The Words of My City:  New Yorkers Read New York Poems

Great Hall, Cooper Union (12/3)
Reviewed in a Personal Essay by Daniela Gioseffi

The charming evening, balancing film, music and predominately poetry in a nicely paced manner, began with a welcome by Alice Quinn, Executive Director of The Poetry Society of America, after a film excerpt by Jem Cohen. Cohen's film, Lost Book Found, offered very surreal—but actually very naturalistic and real—images of people on the streets of New York City. Watching Cohen's picture of a child catching raindrops dripping from a tall building, to the antics of unimaginable 'clowns' and unusual people and happenings on the streets of New York, one could only smile and exclaim to oneself:  "Only in New York!"

I've been a member of The Poetry Society of America since 1971 and the days when one had to be a professional poet with publications to one's name to join. Membership was subsequently opened to anyone with an interest in poetry, in order to bring more dues revenue to the cause of poetry. As a patron of the Society and a member for many years, I've been pleased to see the direction in which Ms. Quinn has taken the Society following the inspired tenure of Molly Peacock. This program was yet another one well to the credit of her directorship. The Society really grew in vitality during the presidency of Molly Peacock and now, it seems, Alice Quinn has made the programming at The Poetry Society more interesting than ever.

To begin "The Words of My City," Quinn aptly quoted a line or two of Allen Ginsberg's "Kaddish"—that very New York City masterpiece of 20th century American poetry. She was correct in noting that one really shouldn't do a program about New York poems without paying homage to Ginsberg's masterpiece—a poem set so completely in The City, which thoroughly transcends its bumbling craftsmanship with the depth of its humanity and the breadth of its scope and meaning. And, what poet was ever more of a New Yorker than Allen Ginsberg?—who was the most famous poet of the 20th century the world produced, bar none, in terms of the languages into which he has been translated and the countries in which he has been read and the number of readings he gave worldwide.

The evening was based on an anthology of poems titled Poems of New York, published in Knopf's Everyman's Library of Pocket Poets and edited by Elizabeth Schmidt who began collecting the pieces after the horrors of September 11th to memorialize the character of The City which we had taken for granted prior to that momumental terrorist attack. "Poets who have written about New York are masters at preserving, and allowing us to cherish, moments of life in this theater of chance and change," wrote Schmidt at the close of her foreword to the attractive little book which begins with Walt Whitman's "Mannahatta" —the native American name for the island. Grace Paley was charged with reading Whitman's poem later in the program.

Richard Howard began the first set of readings and read poems by Howard Moss and Amy Clampitt—not very memorable—but concluding with one of his own which, though forced in its cuteness, entertained the audience. Written from the point of view of a child on a field trip to New York's fabulous Museum of Natural History, it smacked too much of the reasoning of an adult. Its subject was dinosaurs, though its ultimate theme concerned how nothing is dead or extinct that lives so richly in memory or imagination. It was the most entertaining reading I've ever heard the usually rather stuffy Richard Howard give. For one stiff-necked example, I was appalled by his keynote polemic delivered during National Poetry Month just a few years ago at The PEN Awards Ceremony. He maligned the idea of a National Poetry Month as pedestrian and seemed to argue that we should all be pleased to keep poetry a secret for the elite.

Yet, the very problem with this war-mongering, imperialistic culture of ours is that poetry has never been as much read and loved and memorized as it is in Latin American countries or in Romania, for example, where, my friend Nina Cassian tells me, "Romanians like a little bread with their poetry!" Despite Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem project and his attempt to make poetry interesting on the PBS News Hour, I'm sure we'd all agree that poetry still struggles to trickle down with its sensibilities, like an Amy Clampitt waterfall, to the public sensibilities of a nation entertaining itself to death with junk videos, decadent films, sports as an opiate, and TV programs of every sensational and silly kind.

So, how refreshing to see a large audience filling Cooper Union's Great Hall and being thoroughly entranced by a variety of New Yorkers' poems—and belying Richard Howard's thesis that poetry should remain a coveted secret of the educated elite!

Next, Sapphire, the prize-winning author of the well-known novel, Push, from Knopf, read "Summer Solstice" by Sharon Olds—a poem not included in Poems of New York, edited by Elizabeth Schmidt, an editor of The New York Times Book Review. Sapphire herself is not included in the anthology, but should be. Some of those who read of the evening were not included in the book sold at the event. And, one can easily think of many poems and poets who could have been included and weren't. Sapphire's own poem regarding racism, about the photo of a black homicide victim from New York City police records, was the most vital poem of the evening read by a living poet. It concerned the display of the man's penis in the photo, something that the poet explains was not allowed to be done to white murder victims. The poem pales in my explanation, but it was chillingly powerful to hear as Sapphire reads well, too, in a matter-of-fact tone that compels the listener to objectivity and emotion.

Nicholas Chistopher next read good poems by Kenneth Koch and Miller Williams, as well as his own on the subject of 9/11. He used metaphors of Troy as a city under siege, but I found his classical references unyielding to the emotional depth of the meaning of 9/11 today in the work.

Next came a series of cartoon animations or comic strips by Ben Katchor, satiric and droll in their New Yorker style of humor. Katchor regaled the audience with his wit. This was a section of the program thoroughly enjoyed by everyone, enough to bring tears of laughter to some.

Readings by Grace Paley, Mark Morris, and Maria Tucci followed, and it was clear that Grace Paley's charm captured the audience heart with the highest intensity. Her folksy wit was evident in her patter. She held up the lovely little book which was the subject of the evening and said how compact and beautiful it was and how all books should be that size. Indeed, the book is very handsome, with its cover illustration of a cityscape with the Empire State Building at its heart, courtesy of Federico Motta Editore of Italy. Though a hardcover containing more than a hundred poets from Walt Whitman and Herman Melville through Edna St. Vincent Millay, Charles Reznikoff, Garcia Lorca and Langston Hughes to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Derek Walcott, Kenneth Koch, June Jordan and Martin Espada, its portable size makes it a treasurable addition to the Everyman's Pocket Poets series published by Knopf. And, it affords a multicultural variety that matches the world's most international city with a pride in diversity.

After reading "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman, who, like William Shakespeare in his sonnets, uncannily and accurately felt and expressed his own immortality as a poet, Grace Paley wisely offered a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, not in the collection at hand, but so apt that it certainly should be. Rukeyser's "Poem of New York City" is prophetic in its vision of "tall towers falling" and its depiction of a "City of Light" as it remarks "all the lilies of my life on fire," —written so many years ago by Rukeyser long dead. Paley also read her own charming and profound works, three short poems from the anthology: "The Nature of the City," "Fear," and "On Mother's Day,"—a comic piece about a group of transvestites clad as pregnant women who use the occasion of the day to enter a Lower Westside restaurant under a sign that reads "Pregnant Mothers Served Free." As the poet watches them "place napkins over their laps/ and accept coffee and zabaglione" she concludes:  "I am especially open to sadness and hilarity/ since my father died as a child/ one week ago in his ninetieth year." Again, one remarks to oneself:  "Only in New York!" Whitman's Isle of "Mannahatta":

Rich, hemm'd thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long,
      solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising
      toward clear skies,
Tide swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,  . . . 

The down-town streets, the jobbers' houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants,
      and money-brokers, the rivereets,  
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers  . . .

The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along, up or down, with the
      flood tide or ebb-tide,
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form'd, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs throng'd, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,  . . .

A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and
       friendly young men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!  
The city nested in bays! my city!

"The Words of the City" brought back to one's mind the comradeship that existed among all peoples of New York just after the World Trade Center attacks, when we banded together and were helpful and friendly, with our pride in and sorrow for our city.

The closing section of the program featured a very humble style of poetic folk singer who melded wit, irony and pathos in his simple songs, sung to the strumming of a "resonating ukulele"—a metal instrument I don't remember ever hearing before. Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields was compelling in his understated singing—a style of studied, but untrained simplicity.

Though anti-climactic, the final readings by Katha Pollitt, a poet better known for her commentary in The Nation, who displayed humor and wit, and Willie Perdomo held the audience to the very end. Perdomo managed to buoy up the finale with his contribution to the The Words of My City when he read a lively piece about the subways which he dubbed "a multicultural institution." Like the ebb and flow of New York City's rivers, the program was paced to keep the audience with its variety and nuances of humor and tragedy. I haven't found a reading so satisfying in years. All the poets were clear and accessible and read with a clear articulation of their beloved and brutalized "city of light!"

(Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning poet, novelist, literary critic, and editor who publishes PoetsUSA.com. Her latest of eleven books are:  Symbiosis:  poems (Rattapallax Press, 2001) and an all-new edition of Women on War:  Writings from Antiquity to the Present from The Feminist Press; NY, March 2003. She has been published in innumerable leading journals on and off line and is a Regular Contributor to the magazine [Masthead].