In case the publication of the first poetic phone book didn't attract everyone's attention, the celebrity poetry reading did. Hundreds of students and interested Columbians filled St. Paul's Chapel on the evening of Oct. 30 to hear Susan Sontag, David Dinkins, Geraldine Ferraro, Ed Bradley and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky promote national literacy by reading from the first telephone book to feature poetry.
The event was organized by two Columbia alumni: Andrew Carroll CC'93 of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, and Rodney B. Ryan CC'68, the publisher of the Long Island telephone directories that include selections of poetry.
Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice presidential nominee, read "If" by Rudyard Kipling, which can be found in the phone book's listings for coin dealers, and, from the auto parts listings, television journalist Ed Bradley read "Life" by Paul Laurence Dunbar.
"Poetry has always been special to me," Bradley said before the reading. Among his other selections was "The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara, which commemorated the death of Billie Holiday.
When former New York City mayor and Columbia Professor David Dinkins took the podium he thanked Bradley for the poem about the great blues singer. "When I push the cassette into the car on the way home tonight, that's what I'll hear: Billie Holiday," he said.
Dinkins read the famous Langston Hughes poem, "A Dream Deferred," and Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise."
Susan Sontag arrived at the event having just returned from Sarajevo. She chose to read some of her favorite poems, "Lot's Wife" by Anna Akhmatova, "Crusoe in England" by Elizabeth Bishop and "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun" by Walt Whitman. Sontag, who has published many novels and books of nonfiction, admitted before the reading that she also writes her own poetry.
"But," she said with a wry smile, "I don't publish it."
Joseph Brodsky provided a thundering echo of Sontag's reading of Akhmatova by reciting the poem in its original Russian. He also thumbed through a volume by Robert Frost, picking at random several poems to read, including "Acquainted With the Night."
"With Frost you can turn to any page, and everything is awfully good," said Brodsky, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in the early 1970s and went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1987. He was named Poet Laureate in 1991 and is now a professor at Mount Holyoke.
In addition to the celebrity readers there was one featured guest named Cornelius Cunningham. He came to the event from Philadelphia, where he was a volunteer for Across Ages program. Cunningham, who is 59, told the audience that he suffered from years of alcohol and drug abuse and only recently learned how to read.
"I can learn," he told the audience. "There's nothing wrong with me."
Columbia University Record -- November 17, 1995 -- Vol. 21, No. 10