The National Arts Club was jammed with poets on Tuesday evening, and those were on the walls: images of Auden and Berryman, Ashbery and   Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein for the Portraits of Poets 1910-2010 exhibition. What about off the wall, the 3 hundred or so filling this historic Gramercy Park institution's homey Christmas sitting rooms? A who's who of poets and their photographers: Jill Krementz, Nancy Crampton,Chris Felver among them sat to hear the verse, though soon the seats ran out and the New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn urged the standing room crowd to use the floor if necessary. Soon floor space ran out too.

The occasion marked the centennial of the Poetry Society of America with a stellar reading by Richard Howard, Galway Kinnell, Marie Ponsot, Yusef Komunyakaa, and ending withSapphire, the author of Push, the novel on which the movie Precious, sure to be nominated for Best Picture Oscar, is based. Causing a sensation for the level of family dysfunction and abuse, Precious' most egregious figures are the parents.

Sapphire read a Father's Day tribute, “June 17, 2007,” and it was a relief that the poem's father was unlike the father in her novel.

The charismatic beat writers were present in pictures: Bob Kaufman, Anne Waldman, Michael McClure,Patti Smith. One writer, William Burroughs, a poet in his pal Jack Kerouac's praise, will be remembered in a new documentary to be featured at the upcoming Slamdance festival. Talented filmmaker Yony Leyser is asking for eleventh hour help:

See http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/williamburroughs/william-s-burroughs-a-man-within-0upremer

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Photos: Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman courtesy of Chris Felver