Tennessee Williams Inducted Into Cathedral's Poets' Corner in NYC

By Adam Hetrick
November 5, 2009

Theatre veterans Olympia Dukakis, Marian Seldes, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson celebrate playwright Tennessee Williams' posthumous induction into the Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan on Nov. 5.

Williams is the first poet-playwright to be inducted into the Poets' Corner, which was created in 1984 and is akin to the one in London's Westminster Abbey. The 7 PM event is a co-presentation with the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival.

Those in attendance to read and honor Williams' work include Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, Marian Seldes, John Guare, Olympia Dukakis, John Patrick Shanley, Gregory Mosher, Sylvia Miles, William Jay Smith, Lenya Rideout, Jeremy Lawrence, Wyatt Prunty, David Kaplan, Thomas Keith, Mitch Douglas and current Cathedral poet-in-residence Charles F. Martin.

On Nov. 8 at 4 PM the Cathedral will unveil a stone inscribed with "For time is the longest distance between two places," from Williams' The Glass Menagerie.

Previous inductees include Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Phyliss Wheatley, e. e. cummings, Emma Lazarus and William Carlos Williams.

All events are free and open to the public. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is located at 1047 Amsterdam Ave at 112th and Amsterdam.