New York in the Poet — Gary Keenan

"The light is buried under chains and noises
in impudent challenge of rootless science.
Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger
as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood."
"The Dawn," Federico Garcia Lorca (trans. Spender/Gili)

he year or so Lorca spent in New York City, at the start of the Great Depression, was difficult. At home in Spain, his lyricism resonated with the landscape, his classicism an expression of more than two millennia of Mediterranean culture. In the New World, he found himself both a voice in the wilderness and in a society severed from nature and dominated by greed and hedonism. A "New York of slime,/New York of wires and death..." threatened to overwhelm his senses. The great struggle in Poeta en Nueva York is of an individual imagination in a collective chaos, a circle of hell in which the bestial reigns beside the industrial. In this crisis, Lorca appeals to Whitman for strength and wisdom and balance. "Ode to Walt Whitman" is the crucial imaginative act of the sequence of poems, wherein Lorca sees and feels the most difficult loathings, dislocations, alienations--he is absorbing the suffering surrounding him, measuring it against his own. In the climactic tirade against "pansies of the city" who pursue their pleasures in shame instead of love, who have no myths or rites that sanctify their desires, he turns to the elder poet, assuring him first that the crisis is not of desire but of action. Lorca has no quarrel "against the little boy who writes/a girl's name on his pillow" nor does he vilify "the solitary men in clubs/who drink the water of prostitution with nausea"--he recognizes the difficulty, the contradiction, the oppression. In summoning Whitman, he summons poetry, poets, and the Romantic principle that they might demand a more humane possibility, that Whitman even in his eternal sleep might still inspire other voices.

"I want the strong air of the most profound night
to remove flowers and words from the arch where you sleep,
and a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites
the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn."

It's no simple thing to invite the corn goddess to rule over New York City. Corn is of course a cultural phenomenon, not a purely natural one, but it represents a connection to Nature, to the earth, to the fertility rites of the classical world as well as the relation to land cultivated by Native Americans. I grew up in a suburb of Boston. Hingham is a small sea-coast town first settled in 1630; the oldest church there was built in 1670, the oldest home dates to around 1650. My childhood home was planted on a cornfield sold to a developer in the late 1950's, but some farmland remained in our neighborhood. I spent many hours traipsing through cornrows, hiding in hayfields, watching combines spit out bales. I could walk for hours in the woods and encounter no one.

In my early adulthood I moved to Cambridge, more urban but still a short drive from barrier beaches, nature reserves, bird sanctuaries. The relatively small scale of metropolitan Boston doesn't quite obscure the natural surroundings of Boston Harbor, the Charles River, the Neponset salt marshes. New England winters very regularly remind one of the ongoing contest with natural forces, much the same way I imagine the Mississippi points out the limits of the levee builders' genius.

These are the environments in which my poetic consciousness began to develop. I spent a lot of years writing about those early experiences in the woods, and when I started publishing poems, more than a few were set on Crane Beach north of Boston. I was interested in a sense of place, of locale and nature, of the intuition of received beauty and the notion of imperfect surrender. In the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Frost I looked to nature and locale for some sort of instruction. I pursued a relationship with reverie and meditation, running along the Charles River in all weathers, hiking in the woods, walking in the dunes of Cape Ann and Cape Cod. I never felt I was or wanted to be a "nature poet," but I did look to natural forces as an index of poetic possibility. I took from the beach, for instance, not just a set of images but a dynamic whose energy carried into language the idea of unwilled change as beauty.

I grew up more or less hating New York City--home of the vile Yankees and the upstart Knicks. That's about all I knew of the Big Apple other than the Empire State Building and the UN, and what hints of urban character I could glean from episodes of The Honeymooners, Car 54 Where Are You? and the occasional black and white movie on Saturday afternoons.

A college girlfriend from Long Island introduced me to the real New York City, at least parts of it. We'd take the train in from Port Washington, passing Shea Stadium and what remained of the Worlds Fair in Flushing Meadows, and spend a day wandering around Soho where art galleries were just starting to occupy buildings that had been garment shops, light manufacturing concerns, or vacant. We'd visit the Metropolitan and Guggenheim and Modern Museums. We (at my insistence) went to a jazz club on 52nd Street, Jimmy Ryan's, where trumpeter Roy Eldridge, one of the last giants of the swing era, played an extended gig throughout the early 1970's. We took buses because the subway was too dangerous. We avoided 42nd Street and Times Square for the same reason.

These few visits were enough to give me the far-fetched idea that one day I'd like to live in New York. It was overwhelmingly large--the cemeteries alone induced awe as the LIRR train passed them in Queens. The new World Trade Center gleamed with optimism and confidence on a scale that had no precedent in my experience. Those visits reoriented my imagination as sure as a first view of the Grand Canyon startled and confused the first European adventurers. The immense, intentional poetics of the urban grid and vertical living, the flocks of quickstepping pedestrians who always seemed to know where they were going and why, the tides of yellow cabs flooding the streets--none of this negated my seaside reveries, but it all indicated other avenues of inquiry. It made me curious.

I moved to New York at age 35, to attend graduate school in Brooklyn and to test my ability to walk the streets with those knowing flocks. I'd already published some poems, won a fellowship, read my work in performance. It wasn't a particularly romantic change. I'd read Ginsberg and Corso, Ashbery and O'Hara, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, poets who drew inspiration from the chaos and sophistication of New York, who loved the crowd as material and/or audience. Ashbery was the only one of those whose poems I truly loved. He had taught at Brooklyn College, which was enough to get me interested in the program there despite knowing he'd recently gone upstate to Bard College to teach and would likely never return to Brooklyn.

So I found myself (and my wife and cats) living a few blocks away from Penn Station, commuting an hour on the subway to the Flatbush campus where I studied and taught, and temping at various midtown and downtown publishing houses. Instead of leaves outside my windows, I saw other windows. Instead of raccoons climbing up the back stairs, I saw burglars. The nearest trees were a few blocks away in Madison Park, the nearest water a mile west, across the West Side Highway, a fetid Hudson. The stars more or less disappeared from my life. Most of my students had never seen the Milky Way.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, can cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water gazers there.

Herman Melville introduced me to the possibility of poetry in New York City. I'd devoured Moby Dick in college, and regularly return to its pages for delight and inspiration. Ishmael is a poet of fettered desire, ambivalent about his place among his kind. He needs the isle of the Manhattoes in part to justify his maladjustment to human contact, just as he needs Queequeg to bear his sexual ambiguity. Melville labored for years in the New York customs office after his epic's career-killing failure to attract readers. Living in New York City, I found my favorite areas were roughly what was left of Melville's city: the brick and wood buildings of West Village townhouses and taverns, the tottering Ear Inn on Spring Street, the sooty old churches around Wall Street and the World Trade Center, the cobblestone streets around the meatpacking district. Some of these areas were now rather expensive, others devoted to high commerce or low. This was the tail end of the crack epidemic and the Reagan era "me first" economics. Male, female and transvestite prostitutes were common encounters on my new jogging route down the West Side Highway. My walk from Greenwich Village up The Avenue of The Americas went past block after block of empty buildings, on a carpet of crack vials. This was no walk on the beach.

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air
And binds the brain--a dense oppression, such
As tawny tigers feel in matted shades,
Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage,
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed nearby.

Allen Ginsberg introduced me to Melville's "The House-top: A Night Piece" and for that alone I'm forever indebted to his instruction. Few poems work their magic so well. Melville barely touches upon urban imagery at all--roof appears as the adjective "roofy" modifying the figurative "desert." Only the quality of the air and the ominous quiet are literally expressed. The awesome sight of the city from above and the constant awareness of massed humanity struggling for the privilege to live under one of the better roofs require an exotic diction that conveys the strangeness and power loosed from rational purpose or control.

Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought,
Balefully glares red Arson--there--and there.
The Town is taken by its rats--ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe--
Fear bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve,
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.

If war is diplomacy of another means, and civil war is a kind of fratricide, riot must be the ultimate Hobbesian battle of each against every. Melville's poems on various Civil War battles never fail to value the human over the merely political. He sees the cause that separates the enemies, but writes of the suffering that joins them, of the destruction of victor and vanquished and the legacy of graves and ruins that can never adequately report the pain, folly and heroism of war. His view of the riot is more pessimistic--ship-borne immigrant hordes bound by nothing but their appetite for blood. That conventions of civil conduct should break so easily introduces a dual peril--that violence might spread unchecked, that a more overwhelming violence might restore order but not humanity.

Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead,
And ponderous drag that shakes the wall.
Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll
Of black artillery; he comes, though late;
In code corroborating Calvin's creed
And cynic tyrranies of honest kings;

On the cusp of our latest war, I ask myself what poems are needed. I was on my way to work on the morning of September 11, 2001, when New York was attacked. My office was about a half mile north of Cortland Street and the Twin Towers. We watched the towers burn and fall, incredulous, flooded with unspeakable grief. We walked home through tears and stinging air as fire trucks, police cars, and eventually jeeps with machine guns and trucks full of soldiers raced downtown to cordon off the very streets where the rats had overrun the Town 140 years prior. I think it is futile to argue that one war is good, another bad, that mass violence can foster peace. War is a pragmatic undertaking, not a moral one. Whitman was certain that slavery was an abomination: "Who degrades or defiles the living human body is cursed,/Who degrades or defiles the body of the dead is not more cursed" he wrote before the Civil War began. Given the scale of degradation and defilement of living and dead in that war, one must wonder if the curse will ever lift, if America will ever recognize the irony of its own poetic impact on human imagination and the devastation that accompanies its mythic virtues.

Walk down any street in New York and you will see the living body defiled, degraded--by poverty and neglect, by wealth and indulgence. Your own body will be seduced, aroused, repulsed, in a vortex of sensation that can't be stopped, except perhaps by the sort of blizzard that never happens at these latitudes anymore precisely because the commercial culture that founded New Amsterdam has grown so grossly overheated that it has altered planetary climates. This is still a wounded city--tonight my wife walked around the gaping hole that was once a mass grave, on her way to a dance concert. When I sit in the rooftop cafeteria of my office on a misty or snowy day, when the atmosphere obscures most of the twentieth century and New York's 19th century brick and sandstone shape, its wooden water tanks perched on rooftops, comes into focus, sometimes I think this is what Melville must have seen as he watched the riot's progress. Then the wind shifts, the mist lifts, and the glass and steel of downtown reappear with an enormous gap filled by the memory of two buildings.

Our mayor, our governor, our journalists and our unsolicited loudmouths all say New Yorkers will carry on, that we will rise greater than ever. It's quite true that whatever ambivalence one might have about a municipality, on the person-to-person level, people in New York are remarkably friendly, funny, tolerant, curious, and busy keeping up with one another. In concluding his "night piece," Melville considers the fact of restored order after the experience of anarchy. I have a hard time taking the final statements at face value, yet I can't quite read them as purely ironic. The army occupies lower Manhattan. Rioters are shot, fires extinguished, some kind of order restored to the streets. "Wise Draco" has come on his battle horse, leading his artilleries, too late to prevent the riot, with one strategy only.

He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that Man is naturally good
And--more--is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

If man is naturally good, why does he riot like a rat? If the Town is redeemed, why does it not heed its most immediate history? If the Republic's faith is in the natural goodness of humanity, why does it turn its armies upon itself, depending on brute force to maintain its order? I fear we are about to experience another such night piece, in which we all have the opportunity to watch red Arson's glare.