Meryl Streep, Tina Fey among readers at poetry gala in New York

You won’t often find a thousand people in evening dress attending a poetry reading. But the readers usually don’t include Meryl Streep, Tina Fey and Sir Patrick Stewart.

Empty seats were rare Thursday night at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall for “Poetry & the Creative Mind” — an all-star celebration presented by the Academy of American Poets.

Streep recited works on parenting by Sylvia Plath and Richard Wilbur, while Fey was at her comic best reading James Tate’s The List of Famous Hats. Stewart chose Carl Sandburg’s Jaws and Edna St Vincent Millay’s God’s World.