For those lost when we were found-
“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
– William Blake
My city is every contradiction. A beautiful monster that sits in a small nook called the biggest city in the world. The scene is set, and these streets have limbs. Dressed in designer drugs, drenched in human conflict. Accessorized with burnt building cufflinks and broken innocence bracelets. Welcome to the graceful struggle between the corner, perpendicular, and parallel. Filled to the brim with possibility, with potent people laced with latent potential. Shiny - happy folks rubbed raw often, rolling with the punches and still punching out on time to be back to work late the next day. Welcome to my city, get uncomfortable with the contradiction.
From the outside, my city is a fishbowl with tinted windows. You should be able to see in, but until you get wet, you have no idea what you’re getting into. As an outsider, Federico Garcia Lorca saw my city with his eyes. They met halfway down a dark alley, and Lorca never turned away from what must’ve been frightening in the midst of so much dark, the sun.
“Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:…”
Locked within the recesses of Lorca’s tortured mind, somewhere between his Granada and my city, is the sense that life in New York is trying, from sun up to sun down. In his poem “Dawn”, Lorca moves about the city as a lyrical observer, wringing sensational truthfulness from the souls of passers-by. His mind’s eye scanning the visible city spectrum to find that stigmatic moment from which his art will pull inspiration, duende.
“Those that go out early know in their bones…they know they will be mired in numbers and laws…”
Even as an outsider, Lorca shows tremendous intuitive knowing, placing his ear to the skyscraper and listening to the stories of it’s builders. It was clear to my reading of his work that Lorca spent a great deal of time observing the poor of New York City.
“the three of them buried:
Lorenzo in one of Flora’s breasts;
Emilio in the dead gin forgotten in the glass;
Enrique, in the ant, sea, and empty eyes of birds.”
My city is famous for its’ perpetual motion and subsequent insomnia. Like a Ritalin deprived pre-teen in front of a two thousand-channel television, my city sits and feeds off each channel, then moves on to the next. Each channel is a poor family. In “Dawn”, the daily hopelessness of downtrodden folks is expressed and recognized; reading it gave me the sense I was looking in a dull mirror at a reflection I recalled but couldn’t touch. When Lorca says, “…and no one receives it in his mouth…” he alludes to the inability of people without hope to wake up into the new day, or arrive at some great change. My city has long been the paradigm for strife, perceived as impenetrable by nouveau pioneers like Lorca and other lovers of these streets.
It’s a matter or importance that the world knows my city is comes from a famous family. NYC’s Kennedy-esque geographic lineage reaches out to all of the non-existent corners of the globe; Egypt, Rome, Constantinople, Paris, and London. While Lorca watched New York’s gears of industry turn as an outsider, William Blake laid the groundwork for noting the nature of a city as contradictory. Horror and joy are often seen walking hand in hand in Blake’s invisible interpretation of London. Coupled with his interest in gothic architecture and his experience unraveling and interpreting the Bible, it’s of no surprise that he tackles the most spiritual of connections in his London, the most unholy of places for its time. Connected by time, flesh, blood, and effort are sons to their fathers. Often in his work, Blake evokes images of the father and the Father, usually in a recipe for some beautiful horror.
“Speak, father, speak to your little boy,
Or else I shall be lost…
The night was dark, no father was there;
The mire was deep, & the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew.”
Blake tells the story of a boy let down, or even let go, by his father. This excerpt from the poem, “The Little Boy Lost” paints a haunting, actually ghostly image of a boy losing his father to death. While the circumstances that have led to the death remain unknown to the reader and unwritten by the author, it is known by the closing line that like a spirit on the wind the father is gone from the boy. There’s this looming ambivalence at the beauty of the sons’ innocence, speaking to his father in the ether; then like a knife dropped from on high, the sudden plunge and pang of hurt in realizing that innocent moment is born of the horror of pleading with the apparition of a loved one.
Many of the citizens in my city know the bitter-tasting pain of growing up without their fathers. The picture of incompletion it’s been my displeasure to paint to shocking detail. Boys in my city are told not to cry, so with eyes that behave more like gelatinous orbs with mouths we yell our anger and frustrations in a show bravado that is perceived as rebellion. Although my father is not dead, he has always been a spirit on the wind to me. I know in my heart of hearts why this ‘Little Boy Lost’ is indeed lost, and have always looked to ‘find’ other boys lost, and feed them hope from small spoons shaped in the fashion of their future fatherhood. My city breeds broken sons.
The story of manhood does only so much without an understanding of its counterpart, the feminine mystique. While many on the poems on display will be interpreted through the contradiction of my city’s nature, no city has been as schizophrenic as Baudelaire’s Paris. “Everywhere in his … poems is a backdrop of Parisian vice…the most wretched strata of this unchaste city…at the same time, he has stopped and chatted at every street-corner in town …” Evidence of this two-sided social experiment/analysis in poetry bleeds through in the poems, “The Thoroughbred” and “The Eyes of the Poor”. The written-out concept of life flourishing in the shadow of the awful, questioning: what really happens within a city during modernization and assumed ‘progress’?
“She is quite ugly. Nevertheless she’s delicious!
The claws of Time and Love have marked her…
She is truly ugly…but she is also drink, restorative, witchcraft!”
Like star-crossed lovers are the two faces of Baudelaire’s Paris, meeting moments before cessation. Parisians, by extension exhibit the same quality. This woman, revealed by Baudelaire to be a dichotomous deviation defying the laws of human/equine distinction, is wrapped in the “…indestructible elegance of her frame.” In much of the poem, the mortal beauty of the woman is met by the immortality of nature and consequent elements. Here Baudelaire personifies his city’s duality. In this woman’s eyes lie the mystique of the arcades, the bangles about her wrists clanging with the boisterousness of Parisian night life; all of which survives in her actions and persists in spite of her never-dying opposition, ‘Time’ and ‘Love’. Baudelaire treats us to a trip through time with his Paris, using the ‘woman’ persona as a metaphor for his city, and the city’s landmarks to mark its passage through time. Roads? Where Baudelaire’s Paris was going, he didn’t need roads.
I love where I’m from, I hate where I’m from, that’s exactly why I can’t escape where I’m from. My city has too many secrets to be a man, even in poetic device. My city is a throbbing bright light that has seen the peak of her half-life, and is on the wane, peeking in on her own shelf life. Barreling through time lit like a Roman candle, my city somehow takes just enough Botox to stay beautiful enough for tourists to never notice the ugly lingering all about them like ghosts of past lovers. Baudelaire’s unused title for the collection that would become Paris Spleen was Lycanthropic Poems, and our cities are separated by a century but unified in the idea of being beastly cities. Depending on moon phases, sensation chasers are pursued by gorgeous, gargantuan werewolves called New Yorkers. Fashion on the forefront with fangs on the pulse, just below the skin, pumping venomous, viscous sin. You can’t look away from her voluminous skyscrapers. My city loves you, my city loves to eat you.
“I was moved by this family of eyes, but I also felt a little ashamed of our glasses and our carafes, which were larger than our thirst. I turned my gaze toward your's… and then you said to me: "I can't stand those people over there, with their eyes wide open like carriage gates! Can't you tell the head-waiter to send them away?"
Baudelaire’s city eats people too. Le Spleen de Paris alludes not to an organ within the human body, but lends itself to a secondary definition of the word in French, ‘bad temper’. The poor of Paris knew how bad the temper was, as the decadent ways of the wealthy were often on display at every turn. “The Eyes of the Poor” turn in reality the eyes of the rich toward a critical look at their own cruel practices and feigned innocence/ignorance. The story Baudelaire illustrates sheds light on the occurrence of new cafes being built in close proximity to the poor, who can’t afford to visit these eateries, let alone eat or drink there. The gaslight’s lamps, and unfinished walls are intricately detailed. As are the stories written on the colored irises of the poor family walking by. The moral ends up revolving more around how two people in love can maintain a working relationship even though they think differently about they communicate on issues (and how differently they feel about those issues). The contradiction monster rears its head in the window again. Not only is this a love poem and not a social justice piece, but also the manner in which this is revealed takes the reader through the entire empathic journey of a socialite with a conscience, and his ignorant lover.
My city and I have engaged in phantom fisticuffs over class division often, even in classrooms! ‘Get off my block! And take Starbucks with you. Take your cafes, bistros, and boutiques out of my shopping centers - your demographic doesn’t deserve to live here... Get off my block! Jogging at midnight, with your toy dog, and exposed ipod, in a
neighborhood you wouldn’t be caught dead in two years ago. Take your overpriced, low-income displacing condos with you…No, leave the condos - but you...get OFF my block!’ For all her childish wonderment, blinding and euphoric, my city still upholds fatal illusions about how the poor can live so far from the wealthy, but never far enough to not be gentrified. My city weeps for her poor.
For all the dark and secretive traits that envelop my city, there are lights! Bulbs that dance on the edges of marquees, rays that stand in place of towers, there are lights!
James Weldon Johnson asks in his poem, “My City” what it is he will miss about his city when he passes away.
“What to me then will be the keenest loss,
When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?”
Adding to the sensationalism of city life, Johnson lists a group of natural phenomena in which he could miss (in the event of his demise) but immediately dismisses, in light of the titillating temper of the town named twice. Johnson displays pride in the human accomplishment inherent in New York City. As an African-American poet, prominent in the Harlem Renaissance, this pride comes through in Johnson’s work despite discrimination and other institutionalized, racist actions against him, in his city. It’s this pride in ones’ city that binds New York to its’ transcontinental lineage as a renaissance city. Johnson goes the length in reveling in the marriage of the organic and inorganic city elements, the green and grey cacophony. There is celebration evident in Johnson’s poem, the type that forces a smile on your face against seemingly insurmountable odds. My favorite kind of smile.
“Will it be that no more I shall see the trees…
Or hear the singing birds…
No, I am sure it will be none of these.
But, ah! Manhattan's sights and sounds, her smells…”
Being a young man of color myself, I recognize the love/hate relationship with this city/country. It wanders in and out of the Harlem Renaissance verses, stanzas, and prose like a jaded vagabond. My city has had me dodging bullets, and watching my back. While being underrepresented, and overexposed. Shown me indignation, disrespect...they have been building a new stadium, so they have been raising my rent. City newspapers speak about congressional decisions to deepen my debt. My city squeezes the very last drop of hope from its’ folk like tequila with lime; but as long as Black mothers baptize their babies’ faces with Vaseline on cold days, they must always shine. The lights are always on (us) in my city. Scrutiny is the stage on which we live, ergo, we perform is our livelihood, hence music played loud in lively ‘hoods. My city makes me smile, makes you smile too.
Many city-dwellers identify with their city. Many transplants from smaller towns use their city to cover their own identity. Lastly, there are those who use their city as an escape. The latter is the case with Marina Tsvetaeva. Born in Moscow, the largest city in Russia. Unbeknownst to many, Tsvetaeva spent a great deal of her youth living with a stepfamily, with her father, and two half-siblings (from another mother (who were favored over her by her own mother!), and her mother. Much of Marina’s (we’re on first name basis, her and I) poetry dealt with her conflicts with her own identity. Marina would write of her loves, sexual liberation, and the private emotion on paper. These issues in her time led to adventure and then exile from her Moscow. In the time before famine struck Moscow, Marina would write of her identity with the fluidity social scientists would call advanced.
“My city’s vastness is submerged in night.
Away from sleeping buildings, I take flight.
The people that I see think: daughter, wife,-
But I remembered one thing only: night.”
Marina Tsvetaeva married her identity to her city’s and birthed this poem. By submerging her city’s vastness in night, she leaves behind all convention and moves into the ether with her and her city’s identity. Existing in the same luminal sense as Wenders’ angels, she observes other Muscovites and their perceptions of her. Marina then submerges herself into night, joining her Moscow, away from the perceptions of others, and remembering nothing but being in the night with it.
My city and I are loving, fighting...It's all we’ve ever done. Against odds etched in slabs, but here we stand. Where my ancestors worked themselves to death, and received no land. Bought with by baubles from natives who perceived no scam. Here, we stand; thriving in a desert where opportunities are the sands, and originality the oasis. In fear of brass, since bullets seek to keep this thesis in stasis, but here we stand. Because my uncles were killed at sit - ins, and we want to see my enemies...in the eye. We stand here, 'cuz face down's how my kin used to die. More than our identities are identical between my city and I, our destinies are intertwined. My city knows me like a brother. But standing here is not enough, we must move forward. Our survival was written in stone, but our success has no blueprint, we must move forward. Subsidized loans provide shelter, but not a people's movement, we must move forward. Between sand dunes' harsh crests, civilizations are cradled - we must move forward. Pieces of lead took my leaders, we will lead in their stead - my passions enabled, we must move forward. Forward, past blaming others for our misfortune. We must move forward - no longer gazing into the evening, but pressing toward the morning...But here...we stand. My city is one with me.
Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, San Diego, Denver, Newark, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore share many things, but nothing more relevant to ‘a city on the make’ then that they are ‘Panther cities’. These are cities that housed the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s and 70’s. Nelson Algren resided in Chicago, and penned a book-long poem about his city, in all its’ gritty glory. In regards to race and its noted effect on his Chicago, Algren keeps it concise.
“The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and linguistic differences…For the beat of the city’s enormous heart…is unheard out in this spiritual Sahara.”
Algren knows the back alleys and storefronts like a book he read as a child and reread as a college student. He seemed to love whatever city he lived in, and wrote on it, like doting on a lover’s flaws. He’d gone to Latin America, New Jersey, written on the connection between Ashland Avenue and Warsaw, Poland; he was a literary journalist of the highest degree. This last characteristic seemed to garner the attention of the FBI, and cause him to be sought out to write the article on the trial of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, which would become the film “Hurricane”, starring Denzel Washington (which dealt mostly with racism and discrimination in the court system over decades).
In my city we stand in the foreground of the American stage play, when we
were casted as the extra’s understudy. Again in the foreground,
the bastard child of four fathers, now scorned by our forefathers for
disrespecting our single mothers in public. The revolution done
changed, Black man changed shades, Black girl turned blonde, I thought
I heard echoes of victory - turned around and the sorrow in this
song... Can you hear it?
Listen, my people speak, spill blood in these streets/
It takes a toll on my soul, everyday I feel like leaving/
I hear my people crying, and them tears keep streaming/
Every time I try I try to leave...they start to scream like/
From forefathers, to martyrs, folk don't seem to regard us/
But they seen waters walked on, seen brothers auctioned/
Topics that talk on, people see and walk on/
Get tripped up, on what I spit up - now they sidewalks is chalked on/
I'm locked on - focused on the heat that makes the beat dope/
I blow the winds of change just to ventilate the weed smoke/
You speak frail, what I spit you can feel, son I speak Braille/
I spit fire, that's why you kill dragons when they inhale/
Two niggas fought under orange lamps,
Such a sorry sight forced me to cast away hope.
Being one observer, long I watch and thought,
"How redundant the term 'project growth”.
You see I, I speak the word less spoken by,
And all my people show me is indifference...
Can you hear it?
Listen, my people speak, spilling blood in these streets/
It takes a toll on my soul, everyday I feel like leaving/
I hear my people crying, and them tears keep streaming/
Every time I try I try to leave...they start to scream like/
Good Evening my people. I say 'evening' because I see the sun setting
on our culture, our very way of living. I see the decades and
centuries cascade past skyscrapers; the struggle, the
progress...chasing the fleeting sunlight. I say 'good evening', 'cause
I'm afraid we just missed twilight in my city.
Can you hear it?
