Just back from a few days in New York, glad for the chance to get there so soon after returning to the U.S.A. Marilyn Hacker had asked me to teach a couple of her classes at C.C.N.Y. while she was away, something I’ve done before and enjoy.
It was also a chance to see friends and catch up on a city that, like Heraclitus’s river, you can’t ever step into twice, constantly changing as it is. And yet there is a permanent aspect to New York, one that I recall from my earliest years there in the 1960s. Its vertical aspect, its vast underclass, the contrast between riches and poverty, its African-American, Jewish, Latino and generally international flavor. I had good weather, and riding slowly through the streets in a bus I caught again the, I guess, “visionary” aspect of New York in winter, something in the way the light strikes high-rise buildings along the avenues over bare trees; something that seems to incorporate the long history of aspiration motivating so many immigrants to come here, either from other parts of America or from Europe. Not that aspiration was always rewarded. In the city’s story there are so many more broken hearts than lights on Broadway. Nevertheless, if we focus on artistic achievement, New York since the days of Whitman has a wildly impressive record. To have lived long periods in New York, Paris, and London has been my lucky fate. All three did a lot to make me who I am, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, etc.
Going through Harlem I see that it is now integrated and very upbeat in feeling, not at all the Harlem I first saw back in the day (1965). I may be imagining it, but I sense a new cheerfulness and confidence in the Black population of New York. The results of Obama’s presidency are already evident in the faces of his most ardent supporters. And to think he once spent a year or so in one of Harlem’s old-style tenements, without the least idea that he would one day be President. I wonder if a plaque has yet been placed on it. Of course Bill Clinton’s national headquarters located to Harlem several years ago, and after that it was open season for the gentrifiers. Once again the city blocks between 110th and 135th are a new focus of interest and enterprise.
By coincidence the undergraduate course I was subbing for had ot do with the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s and 30s. It’s an under-researched area of American literary history, particularly where the women poets (Anne Spencer, Mae Cowdery, and Helene Douglas) are concerned, though I’m sure that will change. Former students Karen Clarke and Elise Buchman had asked to sit in on this class and also the graduate seminar in prosody, and that was a plus I hadn’t counted on.
It would be silly to come to New York and not try to see things you can’t get elsewhere, so I made an altogether predictable beeline to the show of late Bonnard paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, about eighty works done after he and his wife Marthe bought a house in the South of France in the mid-1920s. “The Late Interiors” was the show’s designation for these works, all of them indoors, though often looking out onto the garden and the Riviera town of Le Cannet. Of course other artists and writers were working in that general environ at the time, not only Matisse, Picasso, and Colette, but also Americans like Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gerald Murphy. If only it were possible to make month-long visits to earlier periods. I’d be off the Twenties in a flash. Bonnard’s unfussed presentation of daily French domesticity—simple interiors casually assembled but with bright bowls of fruit and flowers, coffee carafes, patterned wallpaper, printed or embroidered textiles—is just as persuasive as Matisse’s equivalent. The cultic French doctrine of pleasure, often dismissed in Anglo-Saxon or Germanic cultures as mere inconsequential prettiness and therefore not really serious, needs revising.
Nevertheless, I also had a chance to see a work produced under the sign of high seriousness and--there's no other word--tragedy. It’s the recent film Katýn by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whose reputation was established half a century ago by films including Ashes and Diamonds and Kanal. I saw it at the Film Forum in downtown Manhattan; there's little chance it will get a national release. A fiction film, it is even so based on historical fact—the mass murder, in 1940, by the Soviet military of a group of Polish officers. During the Communist Era, Poland’s Soviet government tried to cover up the event, shifting the blame by adding it to the catalogue of atrocities that the Nazis had actually committed. It’s an unwieldy narrative, touching on several lives only tangentially connected. But the performances are profound and attest to a kind of depth in human experience and response to experience that has more or less been frittered away in the modern West during the last few decades, when the populace at large seems to want live their lives as a sitcom or else a video game.
Another aspect of the film likely to cause embarrassment in an American audience is its unashamed incorporation of Christianity. But you can’t get to first base in grasping the nature of Polish culture unless you understand how important their commitment to religion is. I broached the topic in these e-pages during my visit to Krakow and Warsaw last June. Catholicism is part of the beleaguered Polish national identity, and in recent decades it has been associated, because of John-Paul II, with freedom movements. And there's no inevitable association between Polish Catholicism and Holocaust-denying, which some Poles have attracted fire for engaging in these past twenty years. Also, it needs to be acknowledged that many Christian Poles were also sent to the camps (the background subject for William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice). And I don’t see why it is wrong to commemorate the gentile Poles who died in Auschwitz, all the more considering they were fighting against German occupation. Likewise for the Roma population and gay men. The Nazis were quite lavish as to who qualified for obliteration.
Back to the film. Parts of it are horrifying (we are shown the assembly-line deathblows, each accomplished by a shot in the back of the head at close range). You feel blood-spattered by the time the film ends. The performances are first-rate, and there are arresting visuals throughout. Plus, instead of rock songs, an orchestral score by Penderecki. All told, a shattering experience.
I wandered around in Greenwich Village before seeing the film, passing by a few of the literary sites—the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas committed suicide by alcohol; King Street, where Elizabeth Bishop lived; St. Lukes Place, where Marianne Moore worked as a librarian; Cornelia Street, Auden's first aparmtent when he moved to New York, West 13th, where Edmund White lived in the 1960s, and West 16th, where Hart Crane lived in the 20s. All very familiar from my three decades' residence in New York.
Speaking of Hart Crane, I stopped in New Haven on my return trip to see Langdon Hammer, who was in a class I taught at Yale more than thirty years ago. In addition to teaching in the English Department there, he has edited the Crane letters and has published many critical essays about contemporary poetry. His current project os writing a biography of James Merrill, a complicated undertaking, to say the least. Anyway, we had the chance to catch up a bit during lunch, and I always find him upbeat and stimulating when we touch on topics around the all-encompassing subject of poetry.
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York City. Show all posts
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Friends
Weather in New York turned lovely yesterday afternoon, though it had been cold and wet the days before that. I braved lashing rain to meet Marilyn Hacker for lunch in the Village, where we exchanged news over our meal for better than an hour. There is a keenness to Marilyn's intellect and a passion for the people and causes she cares about. But we've known each other so long she seems the next thing to being a family member. A truth I often return to is that I am very, very lucky in my friends; and in times of transition like this one, friends, almost more than anything else, help you remember who you are... (Case in point: a delicious dinner that evening with Karen Clark and Jonathan Bernstein on the upper West Side. The other guest was Elise Buchman, who, along with Karen was a student in a class I taught at CCNY earlier in the year.)
Yesterday at the end of the work day I met Jonathan Galassi at the new address of the offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 18th St. We had a pleasant hour together before both went our ways to dinner. He is one of the most qualified editors in the business, no doubt because he is a poet himself and, unlike so many, has actually read all the good books.
I met with my agent Mitchell Waters at Curtis Brown this morning to make plans about the novel (my second) that he is representing. He showed me some of he new books he helped find a berth for, and all in all, it was a productive meeting.
Next I had lunch with Ben Downing, whom I met when I was teaching in the Writing Division at Columbia back in the 1990s. He has published a book of poems and many brilliant literary essays. The latter are so fine I have a feeling that prose is eventually going to supplant poetry for Ben entirely; but maybe not. He also works as a co-editor with Herb Leibowitz, the founder of Parnassus magazine. I went to his place on 10th Street and met his French pug Tallulah, what the French would call une jolie laide, and certainly as sweet-natured as that breed can be. Ben's wife Michele was out, and his daughter Cordelia at school, so we found a lunch place nearby and had a good time shouting out opinions and jokes over the typical din of a popular Manhattan restaurant.
Sum total: a wonderfully restorative week in my former home base, a city I know like the back of my hand. Actually, years ago, I put together a long poem about New York, published as the title work in A Call in the Midst of the Crowd(1978). Like Paterson, which was one of my models, it intersperses prose documents about the history and geography of New York among the lyric and narrative sections. As for genre, it definitely falls into the "modern poetic sequence" category that was the subject of a thoughtful panel at the last AWP Conference, moderated by Yerra Sugarman. I was one of the participants, along with Reginald Shepherd, Alicia Ostriker, Fady Joudah, and Grace Schulman. At the time I thought I should have written about it here, but it was a crowded month for me and it slipped by.
Tomorrow I go to Hudson for the CLMP event.
Yesterday at the end of the work day I met Jonathan Galassi at the new address of the offices of Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 18th St. We had a pleasant hour together before both went our ways to dinner. He is one of the most qualified editors in the business, no doubt because he is a poet himself and, unlike so many, has actually read all the good books.
I met with my agent Mitchell Waters at Curtis Brown this morning to make plans about the novel (my second) that he is representing. He showed me some of he new books he helped find a berth for, and all in all, it was a productive meeting.
Next I had lunch with Ben Downing, whom I met when I was teaching in the Writing Division at Columbia back in the 1990s. He has published a book of poems and many brilliant literary essays. The latter are so fine I have a feeling that prose is eventually going to supplant poetry for Ben entirely; but maybe not. He also works as a co-editor with Herb Leibowitz, the founder of Parnassus magazine. I went to his place on 10th Street and met his French pug Tallulah, what the French would call une jolie laide, and certainly as sweet-natured as that breed can be. Ben's wife Michele was out, and his daughter Cordelia at school, so we found a lunch place nearby and had a good time shouting out opinions and jokes over the typical din of a popular Manhattan restaurant.
Sum total: a wonderfully restorative week in my former home base, a city I know like the back of my hand. Actually, years ago, I put together a long poem about New York, published as the title work in A Call in the Midst of the Crowd(1978). Like Paterson, which was one of my models, it intersperses prose documents about the history and geography of New York among the lyric and narrative sections. As for genre, it definitely falls into the "modern poetic sequence" category that was the subject of a thoughtful panel at the last AWP Conference, moderated by Yerra Sugarman. I was one of the participants, along with Reginald Shepherd, Alicia Ostriker, Fady Joudah, and Grace Schulman. At the time I thought I should have written about it here, but it was a crowded month for me and it slipped by.
Tomorrow I go to Hudson for the CLMP event.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
New York and New Haven
This is written from New York City where I will be a few days before going back up to Hudson to participate in an event planned for May 3 by the CLMP (Council on Literary Magazines and Presses). I’m staying in a loft in Soho belonging to Walter Brown, an architect and one of my staunchest friends. In fact, I used to live here (1972-1976) when he and I were partners. We were one of the early pioneers who revamped the old industrial spaces of the area south of Houston and above Canal Street. of Manhattan and made living spaces of them. In my first book (All Roads at Once, 1976) there are a couple of poems based on the move down here, one titled “Measuring a Rooftop in the Cast-Iron District” and another “In Duane Square.” Duane Square is actually in what’s now called Tribeca, though it wasn’t back then. The poem, apart from other topics, accurately predicts that Duane Square will be developed as residential real estate, and that’s exactly what happened. SoHo in the early 70s (it used to be written with upper-case “h,” an abbreviation indicating “South of Houston Street”) was a strange no-man’s land, with very few residents. There were no grocery stores or services, just warehouses and light industry. There was one restaurant, laconically called “Food,” and two bars, the Broome Street Bar and Fanelli’s, the latter dating back probably to the 1890s when these blocks were Manhattan’s red-light district. I remember that Donald Judd had a beautiful space on the ground floor of one of the cast-iron buildings, with glass walls so that you could see inside where his taciturn and enigmatic sculptures were installed. A number of important artists were Soho residents in those days, among them the photographer Aaron Rose, one of the earliest pioneers, who bought a building there in the early 60s and renovated it himself. (I wrote the introductory essay for a collection of his photographs published by Abrams Books in 2001.) Strangely enough, both Fanelli’s and the Broome Street Bar are still going strong; but little else in Soho is the same. Few of the early art galleries remain, and the overwhelming atmosphere is of upscale consumption and partying. At least the original buildings are still there, wonderful architectural fantasies of 19th century cast-iron construction, unlike any other part of the city.
To get to New York I first drove to New Haven and stopped there to revisit places I knew from the five-year period I lived there. (I taught poetry writing there off and on in Yale’s College Seminar program.) I’m familiar with and fond of the sprawling campus, which is not at all sequestered from the surrounding city; main New Haven streets cut right through it. There’s a wide repertory of architectural styles for the campus buildings, beginning with Connecticut Hall, the 18th century structure where the university held its first classes, to 19th century Gothic, to 1930s Gothic, and several Neo-Georgian buildings whose architectural idiom feels more New Englandish than Gothic style possibly could.
I also paid a visit to the Yale Center for British Art, where, in addition to the permanent collection, two fascinating shows were up. One was called “A New World: England’s First View of America.” Its contents include the surprisingly detailed watercolors made by John White, who accompanied Raleigh on his voyage to “Virginia” (present-day North Carolina). The Algonquian people who lived there, their towns, flora and fauna, all are carefully rendered in startling detail. It was a privileged moment, before colonization and disruption of the lives of the original inhabitants, a disruption that soon became murderous. The first foreshadowing of coming conflicts was the lost colony of Roanoke. So many improbable events gather in the story of England’s efforts to plant themselves in the New World. The exhibition includes the famous engraving depicting Pocahontas in English dress after her marriage to John Rolfe. And she wasn’t the only Indian to be brought to London. Does anyone know if these early visitors married and had children in England? Do they have living descendants? It would be interesting to hear that they do.
The other exhibition was titled “The Lure of the East” and assembled a large number of paintings, watercolors, and prints having to do with British travelers to the Mid-East. Some of the painters’ names I already knew like David Roberts, Edward Lear, William Holman Hunt, and John Frederick Lewis, but never were so many works on Mideastern themes gathered together, at least, as painted by English artists. Jewel-like colors and an English Romantic “take” on what Muslim societies were like. The accompanying pedagogical material for the show made the by now well-acknowledged point that these Westerners didn’t truly understand the world they were trying to portray. But then their portrayal of Western society of the time wasn’t so realistic either. Idealization, picturesqueness, stylization: that was the norm. How far away it seems from contemporary art. But the show does register the intense and active fascination that figures like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richard Burton, and T.E. Lawrence felt when confronted with an alternative to their own culture. And clearly Burton and Lawrence were anything but ignorant where the Muslim world was concerned. They took the trouble to learn Arabic and study Islam and the social organization of the culture they adopted. It makes a sharp contrast to the American invasion of Iraq, where no one involved knew much about the country they were dismantling, where not even officers spoke a word of Arabic, and common soldiers had no sense of what Islamic religious practice was. But such facts shouldn’t be surprising in a society where only a fraction of high school seniors are able to locate Iraq on the globe. And with an uninformed electorate, how can democracy be effective?
To get to New York I first drove to New Haven and stopped there to revisit places I knew from the five-year period I lived there. (I taught poetry writing there off and on in Yale’s College Seminar program.) I’m familiar with and fond of the sprawling campus, which is not at all sequestered from the surrounding city; main New Haven streets cut right through it. There’s a wide repertory of architectural styles for the campus buildings, beginning with Connecticut Hall, the 18th century structure where the university held its first classes, to 19th century Gothic, to 1930s Gothic, and several Neo-Georgian buildings whose architectural idiom feels more New Englandish than Gothic style possibly could.
I also paid a visit to the Yale Center for British Art, where, in addition to the permanent collection, two fascinating shows were up. One was called “A New World: England’s First View of America.” Its contents include the surprisingly detailed watercolors made by John White, who accompanied Raleigh on his voyage to “Virginia” (present-day North Carolina). The Algonquian people who lived there, their towns, flora and fauna, all are carefully rendered in startling detail. It was a privileged moment, before colonization and disruption of the lives of the original inhabitants, a disruption that soon became murderous. The first foreshadowing of coming conflicts was the lost colony of Roanoke. So many improbable events gather in the story of England’s efforts to plant themselves in the New World. The exhibition includes the famous engraving depicting Pocahontas in English dress after her marriage to John Rolfe. And she wasn’t the only Indian to be brought to London. Does anyone know if these early visitors married and had children in England? Do they have living descendants? It would be interesting to hear that they do.
The other exhibition was titled “The Lure of the East” and assembled a large number of paintings, watercolors, and prints having to do with British travelers to the Mid-East. Some of the painters’ names I already knew like David Roberts, Edward Lear, William Holman Hunt, and John Frederick Lewis, but never were so many works on Mideastern themes gathered together, at least, as painted by English artists. Jewel-like colors and an English Romantic “take” on what Muslim societies were like. The accompanying pedagogical material for the show made the by now well-acknowledged point that these Westerners didn’t truly understand the world they were trying to portray. But then their portrayal of Western society of the time wasn’t so realistic either. Idealization, picturesqueness, stylization: that was the norm. How far away it seems from contemporary art. But the show does register the intense and active fascination that figures like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richard Burton, and T.E. Lawrence felt when confronted with an alternative to their own culture. And clearly Burton and Lawrence were anything but ignorant where the Muslim world was concerned. They took the trouble to learn Arabic and study Islam and the social organization of the culture they adopted. It makes a sharp contrast to the American invasion of Iraq, where no one involved knew much about the country they were dismantling, where not even officers spoke a word of Arabic, and common soldiers had no sense of what Islamic religious practice was. But such facts shouldn’t be surprising in a society where only a fraction of high school seniors are able to locate Iraq on the globe. And with an uninformed electorate, how can democracy be effective?
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
New York
My partner and I drove down to New York today, putting up at the Penn Club on 44th St., where he is a member. As soon as we checked in I went up to the Met Museum to see the Courbet exhibition that has had such an enthusiastic reception. It's extraordinarily comprehensive, though, unfortunately, Courbet's two greatest paintings weren't allowed to participate. Luckily I've seen them both before--The Burial at Ornans and The Studio. Anyway, a brilliant series of canvases. He was always controversial, in fact, he said, "As soon as I cease to be controversial, I will cease to be important." Controversy centered around his choice of subject matter--portrayal of ordinary country people as though they counted as much as figures in history painting, portrayal of unidealized nudes (including a lesbian couple), and then his proto-Impressionist handling of paint, which clearly influenced Manet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh. Late in life he refused the order of the Legion of Honor, as few French artists have ever done. He was even imprisoned after the defeat of the Paris Commune. I was looking forward to this and the experience went beyond expectations.
I took a slow bus ride down from the Museum, enjoying the prospect of Central Park and surrounding city towers. I spent most of my adult life in New York, and I always say there's no such thing as an ex-New Yorker. I've spent time in all the world capitals except Tokyo and Moscow, but New York is in its own class, a staggering blend of high and low, beauty and the other thing. A homecoming!
Tomorrow evening I have my reading at the Stella Adler Studio.
I took a slow bus ride down from the Museum, enjoying the prospect of Central Park and surrounding city towers. I spent most of my adult life in New York, and I always say there's no such thing as an ex-New Yorker. I've spent time in all the world capitals except Tokyo and Moscow, but New York is in its own class, a staggering blend of high and low, beauty and the other thing. A homecoming!
Tomorrow evening I have my reading at the Stella Adler Studio.
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