Over the objections of Supervisor Vincent Cannuscio, the Southampton Town Board voted 4-1 on Tuesday to change the zoning of the Bridgehampton Race Circuit to allow Robert Rubin, the owner of the 516-acre parcel, to develop a private 18-hole golf course and 20 house lots there.

Although Councilman Steven Halsey of Bridgehampton, a racing fan, described the decision as the hardest he has had to make since being elected in 1995, he sided with the majority, calling it a reasonable compromise.

Mr. Rubin originally had proposed a residential development of 114 clustered house lots. He later brought in a plan for two golf courses, one public and one private, and 40 lots. Last summer, he further amended his application.

Estate Lots

Under Southampton law, golf courses are permitted in residential areas if they carry a "quasi-public-service-use" designation, which this property, an internationally known race track since the mid-1950s, does. Mr. Rubin's plan must now undergo site-plan review by the Town Planning Board.

The approved plan eliminates the public course and sets three acres as the minimum size for what are called "estate" lots.

Although the Town Board held several lengthy public hearings on the application, it allowed members of the public to comment on the matter again Tuesday before voting. They did so, for about two hours. A steady stream of residents, citing either concerns for groundwater contamination or a desire to see racing continue, urged the board to deny the application. Finally, John Raynor, Mr. Rubin's planning consultant, demanded a vote.

Commendable, But

In casting the sole "no" vote, Mr. Cannuscio, in a prepared statement, cited his concern that the development would threaten the "most critical area for drinking water recharge east of the Shinnecock Canal."

While describing a pesticide monitoring program for the course offered by Mr. Rubin as a "commendable attempt to control contamination," the Supervisor said he feared the need for monitoring proved there was a risk to drinking water. Besides, he said, monitoring would "not prevent the problem from occurring." Grounds keepers would be required to "follow a rule book to the letter," Mr. Cannuscio added. "I fear mistakes will be made."

Mr. Cannuscio also argued that a private golf course would represent a loss for the local economy, when compared to a public one or to the existing race track, because it would benefit only its members.

Meanwhile, longtime supporters of the track have joined forces with environmentalists in the Noyac area, who have been arguing against a golf course for the land, to see what can be done now.

Julie Penny of Noyac said the group, the South Fork Coalition for Fresh Water, was founded in December in reaction not only to the plan for a golf course in Bridgehampton but for others in Amagansett and Quogue. It has called a meeting for 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Bridgehampton Community House.

Ms. Penny's husband is Larry Penny, the director of the East Hampton Town Natural Resources Department, who helped write a water management plan for East Hampton 10 years ago and recently has urged its updating.

Still Hoping

According to Guy Frost, an architect and longtime fan of racing in Bridgehampton, the purpose of the meeting is twofold. One is to focus on zoning laws that could control golf course pollution. To this end, he said, Richard Amper of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society has been invited to speak.

The second purpose is to see if there is any way to save the Race Circuit, Mr. Frost said. He faulted the Southampton Town noise ordinance, which was designed to combat disco beats but was applied to the track in the early '80s, for causing the track's financial problems.

Acknowledging that the Race Circuit's neighbors had a legitimate complaint about noise, he said the answer was to "design an ordinance specifically for the course."

A number of South Fork residents - particularly Democrats - will travel to Washington this weekend for the 53rd Presidential inauguration. Although the swearing-in ceremony is intended to be more patriotic than partisan, the Democrats will have a larger presence and reason to celebrate: Bill Clinton is the first Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be elected to two terms.

Indeed, said Judith Hope, the State Democratic Committee chairwoman and an East Hampton resident, "there's a keen sense of history."

Democratic insiders who attended the 1992 inauguration and this summer's Democratic Convention in Chicago said they expected special attention to be paid to Vice President Al Gore at the inauguration this year since he is in line as his party's Presidential candidate in 2000.

Running For Committee

Though others will return home as soon as the events are over, Ms. Hope will be staying in the nation's capital. On Tuesday she will attend a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, at which new chairs and a national chair will be elected.

She will be running for a position herself, hoping to be chosen a member of the national organization's Executive Committee.

Besides official events sponsored by the Presidential Inaugural Committee, there will be nearly a hundred other events, many of them free, inside the Beltway this weekend. They will begin two days before the inaugural ceremony, whose theme is "An American Journey: Building a Bridge to the 21st Century."

Friedan Speaking

Betty Friedan, a part-time Sag Harbor resident, will be among those taking part in ancillary events. She will speak Sunday afternoon at the Holocaust Museum, as one of several "great thinkers" who have been invited to discuss the major issues our country will face in the new millennium.

"What a wonderful idea to not just have fireworks, but great thinkers," Ms. Friedan said this week. She said she hadn't thought she would be among those chosen to speak, "but I was!" Her topic is "Beyond Identity Politics: Toward a New Vision of Community."

Ms. Friedan, who attended the inaugurations of Presidents Carter and Clinton, will attend the ceremony again this year, as well as the New York Inaugural Ball, a women's inaugural ball, and, like many other East End women going to Washington this weekend, a benefit lunch for a women's political group called EMILY's List.

Fair And Fireworks

The public events will start with "Harmony in America," a presentation on the Mall of speakers, music, and ethnic foods which Ms. Hope called "a giant fair." In addition there will be a fireworks display and a public gala at the USAir Arena in nearby Landover, Md.

Those with invitations to the New York State Democratic Committee Ball will find it at a "choice venue" rather than 1993's "lousy site," Ms. Hope was happy to report. It will be at the Kennedy Center, which will be shared by the Democratic Committees of Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Ms. Hope said she expected at least 1,000 people in attendance, and probably more. The ticket price, $150, would cover costs, she added.

Presidential Gala

Invitations to the Presidential Gala on Sunday night, which will be televised nationally, were sent to some 50,000 people, though only about 14,000 are expected. Tickets range from $100 to $3,000, as the Inaugural Committee tries to raise about $30 million to pay for the weekend's events in addition to the several million taxpayer dollars allotted.

Among those who will be seen in Washington during the weekend are Susan and Alan Patricof, who live on Huntting Lane, East Hampton, and in Manhattan. Ms. Patricof, who has been active in both the President's campaigns, said she had every intention of attending the Presidential Gala, the State Committee Ball, and the inaugural ceremony itself, which she called "just so exciting."

Baldwins Bow Out

Despite the tuxedos and gowns, however, Ms. Hope sprinkled a dose of reality on the weekend's coming events.

"They're just big," she said. "They're not as elegant as they sound to be. You lose a lot of elegance when you put a thousand people in a room."

Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, the actors, who divide their time among Amagansett, Manhattan, and Los Angeles, attended the last inauguration but are not going this year.

"I wish we were going," Mr. Baldwin said this week. He added that he hoped to "hook up" with the President and Vice President sometime after the inauguration, however, noting that he had met them at fund-raisers about twice a year for the past four or five years.

Ticketless Attendees

Those without tickets but with warm coats can watch the swearing-in, at which Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist will officiate, from the sidelines.

"When you sit there freezing . . . and watch the President raise his right hand . . . you do get goose bumps," Ms. Hope said.

Symbolically, she said, the inauguration is "the orderly transition of government, and not a single shot has been fired, not a single life has been lost. . . . It's a remarkable system that has withstood 200 years of trial and is still working."

Other East End residents who confirmed that they would be there are Barbara Lee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel of Southampton and Manhattan, who held Democratic fund-raising parties at their Gin Lane house last summer, and Jeff Sachs of Southampton and Manhattan, who plans to go to the ball hosted by the Democratic Committees of Tennessee, Vice President Gore's home state, as well as New York's.

More South Forkers

Others from the South Fork who were invited are Stanley Fink, a retired New York Democratic politician, Peter Tufo, a part-time Southampton resident, Laura Ross, who has a house in East Hampton, and Robert Zimmerman, who is a part-time Bridgehampton resident.

And, having attended every Democratic Convention and inauguration since 1972, Betty Schlein of Southampton said her "very political family" had convinced her to make the trip again.

"I'm a card-carrying Democrat," Ms. Schlein said. Though she won't attend the balls this year, she said of the scene, "I adore it."

I think of myself as a reasonably modern woman, so why, I wonder, do I continue to be shocked at anything at all? However, just last week I happened to mention M.F.K. Fisher to a woman in publishing who had never even heard of our greatest gastronomic writer in American literature.

It wasn't as if I'd mentioned some of our finest food writers who have fallen into almost complete oblivion, like Joseph Wechsberg, Samuel Chamberlain, Alice B. Toklas, Clementine Paddleford, A. J. Liebling, or even the great Waverly Root - a sorry state of affairs to be sure.

But where in the name of Sweet Jesus can literacy in America be headed when a great writer not three years dead is already forgotten!

Or, worse yet, never been heard of.

This of course sent me straight to my Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher collection to refresh my soul and try to atone for those who view that monumental fraud "The Frugal Gourmet" for cookery advice which ranges from trite to bad.

For those who do not wish to cook or can't read, there are the lavish picture books which at least improve the table settings for catered or take-out food.

M.F.K. Fisher - now there's a food writer who charms you right into the kitchen with her skillful anecdotes, poetry quotations, playful musings, or thoughts on such things as "Love and Death Among the Molluscs."

It was just at this point that my copy of "The Art of Eating," her collected works, opened. I had tucked a letter from her (I had the good fortune to be among her friends), dated March 1977, at that spot.

The "Molluscs" chapter begins: "An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life."

Oyster stew is a quintessentially American specialty, from Maine to the tidewaters of Georgia.

"Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger. . . . Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cement-like stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why. . . . Our spat has been lucky, and in great good spirits he clamps himself firmly to his home, probably forever. He is by now about one-seventy-fifth of an inch long, whatever that may be . . . and he is an oyster."

He Becomes A She

"If he is a Chincoteague, or a Lynhaven maybe, he has found a pleasant, moderately salty bottom, where the tides wash regularly and there is no filth to pollute him and no sand to choke him."

Mrs. Fisher once or twice summered in Sag Harbor and sometimes visited her ex-husband's widow, Eleanor Friede, who lived in Bridgehampton, so, though she was a Californian, she knew the Atlantic Coast oysters.

"For about a year, this oyster - our oyster - is a male, fertilizing a few hundred thousand eggs as best he can without ever knowing whether they swim by or not. Then one day, maternal longings surge between his two valves in his cold guts and gills and all his crinkly fringes. Necessity, that well-known mother, makes him one. He is a she."

Oyster-Opening

"From then on she, with occasional vacations of being masculine just to keep her hand in, bears her millions yearly. She is in the full bloom of womanhood when she is about seven."

Now when you consider the oyster, as M.F. did so movingly, are you not impelled to do something about all the effort this little spat has put into becoming the delicious mollusc he-or-she could be on your dinner plate or floating voluptuously in your creamy bowl of stew?

From time to time I re-learn how to open oysters - just so that I can have some at my disposal when a midnight attack of oyster-craving comes on. (It's in my DNA - my father was a midnight oyster stew man.)

Don't Feel Bad

Unfortunately, my resolve to keep some on hand falters all too often and, being oysterless, I lose my facility. It's the same with clam-shucking - or omelet-making, for that matter. There are some skills that definitely are not like riding a bicycle.

Get your oyster knife into the front hinge-end of the oyster and pry up, holding the wide end down with a heavy glove.

Don't feel too bad about it. Were it not you, prying it out at the peak of perfection, a relentless starfish or screw-borer or some other of the poor oyster's many predators would slowly suck the life out of it.

Oyster Stew

Most Europeans consider cooking an oyster - any oyster of any size - a desecration. But I doubt oysters were as plentiful there, at least for the last couple of centuries, as they were in those pristine waters the Pilgrims landed in and continued to feed from for generations.

Oyster stew is a quintessentially American, specifically Atlantic, specialty, from Maine to the tidewaters of Georgia. Big fat wild oysters from Three Mile Harbor, Blue Point, or Robins Island - if you can resist eating them long enough to get them into this stew - make a splendiferous supper for two on a cold winter night.

Eat it with thick slices of hot buttered toast.

20 large, fat, fresh oysters, just opened

The liquor from the oysters

3 cups whole milk

1 Tbsp. fresh chopped parsley

2 Tbsp. unsalted butter, cut in cubes

1/2 tsp. fresh Hungarian paprika

Salt to taste

Splash of dry sherry

Open the oysters over a bowl to catch their liquor and reserve both separately. In a heavy saucepan bring the milk and oyster liquor almost to the simmer, drop in the parsley and oysters, then swirl in the butter and paprika. When the oysters' edges begin to ruffle - this happens almost instantly - taste, add salt, and dish up in hot bowls. Splash a bit of sherry into each serving.

Fried Oysters

While this may sound like a contradiction in terms, it is not only possible, but one of the most delicious oyster dishes I've ever had. The idea for it came to me at a tempura bar, where the oysters were served, crisp and hot but juicy, in a paper boat. This is an intimate dish, for it must be prepared so quickly it's almost a solitary pleasure. It can be managed for two, however.

2 cups creamed spinach (recipe to follow):

1 pkg. frozen spinach, thawed and chopped

3 Tbsp. butter

2 tsp. onion, finely chopped

2 Tbsp. flour

1/8 tsp. mace or nutmeg

1/8 tsp. coarsely ground pepper

Salt

1 Tbsp. Pernod

1 cup hot milk

1 dozen large, fresh oysters in their shells

1 cup dry cracker crumbs

1 quart clean fresh vegetable oil

Lemon wedges

Make the creamed spinach: Melt the butter in a small, heavy saucepan and gently saute the onions until transparent. Stir in the flour and cook briefly. Stir in the spices and salt to taste, add hot milk, and cook until smooth. Squeeze the spinach fairly dry and stir that and the Pernod into the sauce. Set aside.

Open the oysters, reserving the liquor. On the deep bottom shell, heated in the oven, put a spoonful of hot creamed spinach. Roll the oysters in cracker crumbs, fry them about one minute, and place one lightly on top of each filled shell. Serve at once with a few thin wedges of lemon.

After almost a quarter-century of providing prenatal care to low-income East End women and delivering their babies at Southampton Hospital, the physicians at Hamptons Gynecology and Obstetrics in Southampton have refused to renew their contract with the Suffolk County satellite clinic next door.

Some 150 pregnant patients have been told they will have to travel to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital in Patchogue instead, where the doctors who now provide the clinic's prenatal care are on staff.

One of those women, who requested anonymity, lives in East Hampton Town.

"This is my first public health experience," she said, explaining that she had recently fallen on hard times. Six months pregnant with her third child, she said that when labor pains start, it could take her more than an hour to reach Brookhaven Hospital.

"Not In That Place"

The Southampton obstetricians stopped working at the clinic as of Dec. 31, according to one of them, Dr. Allen Ott, because the facility is "not a professional space."

The East Hampton woman said the clinic was "disgusting" and "filthy." Paper diapers are "stuffed into cracks in the windows," she said. She said the facility offered no privacy - and added that she knew "half a dozen names of people who have TB on the East End," whose cases she claimed to have overheard being discussed.

Brookhaven is "pretty far" from the East End, Dr. Ott acknowledged.

"We'd be happy to consider providing the county with our services," he said, "just not in that place. It's like stepping back into the 1940s." He said he had been talking with county officials for "several years" about moving.

Muddy Waters

Dr. Mary E. Hibberd, Suffolk Commissioner of Health since 1991, also wants clinic patients treated in a more suitable space. She escorted a reporter around the facility this week, where 50-year-old floor tiles were pulling up from examining-room subfloors, and where, because room partitions do not reach the ceilings, a resounding sneeze elicited a "Bless you!" from several rooms away.

Water stains were visible in the ceilings throughout the 3,500-square-foot space, and in many rooms, rags were stuffed in the walls to block drafts around air-conditioning units.

The floors were muddy. In one bathroom, Carol Lunt, a nurse-practitioner, leaned down to pick up papers and wipe the floor tiles to demonstrate how they are cleaned most days. A cleaning woman, Ms. Lunt noted, comes once a week.

"Antediluvian"

As long ago as 1993, said Dr. Hibberd, she brought County Executive Robert E. Gaffney to the clinic, housed in the Schenck building in the Southampton Hospital parking lot, to see the less than acceptable conditions. It is owned and maintained by Southampton Hospital.

Calling it "antediluvian - a historical anachronism not appropriate for renovation," Dr. John J. Ferry Jr., the hospital president, said, "If I had my druthers, I'd take it down and add new parking."

The clinic contains an expansive waiting area with examining rooms surrounding it. It "is not anybody's idea of luxury," Dr. Ferry said, "but, frankly, I've seen a lot worse."

Two-thirds of the space is occupied by the clinic and the remainder by the hospital's human resources department, which, by contrast, was repainted, recarpeted, and refurnished in September. The basement is used for hospital storage.

Spanish-Speaking Clientele

In his three years as hospital president, Dr. Ferry said, he has "heard that the county was going to move the clinic," and decided therefore that renovating it was "not a priority."

"A month or two ago," he asserted, he asked for a list of "things that need to be done," but has heard nothing.

Ms. Lunt, the nurse-practitioner, said that of the 175 pregnant women for whom the clinic provided prenatal care last year, more than half came from Bridgehampton and points east. More than 40 percent are Hispanic.

"A good percentage" of those women do not speak English, said Ms. Lunt, who speaks Spanish and is often called upon to interpret for the obstetricians.

Satisfied Patients?

Dr. Hibberd maintained that while the clinic's physical conditions were unsatisfactory, the "O.B. services are excellent."

She said the low-birth-weight rate at the clinic last year was .7 percent, down from 2 percent the year before. The countywide average is 7 percent, she said.

The patients are "satisfied" with the care they receive, she added.

Among the sites the county is considering for the clinic, according to Dr. Ott, are the Flying Point office building on Flying Point Road in Southampton and one of the physicians' office complexes near the hospital.

Space Costs

Dr. Ott estimated the cost of medical space in Southampton at between $20 and $25 a square foot, but thought the county was willing to spend only about half that. The county pays about $2,000 a month to Southampton Hospital.

Jeffrey Martell, an architect in the county's Public Works Department who finds privately owned space for county agencies to lease, declined to be held to a price, saying "everything is negotiable," and there were a lot of variables, such as who renovates the space.

Mr. Martell did say negotiations were under way with owners of at least two buildings, and that he expected to make a presentation "by February" for review by the County Health Department, the County Executive, and the County Legislature.

Making Arrangements

Meanwhile, the Southampton obstetricians have offered East End mothers-to-be the option of being treated in their private offices and arranging with Southampton Hospital to have their babies delivered there. Both the obstetricians and the hospital accept Medicaid, the insurance for low-income families.

In special instances, Dr. Ferry said delivery arrangements could be made through programs such as Hill Burton, which helps low-income patients in small communities obtain free or low-cost medical care.

County officials were reluctant to say why it has taken so long to find suitable space for the clinic. Paul O'Brien, the county's director of health administrative services, said he hoped to move it to a new building "later this year," but that approval for a new lease and any renovations will need the approval of the Suffolk Legislature.

'Space And Staff'

Rick Belyea, a spokesman for Mr. Gaffney, acknowledged that "it has been a long time. This is a very tedious - and that's polite - process." Mr. Belyea said the problem was "a space matter and a staff matter" that he called "crucial now."

In a Dec. 19, 1996, letter to Dr. John E. Hunt Jr. of Hampton Gynecology and Obstetrics, County Executive Gaffney appeared to reiterate Suffolk's commitment to a better clinic.

"My office is committed to finding and leasing new, more suitable, space . . . to improve both the work environment for staff and the clinical accommodations for patients," he wrote.

"Our staffing is not the issue," said Dr. Ott, whose office is expected to bring in an additional physician on July 1. "The patients will be inconvenienced, and we did not want that to happen."

Ferry: It Won't Close

Dr. Donald Bruhn, the clinic's director, himself an obstetrician, declined to comment.

Southampton Hospital's board of directors "would consider" helping the clinic with some funds, Dr. Ferry said, while noting that it was under no obligation to do so.

He dismissed any idea that the county would close the clinic, as was suggested in a Long Island Regional Planning Board report last year that advocated consolidating county clinics such as the Southampton facility, which is a satellite of the Riverhead Health Clinic, to save money.

The Southampton clinic counted 6,200 patient visits last year, including pediatric and adult patients, besides obstetrics. Hamptons Gynecology and Obstetrics received a $21,000 management fee to provide the prenatal and obstetrical care, and about $900 per delivery.

The Answer

Kew Gardens

January 10, 1997

Dear Helen:

Looks like I'm numero uno once again! I have taken up the Alec Baldwin challenge (letters, East Hampton Star, Jan. 9) and daftly (sic) unscrambled the identity of "Bric Upstult." Yes, good readers, the answer is "Pubic Rust"! (Oops, sorry, Alec, must've mislaid an "l" and a "t" somewhere along the boat ride on the bay.)

Cheers and sokolom,

DONALD MARKS

Power, Profit, Greed

Sag Harbor

January 10, 1997

To The Editor,

Former President Ronald Reagan said it and really meant it: "Let's run government like big business. It would become more efficient."

Now, big business runs government and our lives, too. Corporate heads sit down with our Representatives and help legislate whatever they need or desire on our behalf. How ludicrous and how profitable.

In 1996, campaign spending reached a record high: $600 million. Lobbyists had a free-for-all. Favors of every stripe. For ordinary people we call it bribery and send them to prison. Inside the Beltway, it's known as immunity, immunity from prosecution. On the Presidential level, anything goes. And we have the gall to call people on welfare cheaters. How ludicrous! "The policies of the powerful, the scourge of the helpless."

Why are we so shocked and surprised? This is capitalism at its very best, a system of economics based on power, profit, and greed. Once considered our sacred cow, now exposed as nothing more than idolatry - the god of money - its very symbol ($) the dollar sign. Now we pay the price.

LARRY DARCEY

Please address correspondence to [email protected]

The Hamptons International Film Festival has scheduled another free screening of "Not in Our Town," a film detailing how the community of Billings, Mont., banded together to oppose racist hate groups that had moved into their town.

Jacqui Lofaro, president of the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, will lead a panel discussion following the film. The third in a series of screenings designed to help spread the film's anti-hate message, it will take place in the Southampton High School auditorium on Sunday beginning at 3 p.m.

The film shows how, after swastikas were painted on a Jewish resident's house, a local painters union set to work; how, when a group of skinheads began attending an African American church in an act of intimidation, groups of residents of all races began attending as well; how, when houses with Chanukah menorahs in their windows were targeted by rock-throwers, the candelabras went up in the windows of many neighboring houses in an act of solidarity.

A discussion of racism in East Hampton, which was characterized as both overt and insidious, followed a Guild Hall screening of the film last month. East Hampton residents, members of the clergy and the East Hampton Town Disabilities Advisory Board, Audrey Gaines, the town director of youth services, and East Hampton High School students all spoke at that forum.

A double-barreled, twin-gifted, cross-creative artist is as unique as a talking horse or, for that matter, a bimaculate Dalmatian.

Yes, Michelangelo was a poet as well as an artist, and Blake the reverse. But such dual talents are rare, and often rarefied. (As the devoted Mrs. Blake put it, "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise.")

Star Black (named for her mother's first love, who died in World War II) is a photographer and poet who lives in Sag Harbor and New York City, and one of the few contemporary artists with parallel visual and verbal avocations. There was Zero Mostel, the actor and painter, but he has died; not many others come to mind.

Word-Dazzling

There seemed, at first, to be nothing rarefied about Ms. Black. On a recent rainy day she greeted a visitor with a hearty handshake and a mug of coffee, a fire blazing on her cozy hearth.

A practitioner in one of the helping professions, one might have guessed: the warm welcome and the booming laugh.

A perusal of two recent volumes of her verse, "Waterworn" and "Double Time," points down another path, however. Here is a poet of irrepressible intellect and dazzling vocabulary, a passionate woman head-over-heels in love with words and wordplay, and not one to quail at the verbal challenges of the loftiest poetic forms.

Diabolical Doubles

"Waterworn," for example, consists of 91 unrhymed and often slangy sonnets, neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean but "Americanese," she said with a smile.

And as if the sonnet weren't a sufficiently demanding convention, "Double Time" takes a bravura leap into the double sestina - "the Mount McKinley of poetic forms," the critic Herbert Leibowitz called it - 63 pages of them.

A sestina (who knew?) comprises six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, each stanza repeating the end words of the first-stanza lines, but in a different order. The envoy uses the six words again, three in the middle of its lines and three at the end.

Got it?

Not content to tackle this diabolical 17th-century conceit in its original form, Ms. Black has raised the hurdles not only by doubling the number of lines in each stanza, but also by imposing a fixed pentagonal shape on them, an added stricture all her own.

Flying Stanzas

"The form is enjoying a current vogue," Ms. Black said. "Poetry editors are throwing up their hands and crying, 'Oh no! Not another double sestina!' But nobody else has shaped stanzas."

Is this trend toward the embellishment of an already elaborate form tipping poetry over into pedantry, a reader may well ask? And if so, is it "the sort of pedantry up with which [we] will not put," as Churchill famously remarked?

A glance at Ms. Black's work, the nifty flight and bounce of it, will reassure the diffident reader, but only partially. He or she must also agree to go along for the emotional rollercoaster ride.

"Tsunami And So On"

Here are the opening lines of "Tsunami And So On," an hommage to the prize-bedecked John Ashbery, her poetry teacher at Brooklyn College and a continuing mentor. (A tsunami is a huge wave caused by an undersea volcanic eruption, an allusion to Mr. Ashbery's long poem "A Wave.")

Gee willikers, John, here we are in the strumbled dawn

making voices, you the melodious mentor at sea, craned and

careened toward snowcaps, dangerously indefinite and assured,

guaranteed to spot whirlpooled birds and swoop them out of the blue

implosion before the final peep is heard, before foot-falls of a scowling

god liquefy their downy flutterings, and I, derivative as a lonely cloud,

unstrung from desire indefinitely, tuckered out, silent, shy. . . .

Experimental Vigor

"Yes, 'strumbled' is a coinage," Ms. Black said. "I had the option of using an obscure word like 'scrumpled' to describe the dawn, but my editor, Rosanne Wasserman, the publisher of Groundwater Press, said, 'No, keep strumbled, it's you!' So suddenly I had this newfound confidence to go with it, and I did."

This permission to trust what comes out of left field exemplifies the poet David Lehman's theory, published in The Boston Globe, that "an up-to-speed idiom can freshen up a traditional formal structure."

"The experimental methods of composition pioneered by the New York poets have not lost their freshness and vigor," he wrote, "and their conception of what a poem might be and do seems as liberated for poets now as when [Frank] O'Hara wrote the first of his 'I do this I do that' poems."

Professional Photographer

Ms. Black is also a professional photographer whose illustrations for Sharon De Lano and David Rieff's "Texas Boots" (Viking/Penguin) won a National Book Award nomination for photography in 1982.

Her photographs have appeared on the covers of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, News week, and American Poetry Review, and in Alice Gordon and Vincent Virga's coffee-table book "Summer."

A former staff photographer with United Press International, she now earns her living as a freelancer. Through the years her work has also appeared in New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Avenue, and other publications, as well as in The Times - usually spreads about parties, benefits, and galas.

Her photos have also been used in publications issued by the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums.

Art Of The Streets

Recently, to dispel a lingering depression, she branched out, taking one camera and one lens - no lights - on walks through the streets of various American cities. Her compelling views of street art - graffiti, posters pasted over posters, sticker art, murals, theater ads, all the city's ephemeral communications - are gathered into two collections: "City Collage" and "Downtown Doors."

The eldest of six children, Ms. Black is an Army brat who was born on a naval base in Coronado, Calif. Her father, a career officer, moved his family first to Paris, where she attended kindergarten, then to Washington, D.C., and Hawaii, where she "ran wild on the beautiful beaches, swimming, surfing, and water-skiing with my boyfriend Hoagy."

Her mother wrote interviews for newspapers, and her grandmother was an English teacher. The house was full of books, and poetry became her daily bread.

About-Face

After graduating with a B.A. in English from Wellesley College, Ms. Black, who had traveled extensively in Asia, got a job teaching English in Thailand.

A love affair with a photographer led to a collaboration on a "Guide to Bali," he doing the pictures and she the text. It was followed by guides to Singapore and Malaysia.

She fell in love with a writer next, and in a career about-face and with her new knowledge of cameras became the photographer for "Indonesia: A Voyage Through the Archipelago," and "A Day in the Life of Hawaii."

"Writing was my love, but photography turned out to be my job," Ms. Black said. "It's a lot easier, and the deadline is built in to the event: When it's over, you're done, while the writer struggles on and on."

Ashbery's Workshop

She missed writing, however. After she moved to New York in the early '80s, friendships with the poets Daniel Halpern and Mr. Lehman, and the critic Marjorie Perloff, rekindled her desire to pursue what Wallace Stevens called "the gaudiness of poetry."

But it was especially the National Book Award-winner Paul Monette, her friend and advocate of 30 years, now dead of AIDS, who encouraged her to bite the bullet and apply to Mr. Ashbery's workshop.

"I studied with John for four years," Ms. Black said, "galvanized by this introduction to the New York School and New York art. He didn't say much; he was just there."

"I basked in his magnetic field, and in doing the weird assignments he said you didn't have to do unless you wanted to: Look at de Chirico, write like Raymond Rousseau, translate from a language you don't understand, write an amateurish poem, write an adult poem in a childish mode, look at Max Ernst."

Writers' Grants

She went on to study briefly with Joseph Brodsky, and with Derek Walcott, Galway Kinnell, Alfred Korn, and other poets until, she said, she "had to cut loose." She applied for and won the first of many fellowships, this one to the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago.

"I felt challenged to write on my own, and to write in forms: in pantoums and sonnets and sestinas. At first it felt like following a knitting pattern, but then I suddenly caught on. I got it! I released this whole barrage of language with lines that ended correctly, like weaving a blanket with words."

Since then, Ms. Black has alternated working in New York with stays at writers' colonies and workshops around the country. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Boulevard, among other magazines.

The World Works

"[Black's] . . . ironic self-consciousness never deserts her, and a breathless sense of romantic possibility charges her lines," Mr. Lehman wrote.

"Poems . . . radically envisioned - where the world is turned around, made wildly clear, and made to work," said the poet Lawrence Joseph.

Of late she has been trying to merge her visual and verbal sensibilities in surreal collages that superimpose faded photographs of architectural relics and snippets of sentences and bodily features - smiles, wedding-ringed fingers - on old maps and dictionary pages.

"This is like the playpen all over again, but it gives me great visual pleasure," she said. "Who knows if it will survive? I just keep going and let it teach me."

She gave one of her broad smiles and booming laughs. "I got up on New Year's Day and went straight to it. I got a big kick and it made me happy. What more can you ask?"

While it's too early to get much of a handle on Gov. George Pataki's vast budgetary proposals, which he presented to the State Legislature Tuesday, we can be excused for reacting somewhat cynically.

The Governor would, among other things, cut property taxes, increase state aid to schools - though not consistently on the South Fork - penalize districts that have more than the 12 percent state average of special education students, and funnel funds to so-called charter, or alternative, schools.

The proposals as they have been described so far beg all sorts of questions. Residents here can be forgiven if they wonder how state aid will be increased even as property taxes are significantly cut. If it sounds too good to be true, it may, indeed, be. Then, too, if the results mean an inexorable shift in school funding from the property tax to the income tax, the shift ought to be debated for what it is.

If any school districts have been capricious in segregating children into special education programs, knowing that state and county aid would be forthcoming, the practice should, of course, be stopped, although the "mainstreaming" of children with special needs usually has added costs for the districts. The capping of the number of students who can attend state special-education programs, however, seems arbitrary if not callous.

On the other hand, if the state allows parents and community members, without interference from school boards, to design charter schools to serve students on a more individual basis rather than as ruses for the public funding of sectarian programs, they could help improve the quality of education.

Supply-side economics sounds marvelous: Unfetter capital, cut property taxes, increase state aid. . . There is a contradictory ring to the Governor's proposals, however, and we expect the state's educators and decision-makers to study them very carefully before being seduced.

Even without the Governor's proposals in the last week, the quality of education in the state was very much on the public's mind following the release from the State Department of Education of a crush of paper called school report cards.

According to State Education Commissioner Richard Mills, the purpose of the reports, the first of their kind in New York State, was to raise the public's consciousness about how their districts stand up against comparable districts and to push for higher student achievement.

Filled with Regents rankings and bar graphs and pass-fail rates on standardized elementary-level math and reading tests, among others, the cumbersome documents recap data presented to school boards last summer.

If nothing else, Mary Ann Awad, the project coordinator, said, the reports had prompted more public discussion about student performance than she had heard in 17 years at the department.

While that is desirable, the public's ability to assess the meaning of their districts' report cards was undermined by the very department that went to so much trouble to produce them. The department released the reports to the school districts three weeks before allowing the public to review them. That gave tacit encouragement to school administrators to massage the numbers and present the best spin.

More substantively, the comparison of "similar districts" did not work adequately. It would have been more appropriate, many say, to compare East Hampton, for example, with Southampton, than with districts UpIsland with different populations.

The reports contained some bad news on the issue of subject "mastery." The state says an 85 or better score on Regents tests indicates mastery, a score that so far has proved elusive for the majority of test-takers. In addition, the number of elementary school students testing above the minimum standard, below which remedial help becomes necessary, showed a "disturbing trend," the Commissioner said, although the state is somewhat skeptical of the tests used and is revising them.

Beyond that, the report cards provide a way, in the Commissioner's words, for districts to re-evaluate how they "grow from here" and "what actually works." In East Hampton, there is talk now of mandatory tutoring during the school day. In Amagansett and Montauk, and we hope elsewhere, efforts are already under way to shore up reading skills by adding faculty and training for existing teachers.

Whether the positive results will justify the expense of preparing the report cards is anybody's guess, however. When asked this week how much the project actually cost, Ms. Awad said, "I have no idea."

January, as all good shoppers know, is one of the year's best months for bargain-hunting, and this January could turn out to be the best of the best, at least for residents of Suffolk and Nassau Counties and of New York City.

To help boost sales during a traditionally slow retail period, the State Legislature, together with the County Legislatures and the New York City Council, has waived sales taxes for one week, starting Saturday, on personal clothing or shoe purchases up to $500. That could translate into instant savings of more than $40 for shoppers who actually need what they buy, and a windfall, it is hoped, for shopkeepers.

This is one government action that nobody would want to oppose. (And a good place to start is right here in The Star, on our "January Sales" pages.)