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I have a friend who owns a ton of photography books. They take up an entire wall of his apartment. And when I visit this friend of mine, eyes scanning bright bindings, I always ask him, “Do you actually go back and read any of these?” It turns out he does, and most photobook collectors do. For them, this bookshelf isn’t just a vertical coffee table, it’s something more like a home-cinema. When a photobook is treated as more than just the work of a single photographer, it becomes a visual-meditation on another time/place/life. To my friend, his wall reaches to so many more dimensions that just his ceiling.

Take the transportive nature of these three new titles from Powerhouse, for example.

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The first gig I ever had in New York was an internship at Mouth Almighty, a spoken word label. I’m pretty sure it’s defunct now. I do not mourn its passing.

But I thought of it the other night when I made my first visit to the wonderful Bryant Park Reading Room. This “room,” for those who’ve never been, is simply an open-air seating area, nestled in the park and full of books and magazines. It’s open daily into October, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and it’s definitely worth a visit. The Bryant Park Corporation restarted it in 2003; the original Reading Room was run from 1935 until 1944 by the New York Public Library as a service to the many New Yorkers who had lost their jobs during the Depression.

The current room also hosts free events, including a Sept. 10th lunchtime celebration of the Harlem Renaissance that looks particularly promising. I went for a poetry reading by Kelly Zen–Yie Tsai, Shanxing Wang and John Yau:

Ken Chen, the executive director of the The Asian American Writers’ Workshop, which hosted the evening and also holds lots of worthwhile events

I came for the chance to hear Yau (I’ve written about his criticism here), and he didn’t disappoint - I can’t improve on Chen’s introduction of him as a “grizzled western cowboy hero.” Wang was also compelling, though the combination of his heavy Chinese accent and the ambient noise (the perils of outdoor readings!) made it difficult to understand him.

But my Mouth Almighty flashback came when Tsai read:

She began after trying, twice and not very successfully, to get the audience to yell that we “were ready for some poetry.” Poetry folks aren’t really the best yellers, but Tsai didn’t deliver anyway. Stand-up, political activism, performance, sure - just not poetry.

Tsai’s style is well-suited to an informal outdoor setting - better suited, really, than Yau and Wang’s quieter, nuanced work. She’s loud, lively, funny and her words go down easy, so easy that you forget them as soon as they pass. These are the hallmarks of spoken word, and that’s great. But why on earth try to disguise it as poetry? Worse, why preach, as the Mouth Almighty folks always did, about how this rowdy, vulgar form is the answer to the earnest, churchy, pallid world of poesie? That world has its share of problems, certainly. But spoken word ain’t the solution.

At the Poetry Brothel in Brooklyn, Nicolas Adamski dons an eye patch and becomes Tennessee Pink. He’ll take you into a back room draped with curtains, and share with you one of the most personal things that can be exchanged between two people: poetry. He and Stephanie Berger (The Madame) are the founders and organizers of this now monthly soirée. Before we spoke, Tennessee Pink told me that that the kinds of poems he loves best are the ones that “live in the air between the poet’s mouth and the ears of the listener.”

Christie Ann Reynolds (Car) despises blogs and bloggers, though she’s perfectly comfortable with this blogger sharing her work.

Nicholas Adamski (Tennessee Pink) told me he can’t read poetry without his eyepatch. Lazy eye.

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I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Beat writers. Too many of their efforts leave me feeling the literary equivalent of the dismay that comes from looking at dreadlock-sporting white kids in Berkeley begging for money so that, as their handwritten cardboard signs charmingly announce, they can score more pot. I’m just not interested.

But I was intrigued by a symposium at the Asia Society on Saturday and, in an effort to challenge my narrow-minded dismissal of these iconic American writers, I decided to spend some time with “The Beats in India.”

Let us pass lightly over John Giorno’s reading, which I only caught the tail end of. I had come for the panel “Indian Poets and the Beats,” featuring the poets Anne Waldman and Sunil Gangopadhyay, and moderated by Deborah Baker, author of “A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.”

Gangopadhyay did not disappoint. While Waldman nattered on about vortexes, cultural interventions, complex cosmologies and “that very primordial sense of impermanence” one finds when visiting ancient Indian sites, he painted a far more down-to-earth picture of the time Allen Ginsberg spent in Calcutta, and his interactions with the young, rebellious poets there. When Baker tried to emphasize the spiritual connection Ginsberg made with one holy man, he cheerfully torpedoed her.

“Poets generally do not like non-literary figures,” he said with a mischievous smile, “These god men and religious men, they’re boring after a certain time. Allen found these young poets with whom he could talk.”

And, of course, to do things other than talk. Gangopadhyay, with a smile now bordering on wicked, provided the best panel ending I’ve ever witnessed, after Baker asked how Ginsberg’s homosexuality was received in India.

“Allen wanted to have sex with me,” he replied. “I said, ‘Why not, I won’t get pregnant. I’m always up for an adventure. You do it once with me and I do it once with you.’”

But Ginsberg, apparently, wasn’t interested in such equality of exchange.

“I didn’t know the difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive,’” Gangopadhyay summed up with a flourish. “So I said, ‘Forget it!’”

Ha!

Afterward, I tried to read Ginsberg again. Didn’t get very far before ditching him in favor of Frank O’Hara. Sorry, Allen. But all is not lost in my self-betterment efforts. I am heading to Amazon now, to find myself a Gangopadhyay translation.