Category: new york

Poem I have memorized (Terrance Hayes).

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New York Poem

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown
one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles
of buildings where there are more miles
of shortcuts and alternative takes than
there are Miles Davis alternative takes.
There is a white girl who looks hi-
jacked with feeling in her glittering jacket
and her boots that look made of dinosaur
skin and R is saying to her I love you
again and again. On a Chinatown rooftop
in New York anything can happen.
Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty word
for “slaughterhouse.” Someone says
mermaids are just fish ladies. I am so
fucking vain I cannot believe anyone
is threatened by me. In New York
not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York,
dear girl with a bar code tattooed
on the side of your face, and everyone
writing poems about and inside and outside
the subways, dear people underground
in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles
of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown
where Miles Davis is pumping in,
and someone is telling me about the contranyms,
how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word
looking in opposite directions. I now know
“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.
That’s how I think of New York. Someone
jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,
and someone jonesing for grace.

photo taken headed uptown, disposable camera, December 2011

Small things are my favorite things (photograph).

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A corner of Maira Kalman’s studio. Full article found here. It’s charming, of course. (Thanks to Kath, who found it.) (“Who’s Maira Kalman?”)

(Makes me want to write a poem called “Small Chair Poem,” in which thumbs could be found sitting on chairs.)

A song is a poem (and not just because of lyrics).

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Just when I thought I’d finally gotten over this song…I’m presented with a new reason to love it.

Chelsea Hotel No. 2 by Leonard Cohen

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
Those were the reasons and that was New York,
we were running for the money and the flesh.
And that was called love for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.
Ah but you got away, didn’t you babe,
you just turned your back on the crowd,
you got away, I never once heard you say,
I need you, I don’t need you,
I need you, I don’t need you
and all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, you said, “Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music.”

I don’t mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can’t keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
that’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.

A friend is a poem: part 2 (Joanna Roberts).

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“This is something I can give you for your birthday”

as told by Joanna Roberts to my message machine

I’m moving from my apartment
and I can’t stop thinking of this past fall
in which I only wore two pairs of boots—
such. city. boots. in that the tall brown ones
always made my ankles bleed and the little
black witchy ones somehow left
this irreversible lump of cartilage on my heel
and I walked so. much. in them and they’re not.
meant! for walking! they’re meant for viewing!
and they’ve left hilarious damage on my feet
and what makes me think of them is
that there’s this old woman who lives
in the apartment below me and I always hear her
coughing in the morning through the pipes
and I rarely every see her, the only times
I‘ve ever really seen her were when
in the fall I’d go trampling down the stairs
to get to work or to go off on some adventure
in those boots
and I would almost run her over
and she was coming back from brunch
with her sister or something like that
in her cane and her big floral dresses—

I want to go SO BADLY (exhibit).

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“Painters and Poets” at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

From the website:

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery marks its 60th anniversary with “Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painters and Poets,” an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s pivotal role in launching the New York School of Poets and fostering a new collaborative ethos among poets and painters in post-War New York. The exhibit focuses on the gallery’s first two decades, the 1950s and ‘60s, when its vibrant, salon-like atmosphere and director John Bernard Myers’ passion for both art and poetry gave birth to these unique partnerships.

All I can do is go to the gallery’s website and click through the tiny pictures and hope that suffices (it must suffice). A few I love, even in their tiny, virtual forms:

That’s Frank O’Hara, at the Museum of Modern Art. And here’s Larry Rivers’ portrait of John Ashberry:

Poem based on an archived letter (mine).

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A piece from my creative translation project of last semester, made up of letter poems: letters to Alice Notley, from all sorts of cool ladies, turned into poems. This one’s based off of a letter from Anne Waldman. You poets might recognize some of the names she’s referencing.

Thanks to Heather for her handwriting.

Scanner inspiration comes from Frankie.

The Last Brunch Poem, Day 20 (mine).

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Goodbye grandma and grandpa and suckers
in ceramic bowls in their just-cold house where

I came into some Steinbeck and heard word about
the “two-cent plain,” a small glass of seltzer

at the fountain and a single smoke for a penny
less. Goodbye New York, goodbye high school

(though I should’ve said it years ago); goodbye
thick scarves that warm my chin, goodbye smallperson

chance at the lottery win. In an apartment floor
on Warburten we sang “The Weight,” planned the three

-part chorus note and in our rendition humor didn’t pull
us out, half our faces painted and the other half about

to be. The photographs I seized these weeks are grainy
and behind the gloss the noise is coiled. Sam didn’t

snore. Andrew’s voice across the phone was hushed
and pious for the past. He drove. Goodbye pink

backdropped cheetah where we’ll pose until we’re all
too fat for year-end dresses. Goodbye Euclid and Villard

where I didn’t exercise but hoped to hold a face or two.
Goodbye avocadoes posed in pitied winter pyramids

and goodbye to mothers in the store and on the street,
catty-cornered on a mat or in the heated trainstop.

And here’s the last full stop after a half day’s research
into telegrams: I came, I saw, I ate late meals. I ran.