Birthdays Before And After, Puma Perl
Beyond Baroque Books 2019
For countless authors, New York City is a metaphor -- the overwhelming city, with its charms and caresses, its turn-ons and turn-offs, its nooks and crannies, its sheer titanic girth. Its opportunities and dangers, its callous and dismissive disinterest in anything but itself, the pure expression of itself, myriad, unassailable, New York.
But for Puma Perl, in her new collection Birthdays Before and After, New York City is more than a metaphor. It is a life itself – told from the inside out.
Intersectional New York City, with all its contradictions, and with all its scales pitched in perfectly cacophonous array. The New York City of railroad apartments and Coney Island chicken coops, where you grow up afraid to get a dog because they killed your cat. The New York City of speedballs and rainbow cookies, where love is ‘waiting on the corner in the drug dealer’s boots.’ Streets ‘smelling of blood, death, car wrecks and maybe a little bit of hope.’ The contradance of junkies and bill-paying American thieves, and beautiful lost poets who have lived so long writing poems for a gig in neat handscript (and then throwing them out) that life itself has killed them.
Old men playing dominoes in the park. Tattoo’ed girls proud of their shoulders. Vampire cups of coffee brewed at sunset. New York City -- where taxi vomit is for amateurs, where being homeless is ‘not the same as a bottle of Wild Irish and a doorway,’ and where vacancy is an art unto itself.
A city that lives above and below the radar, carrying on multiple simultaneous existences most of which are invisible to visitors and passers through.
Today is a New York holiday
The transplants are gone
Streets are deserted and promise nothing
Neither do we.
In her new collection Perl offers us a kaleidoscopic glimpse of it all. She prowls the streets of Gotham with the elusive skill of a tried and true ‘denizen’ of the city, and does not even bother asking if you want to tag along -- because obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be here. Living in a city like this, as she has, there are simply too many small matters in ordinary human existence to tally it all up like a waitress presenting the bill. Terrible and delicious matters, intrinsic to an overwhelmingly brutal and specific city, a city as uncertain as it is bold, a city as tantalizingly flirtatious as it is unforgiving.
Puma Perl’s poems possess a devotion to the discoverable in the ‘off-moment,’ a quest for aperture, a la Frank O’Hara, who knew how to find a revelation in a doorway, on one or another of his lunchtime strolls through midtown.
They also possess the gritty insistence on the possibility of hope in a seemingly hopeless city, a la Lou Reed, who claimed there’s a book on magic at the bottom of the garbage can, and if you can get hold of it and count to three you can disappear.
Birthdays Before and After, by contrast, is no disappearing act. What we have here are moments of clarity in an overilluminated world, approximating insight.
Drop a five dollar bill on a homeless girl if you want to, it ‘may or may not be her birthday,’ and it ought to make you feel good to do it. But know this -- the gesture carries in itself the very seeds of doubt and disappointment, and anyhow is little more than ‘a shot of dope/lasting a minute and then you’re back where you were//sitting on cardboard. ‘
Give away all your stuff – band shirts, tight skirts, silk dress, workout gear – to people more virtuous than you, and they’ll just worry and think you’re going to kill yourself. Of course you’re not going to do that:
“It’s been done
and 4 am phone calls and railroad
stations will haunt me forever.’
Though they do not attempt to shock or tease, these poems succeed as well as they do in part because they don’t have to go that route. There is a wry believability in these poems, a street-weariness told with survivor aplomb, and with an undertone of unextinguished resolve that makes it possible to believe that a person can swallow the indigestible and keep on going, can keep asking the unanswerable questions.
What does it mean to open your eyes in the morning to ‘bridges and rivers, trees hurting more than the ugly,’
What does it mean to ask ‘when do you cry? When do you stop?’
What does it mean to declare I’m not afraid of my city, and ask us to believe that the sheer pluck of saying so can make it true.
Here in 80-something pages is a life revealed with as much honesty as the facts themselves allow. Half a dozen lives really, rolled up into one, so far. Lived way beyond the punk thing -- an oversimplification of the author’s wide-ranging aims and attitudes -- that help to give dimension and full human context to the label ‘New Yorker.’
Though for those seeking a glimpse into ‘that’ scene, they’ll find much that is satisfying in this book. Deglamorized though, not your standard anti-glam punk chic. Punk made real. I have no doubt Perl could do a whole chapbook name-dropping punk celebrities -- but that would be doing it on the cheap and easy, and if this collection is any evidence, this is a poet who decidedly aims higher than that.
And anyhow, if you hang around in New York long enough, brushes with celebrities are not the point.
What is the point is the way the human drama reveals itself, teetering on stilettos and dirty martinis, leaning against incoherent walls, doing shots with the girls, sprawled out blind in the middle of a party, spiked on LSD on some stranger’s couch. Shouldering onto some stage for a moment of tinsel glory before all the souls around you break into jagged pieces.
“We were all born broken,” observes Perl in an understated inner city drawl. “I was born broken too…
I break soft in hard places
I break quiet on rooftops and subways…
…Men slit their throats for me
Each time I break.
This is neither bravura nor the stuff of leather femme fatale. It is cold, hard, authentic. Human. The kind of poetry that is only possible to write if you have lived it, been a citizen to it, part victim and part perpetrator, part instigator and part accomplice.
A world that offers a kind of transcendence to have simply survived another night of it, woken up with the eyes still in your head and a willingness to open them up and take a chance on another day -- the silences and the sighs, the curses and blessings littered among the sirens, the smacktalk and sidewalk lies.
‘Every morning I raise these shades and it’s still too beautiful not to hurt a little more.’
To write poems like these is to raise the shades and look out into the New York City day. And no matter the conditions of society or the weather, have the resolve to either plunge yourself back into it, or shut your eyes and save yourself for another day.
And along the way, put some of it to pen to paper.
“It isn’t depression,” writes Puma Perl “It’s August.
like a bad play that never ends...
Why bother to talk at all?
People’s intelligence rises
As temperatures fall
Look for me in February
I’ll be wearing boots and black jeans
Just like August but smarter.
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