Evie Ivy’s reading series (no formal name) at the Green Pavilion restaurant in the Kensington section of Brooklyn has been a reliable outpost for performing poets for several years. Its ability to assemble branded artists and generous crowds to its location far off the beaten tracks of Manhattan and the entrenched artistic magnets elsewhere inside Brooklyn is a testament to its exceptional drawing power. Maybe it’s the embracing warmth of the host in her signature leg warmers and high heels, not to mention her apparent acquaintance with everyone passing through the city’s alternative poetry milieu. Or the bright miniature ballroom setting of the Green Pavilion’s back room. Or the restaurant’s menu, one cut above the usual New York diner fare. Or the signup sheet for open readers.

A recent reading presented stalwarts of the downtown scene. Reading from her new book Cover Charge, Linda Kleinbub paraded an eye vigilant toward the transactions between urban humans and nature (“It’s your laundry I do tonight…Watching the gyrations of the spin cycle. oh those damn birds, their caw caw caw, how can I compose myself in this clamoring silence?”). Kleinbub began her set in a matter of fact tone that declined to linger on the adept lyrical properties of her verse but gradually warmed to her groove.

Madeline Artenberg ranges over her many wanderings inside New York City and beyond, as well as her varied and often gritty employment history, dropping homage on aging immigrants, her kinky Jewish hair, burka clad women of Queens, candle men and Studio 54. Arteneberg’s story is of a woman and a poet who frequently gets knocked down but always regains her feet and the proud glimmer in her eye. The humble musical joy she takes in her words and her hand flowing with their rhythms tell it: “I still wear bright colors…I am still flesh awakening the rose.”

Noel D. Cohen takes a populist tack, bypassing the more ambitious textual reformulations that define the general run of alt poetry around town. His prefaces are unvarying (“This poem is called____, and it goes like this”) and his form is saloon table doggerel. But his bluff, roving eye delivery, recountng from memory sister meeting girlfriend, his singular mom, a father’s watch lost and beatniks on the breach (with a bonus sampling from his grandfather’s inspirational verse), breathes an undiluted confidence that his recloaked bromides will find their mark inside the warmer ventricles of New York sophisticates. The laughter and sighs of empathy confirm they do.

Phillip Giambri, a titled local legend who cruises by “the Ancient Mariner” (with t-shirts to match), writes stories of a squalid but detectably less unkind, less ungentle, perhaps older East Village, favoring tiny overheated kitchens over no-water squats, dark, boozy dives over shooting galleries. Tonight Giambri revisited the well-trod but somehow never merely ordinary terrain of American urban working class Catholicism, in his case the bruising streets of 1950s Sicilan South Philadelphia. With unending streams of color, he told of the Italian vs. Irish feuds in his parochial high school, a boycott of his school bookstore over price gouging, Inquisitorial mornings of detention, his robbery-based entrance into juvenile delinquency. He paid tribute to stonemason Uncle Leon, whose granite and stucco craftings still stand: “They could probably survive a nuclear blast.” In his trademark tattoos, porkpie hat and fixed small smile, Giambri reads in a gruff, relaxed voice that betokens a comfortable familiarity with his material, though in a somewhat rushed pace that besets every
performer of longer-form prose who must fight against the allotted clock.