A dozen or more years ago, a great poetry anthology came out from Curbstone Press entitled Poetry Like Bread. I got what the editor was thinking: Poetry is like bread; it’s the linguistic sustenance of daily life. But poetry is also like cake. And like holy wafer – or maybe, blessed matzah. It is the linguistic touchstone of our most important moments, whether celebratory or solemn.

Last week, Poetry At The Albany Library showcased the varied roles of poetry, from the commemorative to the quotidian, from the playful to the experimental.  The featured reader of the evening was Dean Rader, a University of San Francisco English professor whose book, Works & Days, has won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. 

But the first half of the reading had a more somber tone: Nov. 9 was the anniversary of Germany’s Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” when, in 1938, violent street riots and attacks on Jewish shops marked the start of the Holocaust. Berkeley poets Anne Barrows and Chana Bloch read original and translated works to observe this tragic historical event.

“It had to be acknowledged,” organizer Catherine Taylor said of the date, as she introduced the first poets.

Barrows, who is much inspired by art and artists, began the reading with poems from her book Our Charlotte, a volume of poems about German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who experienced Kristallnacht first-hand. She described how “crystalline explosions crack the night” in “Berlin, 1938,” and in a poem inspired by a portrait, called “For Betty,” told how “the voice of the glass was terror.” 

Bloch, renowned as a translator as well as a poet, began her reading with a poem in Yiddish by Yakov Glatshteyn, and one in Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai, also reading each in English, so we could appreciate sounds and rhythms as well as meaning.

Amichai’s poem, “After Auschwitz,” contained especially powerful images, such as a description of the tattooed numbers on camp inmates’ forearms being “the telephone numbers of God,/ numbers that do not answer/ and are now disconnected, one by one.”

When Dean Rader took the podium, the audience was preparing for an abrupt shift in tone. But Rader created a segué through the theme of translation, introducing himself as a former Comparative Literature grad student, a one-time wannabe translator (of German and Spanish poetry), and a great admirer of Bloch’s work. 

He began by reading some of his own translations, including a piece by Romanian poet Paul Celan, who had written in German, trying to “do to the German language what he felt had been done to the Jews.”

Rader’s presentation style is energetic and light-hearted, and soon he was “moving away from the reverent part of the evening, to the ironic and darkly humorous” poems of Works & Days. 

Inspired by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s work of the same name (though with its ampersand fully spelled out!) Rader’s poems in this volume similarly place emphasis on the value of labor (the “Works” section) and the passage of time (“Days”). 

Throughout the volume hop two familiar characters from children’s literature, Frog and Toad – though scarcely recognizable to readers of the children’s books, as Rader’s Frog and Toad deal with anger management, parallel universes, and writing sonnets. 

Some of the poems – more “post-modern” work from the book’s experimental “&” section – were written in a style reminiscent of Mad Libs, with fill-in-the-blank spaces that often brought laughter from the audience.

While one introduction of the original Works and Days describes Hesiod’s long didactic poem as lacking the “quintessential elation that is expected of good poetry,” clearly Rader’s remake doesn’t have that issue. 

“He reminds me of [former U.S. Poet Laureate] Billy Collins,” said Albany resident Sylvia Paull, citing Rader’s mixing of pop culture with high culture and philosophy. She even speculated that perhaps we had just heard a future Poet Laureate.

In keeping with this season’s Poetry At The Albany Library readings, the Edith Stone room had few empty seats, and attendees came from Albany, Berkeley and San Francisco to hear the writers and buy books at the break. And, of course, to munch brownies. Because even if poetry provides the bread, the cake, and the sacrament, poets still need chocolate.