'Husband, surprise, I climbed you, I climbed right out you.’

Over the course of the past four decades, many renowned figures from the high and rare echelons of American poetry have paid a visit to the little farmhouse off Route 110 in West Hills, birthplace of Walt Whitman, to take on the mantle of Poet in Residence; and place their shoulders to the wheel of poetry with the putative ‘pater nostra’ of their field. 

 

Some have embodied modern versions of the Good Gray Poet’s poetics. Others have subscribed to or paid deference to his politics or philosophy. 

 

In her recent visit to the Whitman birthplace's 2019 poet in residence Jane Hirshfield -- a figure who has firmly taken her place in the firmament of contemporary American poetry -- proved herself well suited to her tenure in the position. 

 

It's not just that Hirshfield possesses an impressive list of credentials -- a train of national awards and prizes trailing behind like daffodils on a well-worn wooded path in April. 

 

More than that, her eclectic set of influences are particularly well-matched, in the bicentennial of Whitman's birth, to the Good Gray Poet's ideas -- from his linking of the specific to the universal and his insistence that a democracy 'does not know national borders to his 'I encompass multitudes' mantra.

 

And in fact her remarkable poetry is informed by a galaxy of influences that stretches across thousands of years and span continents. 

 

Ancient Greeks and Romans. The ancient court of Japan. Chinese classics and Buddhist Zazen. Horace. Eliot. Akhmatova. The Taoist poet Yu Xuanji. Cavafy. Neruda. Simone Weill.

 

And importantly, Long Island’s own Walt Whitman, who with fellow 19th century poetry giant Emily Dickinson form the foundational Father and Mother figures of modern American poetry.

 

“They are our great forefather and foremother,” said this year’s poet in residence, “each bringing profound originality to a tradition that hadn’t previously existed. Whitman’s was an outward form of observation, Dickinson's work was oriented towards interiority. Between them they make the whole.”

There is an arresting ‘nowness’ and specificity to Hirshfield’s poetry which is understandably late 20th century. One often finds her probing the harrowing and hopeful moments ‘at the turning point’ of ordinary experience, seeking aperture to revelatory perception.

 

Take as just one example her poem The Husband, which appeared in The New Yorker in 2015.

‘Some things can surprise you both coming and going,’ she writes in her opening line, and then goes on to define a turning point in domestic relations that sends the readers heart and mind in several directions. ‘I took you as a husband, love. Then you left me.// I took surprise for a husband instead.’ 

 

From here, she doubles down on the intense scrutiny of the transformative possibilities embedded in turning points in relational understanding such as these – contemplating the shape of the Phoenician letter ‘heth,’ origin of our H (H as in husband). Heth the poet notes, was a triple-runged ladder, symbol of destination, vision and quest, dwindling over time to a more domestic ‘double-hung window. 

 

Husband, surprise, I climbed you, I climbed right out you.’

 

These are poetics that possess an intent focus on the moment of common human experience, offering aperture into wisdom and insight. A poetics firmly rooted in the late 20thcentury American grain.

Beyond that, however, they are grounded in world poetry, and particularly ancient Japanese and Chinese writing. 

 

And in a corollary way, it helps explain her role in exploring the poetry of indigenous languages in North America -- including Nahuatl, a language native to the American/Mexican borderlands that is foundational to the emergent borderland culture of America’s Southwest. 

 

And while the poet tips her hat to Whitman for this impulse to embrace indigenous languages, she adds that she actually came to Nahuatl poetry “early on, from a Fresno poet named Peter Everwine." 

 

"Part of that,” she says, “was because it makes use of something similar to the vocabulary of ancient Japanese poetry – flowers, impermanence, the idea that our lives are transitory," a ‘narrow environment’ that only opened up during a family excursion to the countryside when she first saw ‘the blue sky above her, and tasted blackberries growing wild in the broad world of nature.’

 

For those following contemporary trends in American poetry, of interest is Hirshfield’s take on identity poetry. She’s aware, she says, there is a need for a kind of poetry that accurately addresses "the true and lasting griefs” of those feeling the effects of marginalization in society. 

 

But she adds that rather than creating ‘separation between human beings,’ poets may serve a different function than that -- ie, to stand at the threshold between worlds, making poems as 'gates' that open people’s worlds to each other. 

 

“I have a certain skepticism with identity,” she declared in a 2012 Youtube interview with Michael Collier, Howard County Poetry and Literary Society of Maryland. “The necessity is (the search for) an authentic self; the danger is an ego-based narrow self which limits a life and creates between human beings an ‘I am this you are that,’ mentality."

 

This corresponds to her idea that literature is more than an expression of identity, but an opportunity for the reader to expand their identity through cultural learning.

 

“If we could not be influenced by work coming from lives different from our own, if experience could not be passed from person to person by art, what would reading be?" she asks in a recent Agni interview with Ilya Kominsky. "To deny the power of art to transmit the whole of human comprehension from person to person is to deny it any standing, seriousness, consequence.”

 

Where does this perspective of hers come from?

 

East 20th Street, New York City, Hirshfield explains, in the projects where she grew up. It was, she recalls, a 'narrow environment that only opened up during family excursions to the countryside, when she saw 'the blue sky above her, and tasted blackberries growing wild in the broad world of nature.'

Her first experience of that, she remembers, was at the age of two. and it was the moment, she says, she first recognized her hunger for a larger existence. 

 

“I tasted the sweetness of blackberries in my mouth,” she explains. “I looked around and I knew there was more. Something in me said ‘yes there is a larger world, and I will make my way towards it.’”

”For me, literature was that way.”

 

By extension, poetry can be that for any of us. And the poet -- the one who has built a gate in perception allowing us to pass through and experience that larger world. 

 

Next time you enter a poem, think of a gate that joins people to each other, and to the larger world beyond them.

 

Think of a poet who has made that gate and stands there, beckoning people to walk through it and see what she has seen.

 

Think of Jane Hirshfield, inviting you to pass through one of her poems and taste, as she has, the sweetness of blackberries. 

 

(As seen in the Long Islander Newspaper, 4.18.19)

 NOTHING SACRED, EVERYTHING REMEMBERED

Walkabout, by Max Blagg (Swallow Books, 2017)

 

There are some places where the layers of history are omnipresent, and inexhaustible -- the deeper you dig it deeper it gets. Rome, for example, is one of those. The deeper you dig, the deeper the history gets.

 

So is Manhattan, in its own way. A far younger city situated on on a rock 2 miles wide and some 14 miles end to end, it is a city with a richness of a different sort from Rome’s millennia-deep layers.

 

Wafer thin in terms of time, and yet as an intensely living, breathing city New York’s a place where almost generation to generation – America’s major cultural movements have taken root and blossomed, only to collide with and been supplanted by the next big thing.

 

Much of those era remain near close to the surface and are retrievable to the patient, curious student of the city. And any stroll down any street or around any corner, promises worlds of cultural associations.

 

Enter Max Blagg -- curious, observant, Englishman in New York, who since his arrival on the scene in the 70s has generated just such a rich and idiosyncratic cultural map of ‘his’ New York.

 

And enter Blagg’s recent book Walkabout.

 

An approximately 500 line journal-in-poetry pulled together from personal experience and enriched by decades in study of the multi-variegated phenomenon which is NYC, it is a richly engaging anecdotal monologue produced by one of the cognoscenti.

 

Blagg’s remembered world is the cool menace of the sexed up seventies, replete with drugs and artists and dog walking poets, FBI agents and criminals and guns and violence and needles and AIDS. 

 

And the ‘now’ in which his walk takes place? The bohemian avant garde being overtaken by hipster gentrification. . “Move aside, abuela, this is our town now,” he’s rudely told.

 

Blagg, who has called NYC “the ever turning wheel that grinds so fine,” treads a fine line between  the sacred and the profane in his observations, steering a reassuring course between the extremes of nostalgia and sham-duende. And he avoids the all-too –current lamentation of gentrification, a trope for which there are many examples these days.

 

Not that he’s digging it – but Blagg seems level headed about it all. “Let the Bohemians expire in their walkups,’ he intones. Nothing sacred, everything remembered.

 

 And why not? Anyone who lives long enough in a city will see old fellowships fade, and new generations of ‘the now’ replace them.

 

The book consists of three sections, following in the footsteps of an artist who had made 'information paintings' by recording his walk through certain NYC streets – from Grand and Center, past Spring Street, to Union Square, and on to a number of iconic downtown locations that played host to the best, the brightest and the most dissipated.  Blagg embarked on a walking tour of his own, "conjuring whatever information the various locations might suggest" and creating a memoir-like ekphrastic poem. The result is part Rorschach test, revealing the socio-historical, aesthetic and cultural concerns of the author; and part mis en scene composition.

 

More than a miscellany, these are carefully chosen threads in the cultural fabric of New York, drawing from his experienced and learned knowledge of prominent moments and personae in the 70s an 80s.

 

Here we find desolate men cruising for a waterfront hook-up. Here we find supermodels, poseurs and staggering addicts. Valery Solana stalking Warhol. Abstract expressionists brawling on University place. Dylan Thomas hauled out of his last dying tavern. Guns, violence, stakeouts, drug scores. Hardcore street life and wildly innovative pioneers of art movements, side by side. 

 

All viewed with something akin to wistful reminiscence, and with an acute awareness of the gentrification taking place everywhere you look (represented by the litany of WiFi handles Blagg calls into play in an incantatory refrain at various points in the narrative.

 

In sum, it is an arresting reflection on the ever-evolving cultures of New York -- a phenomenon known most recently as gentrification -- but in keeping with the inevitable generational pattern of subcultural growth,  renaissance, decline, replacement.  And yes, erasure. And yes, resurrection.

 

It is not an altogether surprising tale. But as created by a storyteller and raconteur as compelling as Max Blagg, who has lived it and who has an arresting command of language at his disposal to formulate it, it is a tale memorably told.  The art is in the telling, of course, and Blagg tells his journey with the verve, energy and linguistic brilliance that has made him a legend in the NYC performance scene for four decades. 

 

These are remembrances of tenderness, fury, uncertainty, transcendence -- and moral turpitude willingly embraced -- which were the good old, bad old days of NYC in the 70s and 80s.

 

You can’t step into the same river – or the same New York City – twice. But Max Blagg has done Heraclitus one better, I think, and turned a neat trick in Walkabout, nonetheless – that through deft writing and discerning recollection, some small piece of the effulgent past may yet tag along with us as we make our way through the now.

 

And that’s what makes this particular stroll through downtown New York City a richly layered journey well worth taking.

 

We are lucky to have fine-tuned cultural observers like Max Blagg around to help remember the rich, and richly flawed, ethos of his era, and lay them before his reader in so handsome and discursive a manner as this little wonder of a book.