REAL BOHEMIANS.(The Talk of the Town)

The other night, at the National Arts Club, a couple of hundred admirers of the poet Jane Mayhall got together for a reading from her work. (Her previous book came out in 1973; her new book, "Sleeping Late on Judgment Day," has just been published by Knopf.) There were friends from Black Mountain, the experimental college in North Carolina, which Mayhall attended from 1937 to 1939; neighbors from the ten or twelve apartments that she had rented over the years in the Village; writers and artists whose work she and her late husband, Leslie George Katz, had published at the Eakins Press; set designers; ballet people; poets; musicians; photographers; psychologists; and professors. Harvey Simmonds, who helped assemble the press's authoritative catalogue of Balanchine's works, was there. He met Mayhall and Katz at May Swenson's house on Perry Street in 1966; he is now a Cistercian (Trappist) monk known as Brother Benedict. "Trappists are enclosed," he said. "It's very unusual that I'm here tonight." His monastery, in Virginia, makes fruitcake and creamed honey--"twenty-five thousand fruitcakes a year." Mary Brett Daniels, a petite woman who met Mayhall at Black Mountain, came up from Philadelphia. "She wrote a poem for our wedding," Daniels said. " 'Neal and Mary, may you be / gay as poets on a spree.' Leslie and Jane were the real bohemians--we had children." She added, "There's Elizabeth Pollet--she was married to Delmore Schwartz."

As the reading began, Daniels scooted a chair next to Mayhall, who was sitting in the front row. Ned Rorem, who is known for his musical settings of Yeats, Auden, Bishop, Crane, and many others, read a poem--he said it was the first time he'd read poetry in public. Ned O'Gorman, a poet and headmaster, also read, saying that Mayhall reminded him of "Louise Bogan, whom I adored, and of Sappho." Mayhall, whose poems are wry and forthright, listened attentively, smiling faintly every now and again. After everyone else had finished, she read a poem herself.

The next afternoon, Mayhall was in her apartment, on West Sixty-seventh Street, where she and Katz moved in 1976. The apartment still houses the offices of the Eakins Press, which was founded in 1966, with some of the proceeds from the sale of a collection of Thomas Eakins paintings owned by Katz's father. Mayhall was wearing a lavender blouse and had a yellow pencil tucked behind her ear. Furniture and books were scattered around the large living room, and paint peeled in voluminous curls from the double-height ceilings.

"My family came to Appalachia during the Irish potato ...