Friday, April 3, 1998 | 9:04 a.m.
NEW YORK - You might expect Laurie Anderson to be a poetry fan or Jimmy Breslin to savor Yeats, but who ever knew that Geraldine Ferraro loved Kipling?
But sure enough, they were part of the eclectic roster of celebrities who assembled Wednesday night at Town Hall to read selections of their favorite verse.
"America is not, contrary to popular opinion, a country that ignores its poets," said Robert Pinsky, the nation's poet laureate and the evening's host. "We are a nation with a powerful film industry and visual arts but we, too, are a vital part of American culture."
The reading, which brought about 1,000 people in out of the soaking rain, was the opening event of the Favorite Poem Project, Pinsky's plan to assemble an audio and video archive of 1,000 average Americans reciting their best-loved poems. It was also the opening day of National Poetry Month.
While Fashion Week may be dominating the gossip columns, the celebrity power on hand was substantial. "Wow," said Pinsky, after watching Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Mike Wallace read. "Those guys weren't bad."
The event was characterized by dignified orations of poems by the likes of Seamus Heaney (read in a sultry tenor by Ms. Anderson) and T.S. Eliot (read quietly by the bookish rocker Suzanne Vega). But there were a few unscripted surprises.
Choreographer Bill T. Jones preceded his reading of "Omeros," by Derek Walcott, by circling the stage and then breaking into a quick, gyrating ballet on his approach to the microphone. "That's my favorite poem," he said, slightly out of breath.
There were moments of dissent. Schlesinger suggested that picking a favorite poem was tantamount to "asking a parent to pick a favorite child." Then he read Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter."
Ms. Ferraro, a candidate for the United States Senate, read Kipling's "If," but only after chiding the poet, who died in 1936, for favoring men in his verse. "I wish there were an 'If' for girls," she said.
Acting as MC for the event, which was sponsored by the advertising department of The New York Times, Pinsky had to tamp down a chorus of boos and hisses after a welcoming letter from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was read to the occasionally ornery assembly. "I'm happy to say I'm not the mayor," Pinsky said.
The evening's most ebullient participant was Andrew Carroll, the director of the American Literacy Project, who plans to spend the next month traveling cross-country in a rented truck distributing about 100,000 volumes of a collection of American poems.
"I'm not a poet, and I only recently began to like the stuff," he said, smiling broadly. "And I've never driven over 300 miles in my life."
As glamorous as the lineup was, perhaps the most emotional moments came as poems were read by local junior high and high school students and an adult-literacy student. Ivonne Norman, an eighth-grader from the School for the Physical City, read from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."
"Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?" read Ms. Norman, her voice cracking and her hands fidgeting on the too-tall lectern. "Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?"
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