The Lorca extravaganza continues! Don’t worry if you’ve
missed some of the early events that have already happened New-York-City-wide
in celebration of this poet of mystery and intrigue. There is plenty more to come.
Happenings including film screenings, readings, talks, concerts, and exhibits
of Lorca’s art, manuscripts, and personal possessions span through July 21.
Plus, there is a beautifully re-packaged, newly released, updated version of Poet in New York available in stores now
(FSG, $17) with reproductions and inclusions of some of the material that’s
currently on view in the “Back Tomorrow” exhibit at the Wachenhiem Gallery in
the Schwarzman Building of the NYPublic Library. If you are a Lorca fan, the
new book and the exhibit are musts, and if you’re curious or ambivalent about
his work, as I have been, this is a superb opportunity to explore why Poet in New York issuch a revered
collection and why eighty-three years after Lorca’s fated visit to our fair city,
his darkly conflicted vision of Gotham is as relevant as ever.
My problem when I first tried reading Poet in New York in 2008, when the Grove edition of the poems came
out, was a twofold mix of confusion: I wasn’t able to let my logical mind
wander through the surreal images of the poems, compounded by the fact that I
couldn’t grasp that someone would write a book about how much he hated
New York. The first stanza of the book, from the poem “Back from a Walk,” is:
Murdered by the sky.
Among the forms that move toward
the snake
and the forms searching for crystal
I will let my hair grow.
The poem continues with four couplets of similarly quixotic
and frankly negative images – limbless trees, broken-headed animals, a
butterfly drowned in an inkwell – culminating with the repetition of the first
line, “Murdered by the sky.” What was I, a lover of reason, beauty, and logic,
not to mention a lover of New York City, to make of this opening poem?
Since then, I’ve not only read the introduction to the poems
– a practice I usually eschew until after I’ve read the entire book (I don’t
want my experience to be tainted by someone else’s, but in this case it was immensely
helpful) – but I’ve come to appreciate, if not entirely agree with, Lorca’s
point of view.
Lorca came to New York from Granada in 1929, when he was 31
years old, and was already known as a playwright and poet in his home country.
His purpose in coming to the U.S. was not to seek fame and fortune, but to nurse
a broken heart and have a new experience. He suspected he would dislike the
city, but he needed a rearrangement of his senses, at least so said Salvador
Dali and Luis Bunuel, former friends who panned his latest book, the popularly
acclaimed Gypsy Ballads, as being
dull and predictable. It’s fair to say that New York duly rearranged his senses
and that his work would never be dull and predictable again.
He hated the crowds: “These are the dead who claw with
earthen hands / the doors of flint where clouds and sweets are rotting.” He hated
the dirt: “Dawn in New York / has four columns of filth / and a hurricane of
black doves / splashing in putrid waters.” He hated the Hudson: “That gray
sponge!” But most of all, he hated the lust for money and the striving for more
and more. “From the sphinx to the vault there is a tense thread / that pierces
the heart of all poor children.” Lorca witnessed, first hand, the spectacle of
Wall Street when the stock market crashed in October 1929, and the death and
despair over the loss of mere money made him sick.
He found respite in the streets of Harlem in the company and
culture of Black Americans, who he identified with the Gypsies of his country.
And he was saved from the long brutal days of August in the city by a friend
who invited him to Vermont for the month. He also traveled to Cuba, which he
loved. All these adventures are chronicled in the poems, and there are moments
of sublime happiness alongside the pieces that document his less-than-enthusiastic
take on the City.
The downbeat poems of the collection give a new spin on the
notion of negative capability, where rather than being a passive conduit of the
beautiful mysteries of the world, the poet becomes the lightning rod for brutal
reality, where it’s equally viable to write magnificent and moving poems about the
world’s exposed underbelly as it is to write odes to Grecian urns.
It’s hard not to wonder what Lorca would make of today’s New
York. It is probably cleaner, but certainly more crowded. The hollow howls of
the City’s weekend and holiday carousing would horrify him, though he might
have been able to appreciate what a center of world culture we’ve become. One
thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the materialism and money grabbing. Though
they don’t read tickertape anymore, there’s still a mass of people here that worships
the stock market and aches for profit, whatever the human cost. That, above all
else, is what turned Lorca off to New York. Ah, but these months are a
celebration of his life and his work. Let’s leave “the others, those drunk
on silver, cold men,” to their own devices. Let’s just follow Lorca
through the streets for now and appreciate the city in all its dingy, horrible
beauty, and honor the poet who sang it.
For more on the program and to find a schedule of events, go
to http://lorcanyc.com/program.