So I’ll admit this post is only tangentially relevant to reading, but it is relevant to being a bohemian in suburbia. Last night I was sitting around with two old friends and as part of a discussion of open-source programming, they tried to explain basic computer science to me. I had the slightly panicked feeling I’ve often had over the last four years, of being the stupidest one in the room, and considered, not for the first time, the fact that the things I chose to study exhaustively in college never seem to come up in basic conversation with my “home” friends. I seldom have a chance to impress people with my grasp of Alice Saltzman’s 14 scene study questions, or the vowel progression. (I did try to show my mom how I could speak with different resonances once, but I think she was unconvinced of its larger real-world applications.)
In bed later, I was reading The New Yorker, which I have loved and subscribed to for probably almost ten years, and which I generally aspire (with mixed success) to read cover-to-cover each week. I gave my mom the food issue to read recently and she said she liked it, but that there was a shortage of “warm and fuzzy articles”—that they were all sort of tough. This is fairly characteristic, and usually it doesn’t bother me (I feel I am exercising my brain), but last night I was reading an article about a religious organization which has declared a British political economist their Messiah figure, and finding it uncharacteristically one-sided and a little tedious, when I came across a poem. I often skip the poetry in The New Yorker—it’s usually over my head, and I’m too impatient to spend the time with it that is required—but this one caught my eye because it was titled “New York Poem.” (The author is Terrance Hayes.) It begins, “In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown…” and goes on to give disconnected images of people on the street, audio clips (“Someone says ‘abattoir’ is such a pretty word/ for ‘slaughterhouse.’ Someone says/ mermaids are just fish ladies”), and sweeping, near-cliché statements (“In New York/ not everyone is forgiven”). The poem addresses the city and the people of the city, captures the disjointed bustle, fragmented existence, ambivalence and juxtaposition of unmatching things (sci-fi, Miles Davis) that characterize a New Yorker’s daily life, and although most of its specific images meant nothing to me, the rhythm of it, the stew of all those things, good, bad, mundane, wild, shook me awake. I felt a little jolt of recognition and delight—my city, you’re still the same—that moved me much more than anything in the well-researched, excellently written article about the cult. And this was sort of a double validation—not just, oh New York! but oh poetry! Oh art! At this moment you’re trumping journalism and the “real world,” and my chosen path doesn’t seem so useless and irrelevant.
But of course, the dick of it is, I’m not in New York anymore, and I’ve had a lot of ambivalence over whether to go back. A friend of mine asked me recently what had made me fall out of love with New York, and the answer is complicated. In some ways it really has been like a breakup—when I decided to leave, I felt like I had to abandon something that had been a source of joy and inspiration to me for most of my life. I could no longer read E. B. White’s Here is New York for comfort, no longer feel pride and kinship watching Woody Allen movies. I had to be mentally disciplined enough to stop romanticizing it, the way I’ve tried to make myself stop romanticizing men I’ve broken up with, so I could get over it and start my new life elsewhere. But it’s difficult, when the friends who do validate the artistic existence, who I can talk to about Shakespeare and Chekhov and Adler for hours, are all inextricably woven into the fabric of the city. One of my best friends called today to tell me about taking a cab the wrong direction to a breakfast date; a line in Hayes’ poem, “everyone/writing poems about and inside and outside/ the subways, dear people underground/ in New York,” made me miss my friends badly, thinking of those girls in boots with bags full of books and notebooks, scribbling and journaling and reading and trying to fit creativity into a hectic life where you travel two hundred blocks a day minimum just to go to work and back.
The answer to my friend’s question about falling out of love, I think, is simply that as a child, I fantasized that I would come to New York and become part of the skyscraper-successful, high-heeled elite; that I would be a glamorous, ambitious workaholic, caught up in the frantic pace, ravenously taking in theaters and museums, mastering the life of the very busy and talented. And when I began to feel like I would never be one of those people, and instead spend my life feeling inadequate as they rushed past me on the sidewalk and cursing the construction crews that woke me up at 5 a.m., it seemed easier to look for a different place to be a star than to tough it out in the Empire City. It really was like a breakup—I wept, I said nasty things, I fantasized about other cities, and in the end, on my last day, I took a walk by the East River and said a calmer, more loving goodbye, acknowledging that it wasn’t New York’s fault, we just weren’t as compatible as I originally thought.
But it’s been the case in my romantic life that sometimes, even when I think something’s over, it’s not; and that the time we spent apart was a necessary growth period enabling us to move on to the next stage of being together. And I haven’t given up hope that that may be the case with New York as well. So I’d like to leave you with the other poem in this issue of the New Yorker. It’s a sestina, one of the only poetic forms I’m actually familiar with, because I wrote a sestina about New York in eleventh grade. Poets.org offers this definition: “The sestina [is] a thirty-nine line form…[that] follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.” This sestina by Ciara Shuttleworth is made entirely out of end words.
“Sestina”
You
used
to
love
me
well.
Well,
you—
me—
used
love
to…
to…
well…
love.
You
used
me.
Me,
too,
used…
well…
you.
Love,
love
me.
You,
too
well
used,
used
love
well.
Me,
too.
You!
You used
to love
me well.
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