I arrived at Zuccotti Park this afternoon feeling agitated about the news coming out of Oakland. Videos had surfaced showing police lobbing several types of “non-lethal” projectiles, including tear gas canisters, at peaceful demonstrators, after shutting down their encampment on Tuesday morning. The news from Georgia wasn’t great either, with the Occupy Atlanta park site cleared out and many arrests. I imagined that the mood in lower Manhattan might be tense as a result. Instead, I found a spirited crowd on a mild afternoon, with a demonstration for affordable healthcare just underway. I said hello to my old friend Mitch Cohen, who was handing out fliers headlined “‘Occupy Wall Street’–Strategy for Expansion.” He thinks the next step should be taking possession of unused or underused spaces on behalf of the 99%–a proposal that reminded me of a column by Black Agenda Report’s Bruce Dixon a couple of weeks back, suggesting that the Occupy movement will become more attractive to large numbers of African Americans if and when it begins to occupy what he calls “the goods in our hoods,” i.e. the large numbers of foreclosed and abandoned homes concentrated in low income communities (http://blackagendareport.com/content/occupying-financial-districts-occupying-goods-our-hoods).  Mitch’s flier encourages us to “Imagine occupying and opening up Harlem Hospital or St. Vincent’s in NYC, and inviting health care providers from around the world to come and treat people! Or, to start with something smaller, occupying a library whose hours have been curtailed due to ‘budget cuts’ and keeping it open 24/7.” What an excellent idea.

I postponed my poetry reading to march around the park with the healthcare activists. I chimed in with their chant, which seemed to be “THE 99%–HEALTHCARE POOR.”  After shouting this with a will for half a block, I realized that the slogan actually was “HEALTHCARE FOR THE 99%. I felt like it was a good sign that I’d brought along William Carlos Williams, the poet who was a doctor (or the doctor who was a poet) on this particular day.  When the demonstration had looped around three sides of the park and arrived back on Broadway, I found a place to stand and began reading from Book II of Paterson, “Sunday in the Park.” It was delightful to read lines about the flowing river, the torrent of humanity, and the exhaustion of language at that spot on Broadway, where all is flow and exhaustion. I read the lovely lines about descent, which must be about the waning of human life and the role that memory plays as one ages, but which I have also grown to identify with the waning of illegitimate authority and the decay of the national project:

The descent
  made up of despairs
   and without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening    :
    which is a reversal
of despair.
 For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
 what we have lost in the anticipation–
    a descent follows,
endless and indestructible  
   (Paterson, New Directions Paperback, 1995, p 79)

I was hailed during my reading by one young man who said he loves William Carlos Williams, and another who said, “Paterson is the first book I read when I came to New York–that’s an amazing, amazing book!” I was interrupted by a young man who was standing to my right with a sign saying he had been robbed of several articles including his wallet and laptop; the sign was modeled after a well-known credit card ad, as dollar amounts were supplied for each article, and at the bottom he’d written, “Occupy Wall Street–Priceless!” He said he’d met me a week or so ago and after a while he asked me for a dollar. I told him I only give to the official Occupy Wall Street collection box (my new policy since I gave a dollar to a guy who said he was collecting to buy toilet paper for the Occupation, and then felt very foolish). Next, I was interrupted by a young man named Tyler who lives in Brooklyn and said he was interested in my sign, because it expresses his concerns for the future of the planet, but he wonders if the problem is that everything is too privatized, or instead that everything is too public. I never quite figured out what he meant by that, but we talked for a while about population and energy and the Keystone XL pipeline decision and fracking and peak oil. He said, “I’m really into the waste stream”–he makes things with discarded stuff, doesn’t see himself as an activist in the sense of marching around with a group of people. I read on, with interruptions by a man who wanted to know if I voted in the midterm election (I said no, then couldn’t actually remember if I had or not); he told me a lot of problems that are occurring now wouldn’t be occurring if people like me had voted. Then the man standing on my left started laughing about how the pro-voting guy thought we were so stupid for not believing our problems could be solved at the polls. “We’ve been voting forever, and look where we are.”

I concluded my reading from Paterson with the astonishing prose excerpt from an accusatory letter addressed to Williams by a female correspondent, the poet Marcia Nardi, that he inserted into his poetic text: “My attitude toward woman’s wretched position in society and my ideas about all the necessary changes there, were interesting to you, weren’t they, in so far as they made for literature?….But when my actual personal life crept in, stamped all over with the very same attitudes and sensibilities and preoccupations that you found quite admirable as literature–that was an entirely different matter, wasn’t it?”  (Paterson, p. 87) Then I took off to be an audience member at another kind of poetry reading, one with tables and chairs and drinks and a stage and a microphone, in a crowded basement space where my sign proved very hard to store without hardship to my neighbors, but at least provided a lively conversation starter.