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.
George Wallace PoemTrain
Each of us inevitable, Each of us limitless--each of us with his or her right upon the earth, Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth, Each of us here as divinely as any is here -- Walt Whitman
Friday, March 17, 2023
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.
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.
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Rukeyser follows the induction of Audre Lord to the honored in he alcove of the cathedral that, since 1984, has become a touchstone to major American literary figures dating back to Anne Bradstreet and, year by year, tapping the shoulders of the true luminaries of American poetry and fiction over the course of 150 years.
As a lifelong New Yorker, she formed a relationship with the Cathedral towards the end of her life, becoming the namesake of the Muriel Rukeyser Poetry Wall. Today, the Poetry Wall continues to receive submissions of poetry from incarcerated people around the United States.
"I have known about Rukeyser's poetry, and her relation to the Cathedral, going back to when I came to Columbia in 1982," stated Howe. "In fact, I often quote from her before I do a reading of my own, particularly this quote which we have chosen for the stone we are placing in the poetry alcove: What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The universe would split open. I keep that quote close to my heart."
Howe is serving a five term as poet in residence at the Cathedral, and follows Marilyn Nelson, and before her Charles Martin and Molly Peacock, all of whom held five year terms with possibility of renewal, in that position.
A woman who biographers note grew up in what has been described as an 'assimilationist' Jewish household Rukeyser learned early a singular mixture of reticence and pride of family identity. "She grew to have an awareness of 'the silence about self in assimilationist families," notes the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Her mother, for example, insisted they were descended from Rabbi Akiba, the ancient scholar who was behind including the erotic Song of Songs in holy scripture. This penchant grew to an acute sense of the common unifying influence of a range of visionary figures in our shred history, " such as the physicist Willard Gibbs, the painter Albert Ryder, the composer Charles Ives, the labor organizer Ann Burlak, Rabbi Akiba, and Herman Melville."
Her literary associations were wide ranging and profound. Rukeyser met Robinson and Una Jeffers in 1944, when she spent the summer at the Carmel cottage of Ella Winter. This occurred a few years after Jeffers served on a panel of three judges who selected Poetry magazine’s first Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, and picked Rukeyser for the honor.
As a woman, Rukeyser was a courageous precursor to the feminist movement of the 1960s. She was independent enough to marry and divorce painter Glynn Collins (the marriage lasted only six weeks) and to give birth to William out of wedlock. Except for persons close to her, Rukeyser never revealed that William's father was Donnan Jeffers -- Robinson's son -- was Bill’s father, although she did write, poignantly, in her poem “The Gates”: “...I cannot name the names,/my child’s own father, the flashing, the horseman,/the son of the poet....”
The Gates was written in 1961 while Rukeyser was in South Korea protesting the imprisonment of poet Kim Chi-Ha. It is one of numerous examples of her fearless engagement in poetry of witness. Another major example of this is her poem cycle “The Book of the Dead” which recounts the story of what many consider one of the worst industrial catastrophes in U.S. history, the Hawk’s Nest tunnel disaster in West Virginia. Two other poems of Rukeyser's which show this profound sense of the relationship between a poet and the politics of her times are "I lived in the first century of World Wars' and 'For OB (a Spanish Civil War poem).
Excerpts of Rukeyser's long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. She was also daring enough to write in the 1950s about such issues as pregnancy and the possibilities of loving another woman.
And in what is perhaps one of the most 'accessible' of anecdotes about Muriel Rukeyser, the Sarah Lawrence archives notes that she "knew full well that to produce something good involved on occasion producing something ‘bad’: ‘Being bad is part of it’, she used to say, ‘don’t erase the bad; let it be’.
All in all then, putting aside Rukeyser's initiative to create an 'open to all' poetry wall at the cathedral in the 1970s, the poet's work is "particularly deserving of installation here as a poet of the world," said Howe.
Since the 80s, the annual installation of a novelist or poet into the corner has grown in stature -- though interrupted by a catastrophic fire and more recently, the limitations imposed on gatherings due to the pandemic. Ceremonies and activities for such famed writers as Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Langston Hughes and WH Auden have become akin to symposia, spread over several days and filling portions of the cathedral nave for the major gatherings. And Howe is hopeful that, once the pandemic conditions allow, Lourde and Rukeyser can be feted with similar 'joy and ceremony.'
CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE POETS CORNER INDUCTEES
1984 emily dickinson walt whitman, washington irving
1985 edgar allan poe, herman melville
1986 robert frost, nathaniel hawthorne
1987 ralph waldo emerson, mark twain
1988 henry david thoreau, henry james
1989 wallace stevens, william faulkner
1990 ts eliot, willa cather
1991 marianne moore, edward arlington robinson
1992 wm carlos williams, henry wadsworth longfellow
1994 hart crane, anne bradstreet
1995 elizabeth bishop, wm cullen bryant
1996 langston hughes, ernest hemingway
1997 louise bogan, ee cummings
1998 theodore roethke, william dean howells
1999 f scott fitzgerald
2000 edna st vincent millet
2001 gertrude stein
2003 robert lowell
2004 robert hayden
2005 wh auden
2006 emma lazarus
2007 robinson jeffers
2008 phillis wheatley
2009 tennessee williams
2010 sylvia plath
2011 james baldwin
2012 katherine anne porter
2013 john berryman
2014 mary flannery o'connor
2015 zora neal hurston
2016 eugene o'neill
2017 jean toomer
2018 carl sandberg
2019 ralph ellison
2020 audrey lourde
Sunday, December 20, 2020
PRIMITIVE OF A NEW ERA: Remembering Aldo Tambellini
al poetry, written text and mass media imagery appropriation. A segment included sound and video clips of the artwork of Iraqi children. James Wines, Founder of “Sculpture in the Environment” (SITE), New York City, called the digital video “a collage of powerful insights related to the war in Iraq and the issue of humanity’s destructive behavior in general.”
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Tiffany and Eric and Don Jr and Kim Guilfoyle say those opposed to daddy's form of government are trying to silence them. Well Boo Hoo to that.
So, Tiffany and Eric and Don Jr and Kim Guilfoyle say those opposed to daddy's form of government are trying to silence them. That it is radical and unfair to speak out against his style of political discourse; ie outright bullying, intimidation, either by proxy or by innuendo; or by anonymous 'followers' communicating death threats to those with opposing views. That it's left-wing political correctness to question midnight firings and elimination of government oversight, and the assembling of secret armies to attack peaceful protestors in the streets of America.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
THE WOMB OF ALL LANGUAGES: Remembering Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke
If I look closely enough, maybe I’ll understand
how life always wins
while all of us lose.
How values are born
and branded onto the body
which is the first to melt.
I am dying inside my mind without any hint of sickness.
I live without the slightest need of encouragement.
At least I’m breathing. Who cares
if I can almost touch warm things
about to go up in flames.
I wonder what other connections
life will invent between the trauma
of absolute disappearance and the miracle
of every day immortality.
I owe my wisdom to fear;
I dispense with petals, sighs, subtleties.
I clutch earth, air, roots.
The useless things can go, I say.
Let me in to the sky of nothingness,
with next to nothing.
it is spring and the blossoming
chestnut trees lean attentively
over the pensioners.
Beards, mustaches, all white,
a little laughter in their faded
blue eyes peeking out behind the beer froth
the slender waitress
like a doll just out of her box
with the divine department store tag
still around her neck.
The brown spots on the old men's hands
- maps of an unknown geography -
the flowers scattered by the wind
on the wooden table
and suddenly I understood silence:
it is the womb of all languages.