, but also circus acts, cooking shows, yoga, folk music from places suck as Tibet & Madagascar, each lasting 45 minutes to an hour. There was plenty of bad singing & dreamy plaid flannel shirt guitar songs from performers bedrooms & living rooms, sort of like “Wayne’s World” come alive, some folks just doing stupid shit. Many, if not most, of the programs were spoiled by bad or sub-optimum video quality which looked like the bad copies of TV shows my kids used to record on VHS tapes.

Charlie & Jack’s energetic performance as Big Roads was one of the more polished, due largely to Jack’s skilled & practiced guitar-picking, & Charlie’s deep knowledge of the Blues. The tunes they covered were Blues songs made known to the pop music audience by having been covered by bands such as the Rolling Stones, but also an obscure hit from the late 1950’s by Lieber & Stoler about “the terror of Highway 101,” as well as their own “paranoia rock” version of Bob Dylan.

Another refreshing performer was singer-song writer Julia Rose who performed with a variety of stringed instruments & a skilled use of the loop machine; her mother is another poet with an Albany connection, Susan Riback.

One program I enjoyed with my New Year’s Ever Happy Hour martini & spring rolls was a reading from a new book The Essential Ruth Stone (Copper Canyon Press), edited by her granddaughter, the poet Bianca Stone. She was joined by poets Didi Jackson & Gary Margolis, reading Ruth Stone's (1915 - 2011) grim poems of grieving & of Winter, which is to be expected, I guess, from this long-time resident of Vermont.

 

47th Annual Poetry Project New Year’s Day Marathon

At 11:00PM Thursday night I switched over the the Poetry Project’s Marathon in New York City, which ran for 25 hours to Midnight, January 1/2. In the last hour of 2020 the prosecco was already gone & the music was like “Gloomy Sunday,” that legendary “suicide song,” but at least the quality of the videos was mostly better than that from Vermont. As the name dropping performance of Penny Arcade & others took us into 2021, I was already anticipating that, just like in most New Year’s Eves in the past when I put on corporate TV shows, I was already heading into a string of tedious performances, just in a different way.

At midnight I blew out the candle, my wish is that it’s got to be better, just get the racists out, get Trump into prison. Already I’m going to sleep in 2021 & will wake up in 2021, just like it was in 2020 — more peace vigils, more poetry, & sometime, I hope, more hugs & our words out in the air instead of a corona virus.

Lewis Warsh reading at home of Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte, May 2000

Tuned back in at 9:30AM, while I made coffee, breakfast (I missed online breakfast crêpes with Nicole Peyrafitte & Pierre Joris), to Rosemary Waldrop, then Don Yorty who said “words are birds” & my parakeets, Uccellini & Aria, agree, on through the day with the words in the background —Sophie Robinson dressed like a Puritan reading “Fucking Up the Rocks,” Edmund Berrigan in a fancy party mask, Rachael Wilson’s quotidian poems, Onotara James & Ricardo Maldonado’s “diptych” of sonnets on 2020/2021 that I really liked. A black & white film from 1978 of Bernadette Mayer reading dream poems, (later during a tribute to Lewis Warsh, he reading from the same event), also home movies of them Bernadette & Lewis, their kids, when Greg Masters read from his memoir It Wasn’t Supposed to be Like This (which is going on my to-read list).

At 2:00 PM I left the Poetry Project for the mid-Hudson Extravaganza (which is described below) & was back to NYC at 8:00 PM, until the end at midnight.

A number of poets shared works by others (often as memorials for those gone this year), which was a respite from the over-arching egos of so much that I’d heard/seen, & evidenced by so much self-conscious costuming. & even though it was from NYC, the home base of so many “famous poets” the work was just like any other open mic running from the sublime to the inane. There was bad singing of bad songs here too, & tedious performance art like listening to other people’s boring, self-indulgent conversations. But ultimately I was glad to actually not be at St. Mark’s for an in-person event, to be at home playing it in the background, actually hear more of it as I move around my house, make breakfast, lunch, dinner, have drinks, go to the bathroom.

There was Anselm Berrigan reading a long poem-in-progress tribute to Lewis Warsh, & later Lydia Cortés’ tribute as well. Others afflicted with “the Bernadette Mayer curse” — writing down every thought that enters your head, everything that you see, or hear, or do, watching a recording of an Alice Notley lecture/poem from 1988 (which was actually one of the gems of the event for me), in which she says “the poetry of everyday life is basically people talking to each other,” & I realize so much of what I was hearing was also “the Alice Notley curse,” that even when a good poet does it even they can sound tedious & frivolous. The day sort of petered out, as most marathon events tend to do, but I was glad I made to the last hour to hear Anna Kreienberg again, who had once lived outside Albany & attended some of the open mics here.

“Perfect Pitch” The Hudson Valley New Years Spoken Word & Performance Extravaganza

At 2:00 PM, Friday, I tuned in to this event streamed in from Green Kill Gallery in Kingston, from 2:00PM to 8:00PM, put together by Bruce Weber, Joanne Pagano Weber & Therese Costa. Apparently it was pre-recorded at the gallery in October & November which made it possible to bring in lots of production values the “live” performances could not. It was also enhanced by the cut-out mobiles, decorative background of the gallery installed by Joanne. Each hour of the 6 there were 6 10 minute segments, individual readers, with a musician or musical duo each hour, & each hour introduced by a mid-Hudson poet, including Bruce Weber, Mikhail Horowitz, Teresa Costa, Sam Truitt, Phillip Levine, & Joanne Pagano Weber.

It was a pleasant mix of poets I’m familiar with, have even featured at the Third Thursday Poetry Night &/or Poets in the Park, & heard at open mics in Woodstock & Kingston, others I was not familiar with, but was to glad to hear. One issue I had was that each hour’s listing of the performers was in alphabetical order, but that was not the order they read in so I had to be careful if I tuned away from a performer I would have to check back in the next few minutes to see who was next.

During the 2:00 to 4:00 segment I heard a short story from Suzanne Bennett, Celia Bland reading from Cherokee Road Kill, poems by Fred Dugan who was new to me, Anne Gorrick read a poem based on Facebook comments, Ken Holland’s fine poems, the humor of Mikhail Horowitz on press release hyperbole (he was the host of the 3:00 - 4:00 hour), Paul McMahon on guitar a better singer than most I’d heard all day, a bass guitar improvisation Abby Travis, Matthew J. Spireng reading poems from his recent book Good Work, poems by Tamas Panitz, Pamela Twining, & Bruce Weber (who was the host of the 2:00 - 3:00 hour).

Teresa Costa, at Albany SJC, August 2017

In the middle segment from 4:00 to 6:00, Teresa Costa hosted the first half & read “The Art of Handwashing,” while Sam Truitt hosted the second half with a hobo jungle chant & drumming, there was Michael Bisio all over his stand-up bass, the quiet, descriptive poems of Robert C. Basher, the rhyming fables of Jennifer Bennett, Andy Clausen’s effusive, ranting catalogs, Guy Reed on sex & love, the humor of Sparrow (who also on Poetry Project), as well as poems by Lily Dunlap, Cate McNider & Sarah Vogill. 

In the final 6:00 to 8:00 segment host Phillip Levine included some of his short poems written on playing cards, the duo of Sylvie Degiez & Wayne Lopes provided music in the first hour, while the music in the 2nd hour was by another duo Karen Whitman & Rick Pantell, I enjoyed the folksy poems of Richard Comerford about being a farmer & making wine, Laura Hinton read from a book-in-progress The Little Book of Human Violence that I would love to read, Mike Jurkovic reading some favorites from other readings, Allison Koffler on the soul of her dog Cole, Dayl Wise’s poems colored by his experience in Viet Nam, Michael Ruby read his political poems while his niece Abby Travis (see above) accompanied him on electric bass, Joanne Pagano Weber hosted the last hour read a memoir of childhood, there was as well as the poetry of Josepha Gutelius, & Vladimir Nahitchevansky. & a charming piece by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright with puppets for his granddaughter.

Perhaps because this was all pre-recorded, but also certainly because the quality of the work was less ego-driven, more genuine from the heart words & music, this was for me the most consistently pleasant, even inspiring event of the 3 events in this day & a half, moving into the New Year, celebrating creativity, in words & music & community. 

Happy New Year!