Alicia Ostriker

I

The 19th-century English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is famous for claiming that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” What I believe he meant is not that poets sit in parliaments debating tax policy—God forbid—but that they define our emotions, our values, our convictions regarding reality and meaning—and that from time to time they can shape history. 

I think often in these divided days of a poem that actually did shape history, and that happens to be the perfect refutation of W.H. Auden’s notorious claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The words of Emma Lazarus, engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, are so familiar that many people suppose they have always exemplified the American dream. The actual story is more interesting. The statue was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States entitled “Liberty Enlightening the World” (La Liberté éclairant le monde) and was intended to celebrate the friendship between France and the USA, two nations that had overthrown monarchies and established republics. Dedicated in 1886, the tablet held by the statue is inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence; the broken shackle and chain at the statue’s foot was to commemorate the end of slavery. ¹ It had nothing to do with immigration.

Lazarus, a successful American Jewish author, was invited to submit a poem to be used to raise funds for the pedestal. At first she demurred. But a friend suggested that such a poem could offer hope to the flood of despised Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Russia and eastern Europe. We need to remember that nobody wanted these people—to the nativist press they were rabble, dirty and probably diseased, probably criminals, they smelled bad, they didn’t speak English. Does this sound familiar? These are standard anti-immigration accusations, in all times and places. But Lazarus was already involved in visiting Ward’s Island, advocating for housing, health, and employment for destitute refugees kept there in miserable conditions. “Until we are all free, we are none of us free,” she wrote. She had been politicized by events. Now she wrote the poem we all know, a Petrarchan sonnet with this sestet offering “world-wide welcome” in the voice of the “Mother of Exiles:”

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she 

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” ² 

The poem succeeded, surely beyond the poet’s wildest dreams, in changing the meaning of the statue, the meaning of the port of New York City, and the meaning of the United States of America. It defined us as a nation of immigrants, whose core value was that its people could “breathe free.”

My grandparents came to this country at the turn of the 20^th century, just after the moment that inspired the poem. They were escaping poverty and pogroms. None of them ever became rich, but they survived. For them, the escape from an old world of monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and the dream of a new world of freedom and safety, came true. My parents in turn taught me that I should be proud of being American, not because we were “the greatest,” whatever that means, but because we were the melting pot. We were a democracy that gave hope to the hopeless. We were the land where prejudice and hatred might one day be eliminated.

That day has not yet come. Many Americans whose own ancestors were immigrants prefer a wall to a door. Americans whose ancestors were kidnapped and shipped here by force, as slaves, have never felt “world-wide welcome” on these shores. Nor do Americans whose ancestors lived here before Europeans arrived and began stealing their land. Yet the promise of inclusion remains an ongoing key to our history, which is why the USA continues to attract immigrants, a large fraction of whom head to our cities. The city is where people hope to breathe free—and sometimes they cannot, and sometimes they can. Poetry of the city wrestles with this wrinkle in our still-young society: we cherish freedom; “we mandate ‘liberty and justice for all,’” and we don’t live up to that mandate. How does poetry—using poets’ particular skills, which are not the skills of the fiction writer, the journalist, or the politician—go at, or get at, these complex truths which are somewhat self-evident but inconvenient (or forbidden) to say? And who are the poets who permit themselves to say the forbidden?

Until the mid-19th century, there was no poetry of the city in the English language. The poetic ideal was idyllic. Imaginary shepherds and shepherdesses made beds of posies. Love poetry, death poetry, war poetry, court poetry, religious poetry, and nature poetry thrived. Poetry was supposed to be elevated; cities were base places of poverty, corruption, dirt and danger—and, if depicted in poetry, depicted with disgust. Jonathan Swift on London after a rainstorm notes “filth of all hues and odors.” William Blake wanders through the city marking “in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.” The tradition of poets despising the city was still in force when T.S. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” describing London as a place

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent ³

and in The Waste Land where crowds crossing London Bridge were like the dead in Dante’s Inferno, “so many, I did not know death had undone so many.” It was still in force when Garcia Lorca visited New York and was fascinated but horrified: “Crowds stagger through the boroughs / as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.” While America and the rest of the world had embarked on the journey of urbanization that continues to surge forward to this day, few of the high modernist poets of America had a friendly word to say of the city. 

Yet the 19th century had engendered something astonishingly new: the visionary, prophetic, expansively democratic poetry of Walt Whitman, whose artistic energies rose to meet the energy of the city. In Leaves of Grass, he celebrates Manhattan in numerous passages, especially as a seaport:

Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships… 

Numberless crowded streets—high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies…

Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week… 

The carts hauling goods—the manly race of drivers of horses—the brown-faced sailors… 

The free city! no slaves! no owners of slaves!… My city! ⁴ 

Whitman’s egalitarian embrace of the city’s urban multitudes, including its tide of immigrants, is supported first of all by the device of the list. In a Whitman catalog no person or phenomenon is superior to any other. The collective, composed of countless disparate individuals, is dynamic and spectacular. The essential message of list-making, so suitable to modern society, is that the poet is dealing with abundance too great to measure, handing it over to readers to make what they will of it. Then there are those long lines, those rolling, uncontained, improvisational rhythms that are his unique formal invention. I dislike the term “free verse”; it is more accurate to call what Whitman does “open form” or “improvised form,” a main attraction of which is its unpredictability. One of the radical ideas that American culture contributes to world culture is the deep unspoken conviction that our future is not rigidly determined by our past—that we are not (for example) permanently shackled to a class system. Whitman’s form, his play of music, his meandering structure, give physical presence to that conviction. ⁵

Whatever is uniquely American about American poetry—whatever distinguishes it from English poetry—we may arguably owe to Whitman. In any case, a forest of American poetry sprouts from the Whitman root, and there is nothing else like it on the planet. To name a few familiar names among poets of the city: Carl Sandburg praises Chicago as “City of the Big Shoulders.” William Carlos Williams writes the epic Paterson, which sees the city as a man, and a man as a city, and announces his materialist faith, “No ideas but in things.” Hart Crane’s panoramic and exalted poem The Bridge is his metaphorically rich answer to Eliot’s vision of London as wasteland. Like the seagull of his “Proem,” Crane dips and pivots, “Shedding white wings of tumult, building high / Over the chained bay waters Liberty.” Whiteness is looked at less favorably, however, in the Haitian-American Claude McKay’s bitter “White City,” where the modern scenes Whitman celebrates are “sweet as wanton loves because I hate.” These are, as Whitman might have put it, radically “varied voices.” 

Today, the poetry of the city is immensely more varied than Whitman could have foreseen, encompassing the voices of women, and of Blacks, Asians, Latinx, Jews, Italians, Native Americans, gay, and trans people in what has become a fountain of increasingly democratizing song, increasingly amplifying what a city can mean in the lives of human beings, the lives of multitudes, breathing free… or not. A suite of New York City poems in my recent book Waiting for the Light highlights the Spanish spoken in my upper west side neighborhood, that tells me I don’t “own the city,” that the city belongs to its tides of immigrants. ⁶ What follows here is a vastly incomplete (but I hope intriguing and useful) account of some multiple veins of poetry tapped by this place: the multiethnic, multiracial city into which I was born as a third-generation American, which I left at age eighteen, and to which I have recently returned late in life—“my city.” ⁷

II

Lola Ridge (the most interesting poet you may never have heard of) was born Rose Emily Ridge in Dublin in 1873, lived in New Zealand and Australia in early life, sailed to the USA in 1907 as a thirty-three year old divorcee, claiming she was twenty-three. She became active in both anarchist and high-modernist literary and artistic circles, was friends with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, and published five experimental volumes of poetry. Living on Manhattan’s lower east side, participating in protests, marches, and picket lines with ferocious spirit, writing poetry celebrating the working class long before the radical left became fashionable among New York intellectuals, Ridge published her extended poem “The Ghetto” in The New Republic in 1918. It is not intended to be a pretty picture. Hester Street in summertime is “Like a beast pressing its great / steaming body close,” stopping everyone’s breath. It is “Heaped like a dray / With the garbage of the world.” Inhabitants’ bodies “dangle from the fire escapes… sprawl over the stoops” with “herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold,” together with “infants’ faces with open parched mouths / That suck at the air as at empty teats.” Yet there is plenty of life on these streets:

The sturdy Ghetto children

March by the parade,

Waving their toy flags,

Prancing to the bugles : 

Lusty, unafraid . . .

Shaking little fire sticks

At the night —

The old blinking night –

Swerving out of the way

Wrapped in her darkness like a shawl.

Portraying the people of the tenement and neighborhood she lives in, Ridge sketches their looks and stories with graphic detail and keen empathy for individual lives, especially those of working class girls, women, and children. ⁸ 

Forty years later, in 1960, Galway Kinnell scans the same neighborhood and its ragged immigrants in his long poem, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World”: 

Areciba Panetaria Hispano

Peanuts Dried Fruit Nuts & Canned Goods

Nathan Kugler Chicken Store Fresh Killed Daily. . . .

Mueren las Cucarachas Super Potente Garantizada de Matar las cucarachas Mas Resistantes. . . .

Happy Days Bar & Grill

A crate of lemons discharges light like a battery . . .

Onions with their shirts ripped seek sunlight . . .

A crone buys a pickle from a crone…

At home she will open the wrapping, stained,

And stare and stare and stare at it.

And the cucumbers, and the melons,

And the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. ⁹ 

Kinnell’s list of ethnic storefronts, his list of groceries, is action-packed. Much of Ridge’s and Kinnell’s writing represents immigrant street life as unbeautiful, suffering, yet vital. For the remainder of the 20th century, this doubleness becomes a central trope. A decade or so after Kinnell, Adrienne Rich’s 1976 breakthrough sequence “Twenty-One Love Poems” set in midtown Manhattan, depicts a tenuous lesbian love affair in a city “dappled with scars,” screens flickering “with pornography, with science-fiction vampires.” The women walking through “rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties / of our own neighborhoods,” nonetheless pledge a kind of allegiance and a clear imperative:

We need to grasp our lives inseparable

from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces, 

and the red begonia perilously flashing

from a tenement sill six stories high…

The nouns form an unlovely litany—pornography, vampires, hirelings, garbage, cruelties. Rancid dreams, blurt of metal, disgraces. The old idea that cities are sordid continues, yet is challenged by the red begonia as Rich imagines exuberance blooming from the poisoned urban setting, “our animal passion rooted in the city.” ¹⁰ 

The recurrent trope of mingled love and hate becomes revolutionary in the work of Black poets. Uptown from Rich’s milieu, the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and ’30s becomes a flaming hot epicenter of the poetics of protest—individual and collective, yearning and enraged, in stanzas and sonnets, in Whitmanic meander and in jazz-inflected metrics—destined to transform poetry in America, and America itself. “Calling black people,” as Amiri Baraka will later shout out in “SOS,” “Calling all black people, man woman child… calling you, urgent, come in… come on in,” African American poetry brings a new urgency to the ambiguous relation of poetry to the city. It demands a new audience, and invites that audience to “come in” to its rightful poetry. But also: can that audience come “in” to America? And can America reinvent itself in the image of the liberty and justice for all to which we supposedly pledge ourselves?

Claude McKay, Jamaica-born in 1889, possibly bisexual, probably Communist, ultimately converted to Catholicism, emigrated to the USA in 1912, and was to become the prototype of the international Black celebrity, spending time in Russia, France, Morocco, and Spain. McKay’s early poetry was composed in Jamaican patois that got him the nickname “Jamaican Bobbie Burns.” He celebrates the lushness of nature, writes earnest love poems, protests “bukkra” oppression “while toilin’ on here,” 

You tas’e petater an’ you say it sweet, 

But you no know how hard we wuk fe it

In New York, McKay turned hard-left politically, publishing in The Masses and Max Eastman’s The Liberator. Sonnets like “The Harlem Dancer” and “Harlem Shadows,” tapping his ongoing romanticism, lament the pathos of young women selling their bodies, “the shapes of girls who pass / To bend and barter at desire’s call.” But his dominant tone is the gauntlet he throws down in “America,” 

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,

And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,

Stealing my breath of life, I will confess

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

McKay’s defiant “If We Must Die,” written in response to the lynching epidemic in the south and the 1919 race riots in Chicago and other cities, provided a rising militant Black culture with an anthem. “The White City” echoes Milton’s Satan. Making “my heaven in the white world’s hell,”

I see the mighty city through a mist— 

The strident trains that speed the goaded mass, 

The poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed, 

The fortressed port through which the great ships pass, 

The tides, the wharves, the dens I contemplate, 

Are sweet like wanton loves because I hate. ¹¹ 

McKay became a father of the Harlem Renaissance despite his never-surrendered use of traditional forms, perhaps precisely because of his doubleness. Like Gwendolyn Brooks, McKay uses the master’s tools of stanza and rhyme and high literary diction to embarrass (if not dismantle) the master’s house. (There is a leap overseas at this point, as the Harlem Renaissance in general and McKay in particular—according to Leopold Senghor—inspire the Negritude movement in France and elsewhere in Europe from the ’30s to the ’60s.)

A generation later the insinuating lilt of jazz in Langston Hughes’s signature poem “Harlem” binds hurt to threat. The “dream deferred” may “dry up / like a raisin in the sun” or it may explode. Two years into the Depression, Hughes deploys food imagery in a biting satire, “Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria,” which might be a response to Wallace Stevens’ high-bourgeois “Arrival at the Waldorf” and which certainly parodies the language of the new hotel’s brochure, offering in capital letters “GUMBO CREOLE / CRABMEAT IN CASSOLETTE / BOILED BRISKET OF BEEF,” etc., and inviting “all you jobless” to dine with “men and women who got rich off of / your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers / because your hands dug coal, drilled stone…” Following sections invite “Evicted Families” to the Waldorf suites, and “Mary, mother of God,” to “the best stable we’ve got.” Not merely sardonic, the undertone here is insurrection. ¹² Yet Hughes’s brief lyrics on Pennsylvania Station, Lenox Avenue Midnight, Harlem Nightclub, subway rush hour, Jukebox love song, are arguments for tenderness. So, ultimately, is his impassioned “Let America be America Again” with its refrain “It never was America to me.… There’s never been equality for me,” grounded repeatedly by his prayer for “the land where every man is free / The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME.” 

Leaping from Hughes to Amiri Baraka in the history of Black poetry is a quantum jump, as the appetite and capacity for social and personal change that American culture embodies may have in Baraka its most powerful poetic avatar. Starting in the ’50s as the beat/Black Mountain-inflected LeRoi Jones, he becomes a prizewinning playwright, essayist, memoirist, cultural historian of blues and jazz, advocate of Black Power and father of the ’60s Black Arts movement with its signature line calling for “poems that kill,” later a convert to Marxism and third-world liberation. Love of Blackness is his constant theme, but the anti-white, anti-Semitic, homophobic rhetoric along with his scorn of assimilated “Negroes,” makes him a deeply divisive figure; his sometimes comic, always fierce idiom is language weaponized. Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” his notorious response to the destruction of the World Trade Center, is a semi-automatic weapon aimed at a ruling class he lines up against the wall for over 200 lines in the spirit of Zola’s “J’accuse” done as standup poetry. Implying that the attacks of 9/11 were the chickens of our imperialism coming home to roost, he demands:

Who? Who? Who?

Who stole Puerto Rico

Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan

Australia & The Hebrides

Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings

Who got the money

Who think you funny

One might discuss and debate every implied accusation, but the scandal of “Somebody Blew Up America” cost Baraka his position as New Jersey Poet Laureate. There was no legal way to fire him, so the post was abruptly terminated. Nonetheless the purity of anger in “Somebody Blew Up America” is delivered with a shaman’s skill. The poem should be studied as a window onto a still-traumatized Black America and a tarnished mirror of capitalist America. Decades later, I find myself shaken and moved by it. ¹³

The Black Arts movement began dissipating in the ’70s. In its wake the culture of rap and the flood of poets coming out of the Nuyorican Café (founded in 1973), Cave Canem (1996), Kundiman (2004), and other organizations representing “outsiders” to American poetry, have changed the course of the river of poetry in America, pulling in tributaries from every ethnicity. So Afaa (Michael) Weaver can imagine the ghost of the murdered Malcolm X rising from the grave, his mind spreading over Harlem, issuing a manifesto “On self-defense: / Strike me and I will strike you back,” while the Korean Sun Yung Shin in “Riot Police” can address a “Baby gladiator” with “jawbone like a scandal reflecting all the thieves and beggars…. You look like my brother, my son.” ¹⁴ 

The voices of the voiceless ring loud and clear in 21st-century America as the margins have successfully invaded the center, and some pure comedy gets into the mix of the classic city poem; so do some pure sexiness and pure pride. Just a few examples: Grace Paley on Hudson Street on Mother’s Day watches “twenty-two transvestites / in joyous parade stuffed pillows under / their lovely gowns” enter a restaurant under a sign promising “All Pregnant Mothers Free.” Jayne Cortez jokingly compares New York City’s aggressively pooping pigeons with calm and happy and friendly pigeons everywhere else in the world. Andre Codrescu discusses astrophysics with a masked subway rat. In “New York City Poem,” Terrence Hayes parties on a Chinatown rooftop where the city is a “dear girl with a bar code tattooed / on the side of your face” and “someone is telling me about contranyms, how ‘cleave’ and ‘cleave’ are the same word / looking in opposite directions.” That’s an ars poetica right there. 

What about crime? Allen Ginsberg chants “Om” while a pack of kids mugs him in “Mugging,” and the effect is deliberately funny. What else can you make of a line like this: “—‘Shut up or we’ll murder you’—‘Om Ah Hum take it easy.’” Patrick Rosal’s Brooklyn Antediluvian is composed in a DJ’s unrelenting amalgam of Filipino kundiman, jazz, hiphop, street dice, street knives, “neighborhoods… whose best sanctuary, duende and diablo, / rite and act, is the dance floor.” In Giannina Braschi’s Empire of Dreams, an epic love poem to the city, Nuyorican immigrants literally abandon the margins for the center, marching up 5th Avenue on the Puerto Rican Day parade, dancing and singing on the top deck of the Empire State Building, “Now we do whatever we please. Whatever we please. Whatever we damn well please.” ¹⁵ 

One of the major themes in the poetry of people of color is music, especially jazz. Another is the gradually growing awareness that the poet actually belongs here. Cornelius Eady fondly surveys the invented “Victims of the Latest Dance Craze” In his book of that title. Li-Young Lee in the long title poem of The City in Which I Love You seeks his beloved “Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed / synagogues, defended houses of worship, past newspapered windows of tenements… throughout this / storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed city I call home, in which I am a guest.” Is the changed tone of that last clause bitter, or is it a confession of pleasure? Is it not both? Lynda Hull, white girl living with a boyfriend in “a piss-poor stinking room” in Harlem, names it “the perfect city luminous in the back of the radio / jazz turned down so low it ghosted improvisations that let me fly,” implying that this is what a city is for—to lead us in a dance of improvisations that lets us fly. Maya Angelou’s coupleted “Harlem Hopscotch” (check out the glorious YouTube breakdancing video of this) implies the same: “One foot down, then hop! It’s hot. / Good things for the ones that’s got… Food is gone, the rent is due, / Curse and cry and then jump two…. Both feet flat, the game is done. / They think I lost. I think I won.” ¹⁶ 

As many of these poems imply, poetry of the city comes to associate itself with pleasure and with freedom, including sexual freedom. The poet can become the gay flaneur, like Frank O’Hara, enjoying “the fact that you move so beautifully” in “the warm New York 4 o’clock light,” in “Having a Coke with You.” In one of O’Hara’s most famous poems, “A Step Away from Them,” the poet takes a lunch hour walk “among the hum-colored cabs,” and the charm of the poem depends on how seemingly casually O’Hara ticks off erotic icons: “dirty glistening torsos” of workers, Marilyn Monroe-like flipped skirts of women, the “languorously agitating” orality of “a Negro” with a toothpick, a passing “blonde chorus girl.” As Linda Gregerson observes in her essay on “The Gay Sublime,” the canon of gay American poetry has been explicitly urban and sophisticated, skimming as it were the cream of “social nuance, material surface, manners, wit, and cultivated artifice.” ¹⁷ Is O’Hara racist and sexist, or is he just campy? Reader, you decide. 

The urban setting is also a central one for Mark Doty. A sweat-stain in “At the Gym” marks “our will to become objects / of desire.” When Doty’s manifesto “Homo Will Not Inherit” challenges the anonymous antigay slur he reads on the wall of a steamroom, the “dirty story” of an ecstatic and humiliating encounter morphs into a hymn to “the divine body” and the sanctity of sex. Doty’s “public city is ledgered and locked, but the secret city’s boundless.… radiant… inescapable, // gorgeous and on fire.” The poet is for minutes at a time “an angel,” rejecting the Christian heaven, declaring “I have my kingdom.” Yet more defiant is Danez Smith in “The 17-Year-Old at the Gay Bar” where the HIV-positive poet, “full on vodka & free of sin” hooks up with “my new savior,” who

deems my mouth in some stranger’s mouth necessary.

bless that man’s mouth, the song we sway sloppy to, the beat, the bridge, the length

of his hand on my thigh & back & i know not which country i am of. ¹⁸ 

Let me take a step backward in time here. Before there was a Frank O’Hara, much less a Danez Smith, there was an Edna St. Vincent Millay, once the most popular poet in America, a Pulitzer winner, a mesmerizing performer of her own poetry, much of it dipping in and out of love. One of her most famous poems, “Recuerdo,” immortalizes a moment of her Greenwich Village years: “We were very tired, we were very merry—We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” is the rollicking refrain. In the last of its three stanzas,

We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,

And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;

And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,

And we gave her all our money but our subway fares. ¹⁹ 

At this point we can connect a few dots. As Lazarus’ poem redefined more than just one monument—redefined our nation, in fact—and as Langston Hughes defines the great migration and the jazz age as a time of hope and pride crosshatched by anger and despair, so Millay in the body of her work is a defining poet of what the Jazz Age was for white people—a period that ultimately encompassed two world wars, and a modernism centered on youth, which was experimental, sexually liberated, some combination of romantic, idealistic and cynical, and above all—free. In a way, Millay is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of poetry. Yet the shawled old woman at the end of “Recuerdo” could have come off the boat under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps from Ireland or Italy, and she could have been living around the corner from Lola Ridge, who saw night itself as wrapped in a shawl. I like to think that the pervasive elegance of gay poetry of the city, its mannered appreciation of beauty, its attention to relationships, and above all its treatment of the city as the place in which one finds freedom, may stem in part from the eroticism in Millay, novel in her own time, normative today.

III

I have been proposing that there exists a vital post-Whitman tradition of city poetry in America that thrives on tensions between attraction and repulsion, along with a counter-tradition that focuses on pleasure. Much of this writing continues to see the city as cruel, unjust, murderous, racked by suffering, galled and teased by hope. Nonetheless the default texture in late 20th century/early 21st century city poems is urgent, boisterous, packed with material and local detail, verging on the surreal, dizzyingly spectacular, and essentially lyrical. Reading through the recent anthology From the Inside: NYC Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, I have been astonished at how much enjoyment steams from its almost 250 pages filled with subways, buses and taxis, bars, pizza joints, sidewalks, galleries, neighborhood in-jokes, the Brooklyn Bridge, pigeons, and rats. ²⁰ 

At root, it may be that celebration and protest alike in city poems stem from a fully shared sense of what the American dream can and might mean. The celebration of the city identifies with democratic values, with immigrants, with a motley population, the vibrancy of its diverse communities and choices—its vitality. And the protests from those who have been denied equality, are ghettoized, kept down, kept out, essentially assert the same values. A suite of poems under the heading “For the City That Nearly Broke Me” from Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts, who as a lawyer advocates for the incarcerated and for reform of a biased criminal justice system, is exemplary. In one of those poems, a keffiyeh-scarved boy, perhaps much like the poet’s younger self, traverses neighborhoods “with names like a nation / falling,” and in another: “talk about never owning a damn thing / & then talk about us.” With that dream of equality and its betrayal, with those values in mind, I want to turn a final corner to an issue we may all ponder—the remarkable explosion of poetry occurring in times of public disaster, and how this question connects to New York City after 9/11. 

When a society suffers collective trauma, something major happens to poetry. Poetry becomes a form of solace because, at a minimum, it implicitly asserts that language defies trauma. It creates community. It reminds us that we need not surrender to suffering but may snare it in words that thereby become agents of healing. In a critically brilliant essay entitled “Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath,” the Arab-American poet Philip Metres writes,

The events of 9/11 occasioned a tremendous outpouring of poetry; people in New York taped poems on windows, wheatpasted them on posts, and shared them by hand. In Curtis Fox’s words, “poetry was suddenly everywhere in the city.” Outside the immediate radius of what became known as “ground zero,” aided by email, listserves, websites, and, later, blogs, thousands of people also shared poems they loved, and poems they had written. By February, 2002, over 25,000 poems written in response to 9/11 had been published on poems.com alone. Three years later, the number of poems there had more than doubled. ²¹

Among these thousands of poems, over a dozen of which (including Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”) Metres discusses in depth, let me conclude with another poem built for public performance, Martín Espada’s widely anthologized heart-stirring, heart-breaking “Alabanza.” Espada is a Puerto Rican American poet known for his engagement with issues of social justice. But he is both political and lyrical, and at times, as the poem “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” shows, mystical. “Alabanza”—a word meaning praise—is dedicated “for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center.” Here is the opening:

Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head 

and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, 

a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, 

the harbor of pirates centuries ago. 

Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle 

glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea. 

Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap 

worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane 

that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, 

for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes. 

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked 

even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish 

rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Espada introduces us to a busboy, a dishwasher who worked that morning because he needed the overtime, a waitress singing along with the radio: working people living beneath the media’s radar. The poem’s climax and ending arrive “After the thunder wilder than thunder, / after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows:”