Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, “Passing Stranger,” is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.
On April 15, it will officially make its debut with a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, the last stop on the tour, but the guide is already available as a free MP3 at eastvillagepoetrywalk.org. Listeners can download it and stroll through the tour anytime (or just imagine the sights mentioned from their couches).
The project, supported by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, was five years and more than 40 drafts in the making, whittled from nearly 100 hours of tape, Mr. Malinovski, a freelance radio producer, said. The idea came to him when he first moved to the city, and lived in the East Village. He read Daniel Kane’s “All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s,” and walked around, envisioning the Beats and the generations of New York School poets who followed. A map began to form, and a natural chronicle.
In today's edition, The New York Times tells a wonderful story of a walking tour through the East Side focusing on the writers of New York. The usual suspects are there—Ginsberg and Kerouac—but William Burroughs, Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, and LeRoi Jones find their way into the piece. The real surprise for me is the opening—Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, was once buried in New York City! I've gone out of my way to visit sites associated with Antonin Dvorak, Bela Bartok, and William Dean Howells, but this is a pilgrimage I've yet to make.