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Station North

West North Avenue

January 5, 2013

19. Baltimore vs. Brooklyn

“I have been here once or twice and for some reason I like Baltimore,” deadpans Matthew Zingg, a Brooklyn poet, as he steps to the stage at the Windup Space in Station North. “It sort of has a small, non-descript place in my heart.”

Outside the performance space/lounge at the corner of North Charles Street and West North Street, a group of artfully disheveled 20-and 30-somethings, mostly in knit caps, plaid shirts, jeans, and eye glasses, stand near filled bicycle racks smoking cigarettes. Inside, the tables and bar are packed for literary “competition” between poets from New York’s most populous borough and Charm City, which doesn’t mean there aren’t funny asides and wry observances about urban life in both locales.

“We’re city people,” says Allyson Paty, Brooklyn’s second reader. “We pull an invisible bubble out of our own heads and create a protective space around us.”

A copy of the New York Post, always good for a laugh, sits nearby.

Before intermission, Alicia Puglionesi of Baltimore, taking requests from the audience, reads from her “non-verbal” dictionary, a project she’s been working on for a year. She highlights the contradiction in defining actions, which are inherently non-verbal, with words. Someone requests a word from her dictionary beginning with the letter “I,” and she chooses to describe “information,” comparing the term and its movement to a person: “It comes,” Puglionesi says shyly behind her large frame, 80s style glasses, “and never says where it went.”

Later, Eric Nelson, self-deprecatingly admits he’s actually not from Brooklyn, but Queens, which he refers to as “the land of pleasant living,” which of course generates a chorus of boos from the Natty Boh-loving hometown crowd. Bearded and slight, with an open striped sweater vest over mismatched button-down shirt, Nelson recalls his last visit to Baltimore several years with a couple of friends for another poetry reading.

“It was at the Hexagon Space and we’d stayed over night,” Nelson recalls. “The next day, the morning after the reading, we’re walking down the street toward our car and a big jeep pulls up alongside us,” Nelson recalls, “and this guy leans out and says, ‘Die hipster scum.’

“We still laugh about that.”