Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

‘In fact, once you get over your first impressions and first sense of fright, it is very easy to get around New York: much easier than Paris and infinitely easier than London, for all the streets are numbered, and the entire city is mathematically laid out in blocks, the only way to organize the chaos and motion. In a word, I feel adjusted. New York is an extremely gay, friendly place. The people are naïve and charming. I feel good here, better than in Paris, which I found a bit old and a bit rotten . . . But, as I started to say, what happens to me is always unusual.’

When Federico García Lorca arrived in New York in June of 1929 he’d just turned 30. Poet, artist, accomplished pianist and fledgling playwright – his great plays were yet to come – he was already a key figure in the revival of interest in the traditions of old Spain, its colourful mix of races and its wealth of songs. But in no sense was he merely a preserver of heritage. Friendship with Manuel de Falla, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí placed him at the centre of cultural revolution, and he was well aware of the impact of Modernism – though hardly prepared for the first hand confrontation with mechanisation he was about to experience. He was also at a difficult stage in his personal life. He’d just ended a painfully one-sided love affair with an ambitious young sculptor, and he was unhappy about what he’d heard of Dalí and Buñuel’s plans to make their film Un Chien Andalou – ‘a little shit of a film’, he said, ‘and the Andalusian Dog is me’. So perhaps it was time for Lorca to get away for a while. Which brought him to Columbia University – to study English and to write about America.

   Another friend, the poet Rafael Alberti, characterised Poet in New York as being written by ‘a lonely poet . . . lost amid docks and avenues and skyscrapers, returning in nostalgia and anguish to his little room at Columbia University’. And, in a lecture-cum-poetry reading Lorca himself gave in Madrid in 1932, two years after his return, and having done nothing about the New York poems until he could introduce them - or, as he put it, ‘make them known’ - he began, as the book now does, with the section entitled ‘Poems of Solitude at Columbia University’. In fact, the first poem he read on that occasion was 1910 (Intermezzo) – he’d have been twelve years old then – introducing it thus; ‘A solitary wanderer, I evoked my childhood like this. . .’

Those eyes of mine in nineteen-ten
saw no one dead and buried,
no village fair of ash from the one who weeps at dawn,
no trembling heart cornered like a sea horse . . .

Don’t ask me any questions. I’ve seen how things
that seek their way find their void instead.
There are spaces that ache in the uninhabited air
and in my eyes, completely dressed creatures – no one
                                                 naked there!

   The child is father of the man, and at the risk of sounding over-simplistic I’d like to suggest that all poets are lonely, solitary wanderers, but that some are more lonely than others. However engaged they are with the culture, the society, the politics of their own times, there is an inner core that responds to the void and which is fed by an impulse to explore the heart of darkness. In this sense, New York – which Lorca described as the most useful experience of his life and which ‘has given me the knock-out punch’ – was the making of him as a major poet. ‘I think everything of mine grows pale alongside these latest poems which are, so to speak, symphonic like the noise and complexity of New York’ he wrote to his parents in January of 1930 while he was in the thick of writing them. And I think he relished the privilege of his isolation, cultivating it artistically while having – as perhaps we shouldn’t guess from the poems – what many would consider a pretty good time and making several close friends, one of whom - the writer Philip Cummings – remarked perceptively ‘that man was always playing hide and seek with death.’

   Perhaps even more perceptive was Lorca’s own comment at the
outset of the lecture: “I have said ‘A Poet in New York’ when I ought to have said ‘New York in a Poet”’ he explained, reminiscent perhaps of the old saying that you can take the boy out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the boy. We make poetry from the quarrel with ourselves, as Yeats said, and it’s fascinating to watch Lorca absorbing his New York experiences and transmuting them. Time and again, outside the poems, he damns and celebrates in a single phrase. ‘New York is something awful, something monstrous’, he reports home – with more than a little ‘awe’ in that ‘awful’, and glamour in that ‘monstrous’. Wall Street (and he did witness the Crash) was ‘the spectacle of all the world’s money, in all its unbridled splendour and cruelty’ and the architecture was all ‘geometry and anguish’ – a terrible beauty, extrahuman but full of a furious and thrilling rhythm. A keynote of his lecture is struck by his awareness of how the visitor’s vivid first impressions are modified by enquiry into a crescendo of passionate eloquence in which allure and repulsion battle it out in what often approaches an apocalyptic scenario:

At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that nothing but a typical, empty anguish that makes even crimes and gangs forgivable means of escape . . . The sharp-edged buildings rise to the sky with no desire for either clouds or glory. The angles and edges of Gothic architecture surge from the hearts of the dead and buried, but these climb coldly skyward with a beauty that has no roots and reveals no longing, stupidly complacent and utterly unable to transcend or conquer, as does spiritual architecture, the perpetually inferior intentions of the architect. There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.

   It’s particularly instructive, I think, with that passage in mind, to
compare the powerful, magnificently grotesque poem about Coney
Island – ‘Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude’ – with his account, in a family letter, of his one visit there: ‘According to the newspapers, there were more than a million visitors that day. I can’t even begin to describe the colour and movement on the beach with throngs of twenty and thirty thousand people. The amusement park is truly a child’s dream. There are incredible roller coasters, tunnels of love, music, freak shows, dance halls, wild animals, Ferris wheels and all sorts of rides, the world’s fattest women, a four-eyed man etc. and thousands of stalls selling a fantastic variety of ice-cream, hot dogs, French fries, little buns and candies . . . When night came, all the lights were lit, and it was like a childhood dream – the big golden Ferris wheels, the brilliant towers of wood and glass, with music and the sound of rides in the background.’ He does, it is true, add that it is all ‘too much’ and that one visit is certainly enough, but in the poem this ‘fantastic variety’ undergoes a transformation into what is more of an adult’s nightmare than a child’s dream. A poem, though, as it always does for Lorca, becomes its own location, operating according to its own laws, and what results is a haunted, surreal mutation, an alarmingly populated Coney Island of the mind:

. . .The fat lady came first
with the crowds from the ships, taverns and parks.
Vomit was delicately shaking its drums
among a few little girls of blood
who were begging the moon for protection.
Who could imagine my sadness?
The look on my face was mine, but now isn’t me,
the naked look on my face, trembling for alcohol
and launching incredible ships
through the anemones of the piers.
I protect myself with this look
that flows from waves where no dawn would go,
I, poet without arms, lost
in the vomiting multitude,
with no effusive horse to shear
the thick moss from my temples.

But the fat lady went first
and the crowds kept looking for the pharmacies
where the bitter tropics could be found.
Only when a flag went up and the first dogs arrived
did the entire city rush to the railings of the boardwalk.

   Geographically, Lorca’s locations - apart from New York – were Vermont (poems of solitude again) and Cuba. Cuba was paradise island for him, an idyllic, idealised destination so much closer to home, and the poem ‘Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms’ is the most joyful, the most exclamatory in the book:

As soon as the full moon rises, I’m going to Santiago, Cuba,
I’m going to Santiago
In a coach of black water.
I’m going to Santiago.
The palm trees will sing above the rooftops.
I’m going to Santiago.
When the palm wants to be a stork,
I’m going to Santiago.
When the banana tree wants to be a sea wasp,
I’m going to Santiago.
I’m going to Santiago
with Fonseca’s blond head.
I’m going to Santiago.
And with Romeo and Juliet’s rose
I’m going to Santiago.
Paper sea and silver coins.
I’m going to Santiago.
Oh, Cuba, oh, rhythm of dried seeds! . . .

   All that he found depersonalising in New York converted to liberation and community in Havana and Santiago. In an interview, he called Cuba ‘our America’, where in particular there was a vibrant black culture which attracted him and made him feel at ease and welcome. Having decided that the only things the United States had given to the world were skyscrapers, jazz and cocktails, he was quick to point out that in Cuba they made much better cocktails. Again, this is a kind of epigrammatic shorthand which sells America short. Even at his most disenchanted in the New York poems there is an energy and wealth of imagery – even, for some critics, too much of it – which amounts to a sort of free-association kaleidoscope of city life shot through with Lorca’s hallmark symbols of ‘moon’, ‘lover’, ‘wound’, ‘blood’, ‘water’ and a signifying menagerie of birds and beasts. And this is a poetry which - in T.S.Eliot’s famous phrase – communicates before it is understood, though as an English poet, who must confess to having no Spanish, I can’t help wondering whether my own understanding might not be more intuitive if I shared the culture from which Lorca emerged and a common tongue. It must be so. When I read all his poems in a dual language edition, and try to hear the Spanish – luna for moon / sangre for blood – I know that the poetry is what gets lost in translation. It’s not just a matter of extra syllables, but of cadence, texture, momentum. These are symphonic poems, just as so many of Lorca’s shorter poems are chamber music, and, far more so than with work that depends on straightforward narrative or anecdote, they really do – I’m sure – defy transcription.

   Before his New York experience, Lorca was very much the poet
of rural Spain who wrote of his love for the land – ‘all my emotions tie me to it . . . the earth, the countryside have wrought great things in my life’ – but he felt, he said, that he was in danger of being typecast. ‘This gypsy myth of mine annoys me a little’, he wrote to a friend. ‘The gypsies are a theme. And nothing more. I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles or hydraulic landscapes. Besides, this gypsyism gives me the appearance of an uncultured, ignorant and primitive poet that you know very well I’m not.’ Certainly he wasn’t. His belief in the central importance of metaphor, the deep image, the lyricism of desire and what he called the poetry of inspiration in which the poet acknowledges mystery and a sense of the ‘otherness’ that lies beyond human speech had already been memorably defined, but I think it could be said to be the New York experience that not only gave him ‘the knockout punch’, but a kick-start into full maturity as an artist. What followed were the great plays, the magnificent ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías’ which is widely regarded as his finest single poem, and the influential speech about artistic inspiration ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’ – the theme of which (remember Philip Cummings’ prescient remark about his always playing hide-and-seek) is that great art can occur only when the creator is acutely aware of death:

With idea, sound, or gesture, the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well. Angel and muse escape with violin and compass; the duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the invented strangest qualities of a man’s work.

Geometry and anguish, chaos and complexity, splendour and cruelty – those New York couplings – resolve themselves finally into violin and compass, the music and design of great poetry. The sadness was that Lorca did not live to see the book publication of Poet in New York - death won the game – but it’s a privilege to be able to inspect the manuscript of this remarkable work.

An expanded version of the address, given, at a Poet in the City event, in the sales room at Christies on the eve of the auctioning of the manuscript of ‘Poet in New York’, June 3rd 2003.

Verse and prose extracts from Poet in New York (Penguin) trans: Greg Simon and Steven F. White.