[Joy Katz]
“Now it is one long agony of taking in.” —Mona Van Duyn
I came to St Louis to figure out why I can’t write in New York anymore.
There, I’ve buried it on page three.
I’ve been reading poems by my late St Louis neighbor, Mona Van Duyn. They have a lot of space around them, as though she came to the page after having taken a deep breath (see especially "Postcards from Cape Split," in To See, to Take; Van Duyn’s work is regrettably scarce online). The poems come from habitable space and inhabit a space freely available, as do Carl Phillips‘ (another neighbor here).
In New York, poetry and thinking are jammed into the cracks. There’s no time between the brain and thoughts-in-the-air and wait, is the G train running? and the hand clamped on the subway strap and the many options that suddenly show up, like panhandlers, crowding the free hour. I tend to write about what’s in front of me. These days I can rarely back off far enough to apprehend it. Robert Hass talked about "the peace of the writing desk." I feel like I’m slapping my hands around in a swarm of flies.
One recent morning in Brooklyn a man came over and asked to share my tiny window "seat" at the bagel cafe. It was a strip about fourteen inches long and four inches wide—a sill, actually. I hadn’t written in days. And i couldn’t write if he were to sit on my toes. So I had to say no—I’m sorry—and he looked shocked and walked off (to the best table, which was just then abandoned)—and then the instant was packed with both a frenzy to write and shame over my sudden status as a super creep. That’s the way it is, in any minute: suddenly you’re the jerk who won’t share, but never mind. You’ve got fifty minutes. Pick up your pen, and live awarely.
To be a poet in New York, you have to write about something other than New York. Or you have to be a good sorter. You pick just the skirts and the hard hats and the ice cream soda. It helps if you’re able to sit in the hallway and write while the baby sleeps: have a smoke, curl over your notebook, no matter the neighbors passing on the stairs. You can be a poet in New York if you have a really solid stage upon which an interior drama is unfolding, with guns and green suede sandals. In New York you can be an artist of muchness, if that’s what you are—zoom out and sweep it in. You can turn the diorama of your psyche into art. (Or you can leave whenever possible.)
I am none of those things, and I’m an especially poor sorter. I get dazzled by a six-storey, migraine-colored corporate logo, a lady with a sore on her chin eating a dry rye sandwich, hatchety modern classical on a sound system, or the way people stand, light-struck and pleasured, when…
"All you do is perceive," said Harold Pinter in The Room.
An agony of taking in! I want to do more than that. But I’m not sure I can, unless I leave.