Marathon Reading of Dante's Inferno at St. John the Divine

A marathon reading of Dante on Maundy Thursday . . . it sounds like the start of a tongue-twister, but the poets, clergy folk, performance artists, and other readers at the 19th annual event last night at St. John the Divine were more interested in twisting souls, just like Dante was. As the microphone's reverb echoed off the Gothic church walls, with incense and candle smoke still swirling from the actual Maundy Thursday mass, the audience was itself transported, several lines or a half-canto at a time, into those dark woods. "Hell, yes," St. John's website says. No joke.