New York City's Poetry

Musings from a poetry reading hosted by First Things magazine and featuring the poetry of Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine.

I am seated in a small, crowded room on the sixth floor of a building on New York City’s East Side. It is my first time at a poetry reading. Initially, I feel out of place. I am younger than most here – too young even to drink the wine. But I find several familiar faces in the crowd. I realize that all in this room are united by a love for words and especially for poetry.

Christian Wiman, a native of west Texas, came to the city to share his poetry. He laughs, almost apologetically, when admitting that most of the poems are about Texas. But I am fascinated by the way his voice (with a hint of a Texan drawl) lifts words from the page and paints pictures of fields that “wrinkle into rows / of cotton” and dust devils that are a “mystical hysterical amalgam of earth and wind / and mind.”

Leaning forward in my chair to catch the words as they slip past, I wish for pen and paper to write down several of the lines. Wiman knows these poems by heart and does not think to allow a long pause between each reading to let his listeners ponder the graceful phrases.

There is one poem that captivates me. He calls it “Postolka,” the Czech word for kestrel. During a stay in Prague, he saw a falcon land on his windowsill. The poem recounts the moment: “Wish for something, you said. / A shiver pricked your spine. / The falcon turned its head 
/ and locked its eyes on mine.” I love the way I suddenly feel transported to that room. I can feel the eager anticipation pulsing through my body, and the wonder that such a large bird, loose in a city, would choose my windowsill on which to alight. What would I do in this room if I saw a falcon dive through the night air and perch on the fire escape to stare at me?

I am reminded of a passage from Mystery and Manners, a book of essays by Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor encourages writers to take up painting because it forces them to see. This is the basis of all the arts, she argues. Writing is not concerned with just saying things, but showing things. I do not know if Wiman has read O’Connor, but he has surely taken this advice to heart. His poetry is charged by a peculiar clarity of vision that creates honestly detailed portrayals of everyday life. The poems possess all the color and beauty of a photograph. And, yet, they are much more alive than a photograph: they allow a glimpse into Wiman’s mind and transcribe into words the vibrant glow of his soul.

That glow seems to fill the room, subduing his listeners into an awestruck silence or stirring them to applause. We applaud when his words inspire and encourage the glow within our own souls.

When I leave the poetry reading, I am refreshed and renewed. I find myself on the sidewalk in the cool of an October evening. But the city seems different than before, as though I see it with new eyes. I long to draw my own lines of poetry – to capture the emotions welling up in my soul and somehow offer them up to this big city.

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 12:39 PM |

Snapshots

In late August, I began going to school in New York City, and soon realized that there is too much to see in this busy metropolis.

But I keep forgetting to bring my camera with me. I wish I could store images in my head like I do on my camera's memory card. Yet, when I go back and try to remember, I find I have lost the important details. Or perhaps it is that I am remembering only the details that stood out to me: the rich mulberry of the art-deco uniforms worn by staff at the Empire State Building, the smell of fresh bread wafting out of Zaro's in Grand Central, the woman who leaves the train with a little white dog peeking his head out of of her pocketbook, the small boy in the subway station who must think it is Carnegie Hall because he has set up his piano keyboard and is playing Mozart's Alla Turca as if his life depended on it...the cracks in the sidewalk, the buildings that you can only see completely if you crane your neck back till it hurts, tourists who feel as if they didn't belong here, thousands of tourists who stop in the middle of sidewalks to check their maps while people who do belong here are pushing past them to get to work, to get to school, to get to a train, to hail a taxi, to do something, to be somewhere, who are happy as long as they keep moving...

"If you imagine an ordinary moment
at an intersection in New York City,
and there is a pause because there is a streetlight,
and some people are stopped and others in motion,
and some cars are stopped and others in motion;
if you were to put that into film terms as a “freeze frame”
and hold everything for a second,
you would realize
that there’s a universe there of totally disparate intentions,
everybody going about his or her business
in the silence of their own minds,
with everybody else
and the street
and the time of day
and the architecture
and the quality of the light
and the nature of the weather
as a kind of background or field for the individual consciousness
and the drama that it is making for itself at that moment,
and you think about that,
that’s what happens in the city,
in that somehow the city can embrace and accept and accommodate
all that disparate intention,
at one and the same time,
not only on that corner,
but on thousands of corners.
It's really an astonishing thing. . . . ." - E. L. Doctorow, New York: A Documentary Film

My favorite book on writing is Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners. If you write or love writing (or are a fan of O'Connor or simply want to enjoy some beautiful prose), read this book. When poring over the book for the second time this summer, one passage in particular stood out to me. O'Connor writes,

I have a friend who is taking acting lessons from a Russian lady who is supposed to be very good at teaching actors. My friend wrote me that the first month they didn't speak a line, they only learned to see. Now learning to see is the basis of all the arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things...Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention.

Never be ashamed to stare (or eavesdrop, for that matter). It may seem rude, but I'm sure that O'Connor would agree that proper and undetected staring is an art form and most writers can do it quite well. After all, can we truly believe that the stuff of many of O. Henry's short stories was not lifted from the conversations he overheard at Pete's Tavern?

Why do I care about all this? Because here am I, commuting to school in New York City, the largest city in the United States, hoping that these rich and varied noises, these crowds, these buildings will somehow shatter my writer's block.

I will keep my eyes and ears open. I will remember to bring my camera. And I will share what I experience here on this blog.

This quote inspires me:

"Dawn in the big city. There are eight million stories out there." - Metropolitan

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 8:58 PM |