Dinner with a beat...Poet
Miranda Bloodworth
Issue date: 11/12/03 Section: Features
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It is Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting in the Back Fence, a bar at the corner of Bleeker and Thompson Streets, at the smallest table I have ever seen. The floor is covered in saw dust and peanut shells. After she buys me a Coke, I listen to Brigid Murnaghan, the show's emcee, start off the Back Fence's weekly poetry slam - the longest running one in New York City. Murnaghan, a poet who hung around with the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Dylan eventually joins me at my table. "I know you have questions" she says, "but I'm going to tell you some stories."
Murnaghan has lived on Bleeker Street nearly her entire life and has been running the poetry readings for nearly thirty years. "My only rule is you can't be stoned," she explains. "You can do anything on stage except that; in the early beginning, I allowed it. Then I saw what it did...it's no fun" she continues. As she explains this to me, a poet on stage, almost on cue, evokes a wave of laughter from the audience as he reads, "Brigid says you can't be stoned on stage, but Brigid, don't you know, I'm always stoned?" As it got later, she gave me her card and told me to call her one night so we could have dinner.
A week later my roommate Rebecca and I headed up to Brigid's apartment. She read us some poetry she had written in response to being called a "sort of poet" by Joe Lesueur. "You have to honor it," she said, in reference to her writing. "[My poetry] was a secret I kept for many years, but I always honored it."
Our conversation generally focused on writing, specifically, the current poetry scene. "I've seen the whole poetry scene from the beginning to what's going on now, and I like some of it, but what's really wrong with [the current scene] is academia, because they're the only ones that get published." Brigid had explained a similar sentiment earlier at the Back Fence when she told me how English professors especially seemed too stuffy when it came to writing. She mentioned how she could always tell which readers were the teachers by their writing style.
Murnaghan has lived on Bleeker Street nearly her entire life and has been running the poetry readings for nearly thirty years. "My only rule is you can't be stoned," she explains. "You can do anything on stage except that; in the early beginning, I allowed it. Then I saw what it did...it's no fun" she continues. As she explains this to me, a poet on stage, almost on cue, evokes a wave of laughter from the audience as he reads, "Brigid says you can't be stoned on stage, but Brigid, don't you know, I'm always stoned?" As it got later, she gave me her card and told me to call her one night so we could have dinner.
A week later my roommate Rebecca and I headed up to Brigid's apartment. She read us some poetry she had written in response to being called a "sort of poet" by Joe Lesueur. "You have to honor it," she said, in reference to her writing. "[My poetry] was a secret I kept for many years, but I always honored it."
Our conversation generally focused on writing, specifically, the current poetry scene. "I've seen the whole poetry scene from the beginning to what's going on now, and I like some of it, but what's really wrong with [the current scene] is academia, because they're the only ones that get published." Brigid had explained a similar sentiment earlier at the Back Fence when she told me how English professors especially seemed too stuffy when it came to writing. She mentioned how she could always tell which readers were the teachers by their writing style.