The rain rained and the wind blew fiercely in lower Manhattan today, creating what looked like miserable conditions for full-time Wall Street Occupiers, but giving me a break from the incredible press of the crowds that lined Broadway yesterday afternoon. As I stood at the entrance to Zuccotti Park clutching my umbrella, and trying to turn the pages on my paperback copy of James Wright’s Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1968), I found that I had become, by default, a kind of unofficial guide to the Occupation. Newcomers stopped to ask me where they could get more information. Several kind people offered to hold my umbrella for the length of a poem, including a woman who said she was making a documentary about the undue influence of giant corporations in all aspects of American life; a conservatively dressed father-and-son pair (or that’s what I took them for) who snapped my picture; and my friend Eric Darton, who blew by just at the moment when I’d had enough of soaking socks and a disintegrating sign. (The bottom half, the part that says OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF actually fell off before I’d quite finished reading, leaving me with BECA– USE THEY’RE TRYING TO DRIVE rather ridiculously strung around my neck; did I mention that it has occurred to me, in the last day or so, that I’ve actually become the walking equivalent of that old New Yorker cartoon figure, the individual with a sandwich board proclaiming THE END IS NEAR?) Eric told me he’d been helping to hold the kitchen equipment together when it threatened to sail away in what was starting to feel like a nor’easter.

Given the stormy atmosphere, I practically had to bellow my reading, which seemed much more appropriate at certain moments than others–for example, when I read the lines, “There are men in this city who labor dawn after dawn/to sell me my death” from “The Minneapolis Poem.” I made a conscious effort, nonetheless, to quiet my voice for “Poems to a Brown Cricket,” which really must not be bellowed. Interestingly–and similar revelations have happened on several prior occasions–I had the impression while reading  “In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned” that I actually understood the imagery in the poem much better than I ever had before. (Those women pouring “down the long street to the river/and into the river,” the ones who “drown every evening”–they’re the sex workers, the immiserated proletariat, female equivalent of the male laborers like the poet’s father who worked themselves to death in southern Ohio factories! Duh.) I closed, as how could I help but do, with the poem that ends the book, “To the Muse,” with its imagery of tenderness and torture that never fails to take an axe to the frozen sea at the top of my cranium, or whatever it was Franz Dickinson Emily Kafka said that great poetry ought to do for us (“It is all right. All they do/Is go in by dividing/One rib from another.”).

I also met a tall man, perhaps in his fifties, wearing business attire, who listened carefully to a poem and then told me that he lives in Connecticut, his daughter is a graduate student in the city, is interested in the Occupation and has gotten him interested as well; he’d been walking around talking to various people and said he was very impressed with the level of discourse inside the park. “These aren’t wild-eyed crazies or anything like that. And I can appreciate why they’ve held off on making demands, but now it’s getting to be the time where they need to shape some kind of coherent program, so something concrete can come out of this.” And I spoke for a few minutes with a journalist who told me she’d come from India expressly to cover Occupy Wall Street, which is starting to generate a lot of interest over there.

Now I’m sitting at home, it’s after 9 p.m., raining hard again, and I’m thinking about how chilly and miserable it must be in Zuccotti Park right now. I’m thinking about James Wright’s book, written at the height of the Vietnam War protests, in many ways the height of 20th century America’s confrontation with the putrefaction at the heart of the national project. “The old man Walt Whitman our countryman/Is now in America our country/Dead.” I’m thinking about how much James Wright knew that so many people back then wanted not to know, and so many people today still can’t bear to know, and how, in the decades since he wrote, the lonely heartland scenes he kept coming back to–scenes from which nature has not yet entirely fled despite their patina of late-industrial decay–have come to seem almost quaint, almost bucolic, given the corporate wallpaper covering over everything in sight. Yet he wouldn’t have been surprised to see what we’ve come to: “This place of skull where I hear myself weeping.”