DAN WILCOX POET, PHOTOGRAPHER
By Michael Eck, Special to the Times Union
First published: Sunday, December 18, 2005

"I don't know how I ever had time to work," poet Dan Wilcox mused last week between bites of a roast beef sandwich at Albany's Lark Street Deli.

Wilcox, 59, recently retired from a 30-year career as a disability analyst, but he remains a busy man. A very busy man.

Just prior to lunch, for example, he offered the invocation at the weekly Quaker Peace Vigil at the state Capitol. After our chat, he was heading home to at least figuratively clear his desk of papers from the Poetry Motel Foundation (which he jokingly refers to as "a money-laundering scheme for poetry") and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild (where he serves as program chair) before updating the e-mail list he maintains, which sends out information about local poetry events to more than 250 recipients.

"My mission," says the Beat-influenced poet, "is to give other poets an opportunity to get their work out there."

Q: In the 1980s, Tom Nattell's "Readings Against the End of the World" series helped lure you back to Albany from Yonkers. He was the patriarch of the Albany poetry scene. He died from cancer in January. Has the mantle passed to you?

A: Meeting Tom was one of those great coincidences, it was destined to happen. Over the years we became friends, mainly through me carrying his music stand into the old QE2 for his Last Monday of the Month Open Mike.

At the end, he was passing stuff on to me, like the Poets in the Park series, which I now run, or asking me to help with projects like the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize at Albany High School.

People say, "Oh you must miss your friend." I do. But he left me so much that it's almost like he's not gone. I feel more a sense of appreciation, a sense of privilege, for having known him and having worked with him.

Q: Tom was part of 3 Guys from Albany. I understand you and Charlie Rossiter (who now lives in Chicago) are carrying on the troupe as a duo. What is the concept behind 3 Guys?

A: In 1992, the three of us were coming home from a poetry festival in New Jersey, and somehow we came up with this concept of a traveling poetry performance group.

Charlie said, "We should call ourselves 3 Guys from Albany, and we could read in all the Albanys!" Then we envisioned these tour shirts that would read "Albany ..." and then just list all the states.

We've done 11 out of 18 so far. To support it we set up gigs en route that might be able to pay our way around the Albanys, which are all smaller than this one.

Q: Legend has it that you have "The World's Largest Collection of Photos of Unknown Poets." True?

A: I started carrying a camera around to readings just before I moved back up here in 1985. I was taking photos mainly to remember what the poets looked like, so if I read their book or saw them again somewhere I could place them. At the time I was the only one in the audience with a camera, but now it happens quite a bit. It just became something I did to document the scene.

A few years ago I did a count and I had about 6,000 images, so I must be up to about 8,000 to 9,000 now.

Q: You've been hosting the "Third Thursday Open Mike," which is now at the Lark Street Bookshop, at various locations since 1997. What's the attraction of an open mic?

A: There's gonna be some good stuff, there's gonna be some bad stuff, and there's going to be stuff that you carry with you because it made an impression one way or the other. That's the thrill. You never now what you're going to get out of it.

Q: The night Tom died, a group of friends took his green beret to Washington Park and placed it on the Robert Burns statue, the site of Poets in the Park. You wear a black beret. What would you like done with yours when you go?

A: I want all the young poets in Albany to be wearing it. Let's go from the real thing to some kind of symbolic beret. Or if they all want to sport berets at my memorial service, fine, that's what they should do. Any young poet out there from 5 to 80; anybody into poetry and following along and doing it after I'm gone should wear a beret.

Michael Eck is a freelance writer from Albany and a regular contributor to the Times Union.