Four Poets of Contemporary Democratic Urban Expression  

When Joan Navarro asked me to present four New York City Poets to be translated and published by Alfa Series, I was at first immediately seized by a kind of anxiety.  How to choose four “representative” poets from this megalopolis of over 10 million people with literally hundreds of poets?  New York is teeming with poets of every aesthetic imaginable, in every part of the city, from every segment of society. Virtually every type of World and American poetry can be found here (and by “American” I mean Greater American -- from Point Barrow, Alaska to Punto Arenas, Patagonia).  Perhaps it might inflame some people when I say that there is at present no representative style or school that can be exclusively called “New York.”  Though monikers abound (including “New York School”) the city has, by now, become a truly spectacular hub of poetic activity that defies unitary definition. 

New York City can also be said to produce a distinctively formative and transformative (what to call it?) stamp of Urban Consciousness.  By “stamp” I don’t mean one poetic methodology over another or any particular genre, but a developed (macro) sense of the everyone-in-everyone.  The four poets presented here (Robert Fitterman, Anselm Berrigan, Cecilia Vicuña, and Laura Elrick) demonstrate this poetic sense in radically different ways. And by sense, I mean “to make sense”…from one NYC compeer to another, one everyone-in-everyone to another. 

In a city cluttered with messages, chatter, densities of bodies touching bodies, NYC poets strive to communicate within that, beyond that, despite of that.  We’re not going to tell you anything.  Telling is what a bill does arriving in the mail.  We’re not going to lull you into a “poetic state of mind.” That’s what a presidential address does, brutally, effectively.  We’re not going to transport you to someplace you’ve “never been,” and yet, decidedly, one thing we’re not going to do is abandon you “for art’s sake.”  NYC poets are dense.  Like granite buildings.  They go up spectacularly, terribly, monumentally, and fall down just as spectacularly, terribly, memorably. 

We slink into our hovels for the night, shut the doors tight, roll down the shades and resume some kind of “living” that resembles “a life.”  New York poetry is about resemblance in every way! Nothing could be more far-fetched to us than the notion of the “thing itself” -- of anything.  And yet, the poems struggle to resemble themselves, and in a big way.  I’m not trying to be deliberately inscrutable.  I am talking after all about the complex expression of a city in words, and not its heinous Hollywood and TV reductions.  But enough of this -- let’s go to the poets “themselves.”

Robert Fitterman’s epic poem Metropolis (now in its 3^rd volume) can be said to be so “stamped” with an NYC urban consciousness (the relentlessly perpendicular avenues, the weirdness of the art scene, its exotically hybrid restaurants, its local polity along with its doublespeak) as to be literally flat -- flattened, compressed, hyper-materialized, textured so tightly that the materials are for all practicality (as he puts it) “equaled.”  For Fitterman, perhaps like Whitman (Rob might be pleasantly amused at this comparison) every walking being of the city is an “installation,” a living demonstration to be marveled at, to be spectrally (post)-represented.  Straight representation for Fitterman is too narrow of a bandwidth to arrive at “it.”  In “This Window Makes Me Feel” (a poem dedicated to the victims of the World Trade Center attack) we get as pure of a distillation of the Fitterman aesthetic as to be found anywhere.  As he himself has put it, “I’m definitely interested in subjectivity (Fitterman having poetically “come of age” (the 80’s) when subjectivity was under severe critical scrutiny) but not necessarily my own!” In the book-length poem comprised of single sentences that begin with “this window makes me feel…” the accumulation of a polis’ desires, triumphs, disappointments, obsessions, depressions, build up to a kind of critical mass, a kind a social psychology that perhaps we all share but have a hard time conceiving of as one teeming mass.  And as cool and objective as the poetic method might seem on the surface, the poem brings out an emotionality that is difficult if not impossible to reach through the certitude-vs.-doubt perspectivalism of most lyric poetry.  Fitterman thinks these social problematics with a sweep as ample and sleek as the city’s bridges. “Welcome to NY” indeed.  

Anselm Berrigan’s “stamp” is felt, understood, experienced in a completely different way.  Long known for an intellectual poetry-of-the-gut that challenges both the “only lived experience counts” as well as numerous  academic attempts to formalize the problem of language “itself,” Berrigan continues that struggle in his exquisitely rhapsodic poem “Trained Meat” (the title itself is suggestive of that struggle).  In contrast to Fitterman’s “not necessarily my own!” Berrigan’s poetic might be described as “not necessarily anybody else’s either.” That is not to say that he is an agnostic as regards the social “other,” but that perhaps the best way to reach (or appeal) to such an “other” is through exposing the most immediate raw consciousness that he can possibly arrive at .  And that would include some constantly-variable version of “him.”  In other words, his poetry stems from a radical “intra-” as opposed to Fitterman’s radical “extra-” determinism.  The City, like a catheter, having been deeply and carefully -- and often not so “carefully” inserted in the body of his poetry, offers us views of that outer experience that is difficult to operate on.  And it is those “not-so-careful” moments that he seems most determined to document.  It is fair to say that he’s more than “allowed” that to happen, in fact he comes from a tradition of such poetic investigations and practices.  And though his father, mother, stepfather as well as brother are notable poets themselves in that tradition (Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Douglas Oliver, Edmund Berrigan) Anselm Berrigan is entirely his own.  His poetry has an uncanny sense of when an Era is just about to end.  Not a little bit after.  Not presumptuously too soon.  Like Neruda, he’s interested in the spark -- the moment it flashes, a wider democratic impulse.  And so he begins.    

If the “everyone-in-everyone” has been a NY super-trope explored from Walt Whitman to Garcia Lorca to Bruce Andrews (scores of other poets would equally apply here) then Cecilia Vicuña can properly be said to be in that line.  But more than “lines” “tropes” “methods” or “traditions” Vicuña’s poetry is concerned with the journey from “every-word-in-every-word” to “everyone-in-everyone.” In her work, the radical approximation of the polis for its human <paceable-democratic-productive> potential must go through the very utterability of such a potential.  Vicuña never accepts that the terrain for poetry is “already given” whether the poetry is to be demonstrated in a concert hall, a gallery, or even a giant outdoor festival.  But the very terrain from which The Journey is to begin must be made, but not only made, made together, from the “everyones” who are there present (I’ll dare to say too, that she summons some somebody else’s that aren’t corporally there either!)  In a manner of speaking, she doesn’t “refer” to baskets, she gets us to pull the very reeds for the basket.  She doesn’t “refer” to the English, or Spanish, or the many native languages such as Quechua that appear in her work, she summons them one unto the other -- through concerted action, as through our live and on-site comprehension of them.  Her poetry is the radical opposite of Billboards.  Her poetry is the radical opposite of Art Bureaucrats of every stripe.  It is defiantly anti-scoptocratic (given the flood of “images” under Capitalism) though she is also well known for the visuality of her poems on the page as well as for her artwork.  In her texts as well as in her reading of those texts, the words are released of the obnoxious duties that they’ve been pressed into by a repressed society.  “Fabulas Del Comienzo y Restos Del Origen” (from her already classic book Instan) is an excellent introduction to her work as well as (for us) a thrilling look into her core philosophies of art, society and life itself.

Finally, when Langston Hughes, during the Harlem Renaissance, developed a sweeping social poetry that dared specificity while insisting on the universality of the historical moment and its extension into poetic method, the world called it a new Afro-American Art, Afro-American Poetry.  And accurately so.  Both the extension of what had come before and the projection of his politics into the future, became what we call now the poetry of social movement.  What’s not as widely recognized is that Hughes was / became the Urban Poet non plus ultra of his time. A poetry of political-cultural sociology had been born with Hughes. As contemporary (and native New Yorker) poet Charles Bernstein has pointed out, it was Hughes who came up with a unique intervallic rhythm between poems or poetic instances (fragments) that are distinctly [my wording] on-the-beat urban time frames (add that Hughes did it also by weaving the rural folksong forms so crucial to his tradition, an oral one).  The “bop” (as in the “bop” of jazz) of the fragment had been born.  Did the fragments bop before Hughes?  I’d say no.  Ezra Pound’s both smaller and larger poems though “fragmented” seem like still-life forms, wrought by the geometry of renaissance architecture rather than the rhythms of modern urban life -- Frag (Mental) Monumentalism.

Laura Elrick’s first book sKincerity can be said to be broadly developing the three main aspects of Hughes’ poetics.  1. An openly declared poetry of Social Movement;  2. an on-the-ground (and now subway tempered) Urban Poetics; and 3. The Bop of the fragment (though the hip hop verse-line might better describe it now).  In the poem represented here, “Dimensions of Calm,” all three concerns are given rigorous treatment in surprising new ways.  Elrick is a relentless mode-shifter, in that the forms of diction that she employs throughout her poetry, always positively react to new social spaces and conditions. In other words, changes in the volume and density of the fragment are not mere stylistic innovations, but rather they correspond to the real political necessities to speak through that aggregate mass of contradicted social speech that we diplomatically still call “the civic.”  Few poets who’ve moved to NY have adjusted more quickly and adeptly to its civic reality than Laura Elrick.  “Dimensions of Calm” (a devilish title to be sure!) is a tour de force (“everyone-in-everyone”) demonstration of fragment as civic animus.  As Fitterman puts it in a recent review of sKincerity,  “sources that Elrick employs may demonstrate the kind of equality that sampling encourages, the winners and losers of the language-equals-power game are not equal.”  Like Hughes, Elrick aims to level inequality through her poetry by exposing and engaging the unevenly developed fragmented experience of one of Capitalism’s premier cities – New York.

-Rodrigo Toscano

 February 9, 2004, NYC

Rodrigo Toscano is originally from San Diego, and after some years living in San Francisco, he now lives in New York City where he works at The Labor Institute. He is the author The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002), Partisans (O Books, 1999), and Platform (Atelos, 2003). His latest collection is To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004). A poem from that collection has been chosen for the “Best American Poetry, 2004.” His poems have been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. He is one of the original co-founders of Krupskaya Books, and was poetry co-coordinator for The Social Mark conference in Philadelphia, 2003.