Poems of New York »

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry–ranging from Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets’ moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city.

All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes’s Harlem to James Merrill’s Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices.

Encompassing as many moods, characters, and scenes as this multifaceted, ever-changing metropolis has to offer, Poems of New York will be treasured by literary lovers of New York everywhere.

The New Yorker

In 1811, city planners unveiled the urban grid that would become the New York we know; not long afterward, the city's first poet, Walt Whitman, came along to chronicle its particular nexus of enthusiasm, expansiveness, and elegant ennui. This well-selected volume of New York poems, conceived in the days following September 11, 2001, includes not only the tried-and-true anthology pieces but an assortment of excellent lesser-known poems; we're reminded that in New York all things end "Too soon! Too soon!" (as Ferlinghetti exclaimed), although the city's sophisticated residents will murmur only "It gets so terribly late" (Elizabeth Bishop, teasing a friend). There are some stirring September 11th elegies here, but Whitman's words speak most consolingly, across the century, to the city's new sense of strength imperilled: "It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, / The dark threw its patches down upon me also."

Foreword

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
Mannahatta Broadway Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891)
The House-Top: A Night Piece

AMY LOWELL (1874–1925)
The Taxi Anticipation

WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955)
Arrival at the Waldorf

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963)
The Great Figure

SARA TEASDALE (1884–1933)
Union Square Broadway

MARIANNE MOORE (1887–1972)
New York

CLAUDE MCKAY (1889–1948)
The Tropics in New York The City’s Love A Song of the Moon

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)
Recuerdo
‘‘If I should learn’’

DOROTHY PARKER (1893–1967)
Observation

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)
“Taxis toot whirl people moving”

CHARLES REZNIKOFF (1894–1976)
“Walk about the subway station”

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA (1898–1936)
Dawn

HART CRANE (1899–1933)
To Brooklyn Bridge The Harbor Dawn The Tunnel

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)
The Weary Blues Good Morning Harlem Juke Box Love Song Subway Rush Hour

HELENE JOHNSON (1906–1995)
The Street to the Establishment

W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)
Refugee Blues September 1, 1939

GEORGE OPPEN (1908–1984)
Pedestrian

ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979)
The Man-Moth Letter to N.Y.

MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913–1980)
Seventh Avenue

MAY SWENSON (1913–1989)
Staying at Ed’s Place At the Museum of Modern Art

KARL SHAPIRO (1913–2000)
Future-Present

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1919– )
“The Pennycandystore beyond the El”

AMY CLAMPITT (1920–1994)
Dancers Exercising

GRACE PALEY (1922– )
The Nature of This City Fear On Mother’s Day

HOWARD MOSS (1922–1987)
The Building The Roof Garden

DENISE LEVERTOV (1923–1997)
The Cabdriver’s Smile

JAMES SCHUYLER (1923–1991)
This Dark Apartment An East Window on Elizabeth Street March Here

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923– )
Photograph from September 11

KENNETH KOCH (1925– )
Girl and Baby Florist Sidewalk Pram Nineteen Seventy Something

GERALD STERN (1925– )
96 Vandam Let Me Please Look Into My Window

FRANK O’HARA (1926–1966)
Steps Gamin

JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995)
An Urban Convalescence
164 East 72nd Street

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997)
I am a Victim of Telephone My Sad Self

W. S. MERWIN (1927– )
St. Vincent’s

GALWAY KINNELL (1927– )
Room of Return Running on Silk

JOHN ASHBERY (1927– )
A Sendentary Existence So Many Lives

CHARLES TOMLINSON (1927– )
All Afternoon

PHILIP LEVINE (1928– )
Get Up

RICHARD HOWARD (1929– )
209 Canal Among the Missing

L. E. SISSMAN (1929–1976)
Tears at Korvette’s Visiting Chaos

ADRIENNE RICH (1929– )
Upper Broadway

GREGORY CORSO (1930–2001)
Eastside Incidents The Whole Mess . . . Almost

DEREK WALCOTT (1930– )
The Bridge

AMIRI BARAKA (1934– )
Return of the Native

MARK STRAND (1934– )
Night Piece

AUDRE LORDE (1934–1992)
To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train A Trip on the Staten Island Ferry

TED BERRIGAN (1934–1983)
Whitman in Black

HETTIE JONES (1934– )
Dust— A Survival Kit, Fall 2001

JUNE JORDAN (1936–2002)
Toward a City that Sings
“If you saw a Negro lady”

C. K. WILLIAMS (1936– )
Love: Wrath
From War

CHARLES SIMIC (1938– )
Couple at Coney Island For the Very Soul of Me

THOMAS M. DISCH (1940– )
The Argument Resumed; or, Up Through Tribeca In Praise of New York

BILLY COLLINS (1941– )
Man Listening to Disc

ERICA JONG (1942– )
Walking Through the Upper East Side

SHARON OLDS (1942– )
Boy Out in the World

NIKKI GIOVANNI (1943– )
Just a New York Poem The New Yorkers

RONALD WARDALL (1947– )
Three Weeks After

DAVID LEHMAN (1948– )
The World Trade Center October 11, 1998
September 14, 2001

LAWRENCE JOSEPH (1948– )
In the Age of Postcapitalism

DOUG DORPH (1949– )
Love

EDWARD HIRSCH (1950– )
Man on a Fire Escape

JORIE GRAHAM (1951– )
Expulsion

ROBERT POLITO (1951– )
Overheard in the Love Hotel

NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER (1951– )
Construction Site, Windy Night
1972, #43
The Last Hours of Laódikê, Sister of Hektor

ELIZABETH MACKLIN (1952– )
A Married Couple Discovers Irreconcilable Differences

VICKIE KARP (1953– )
Glass

LAURIE SHECK (1953– )
In the South Bronx The Subway Platform

CORNELIUS EADY (1954– )
The Amateur Terrorist Dread

PHILLIS LEVIN (1954– )
Out of Chaos

VIJAY SESHADRI (1954– )
A Werewolf in Brooklyn Immediate City

JUDITH BAUMEL (1956– )
You weren’t Crazy and You weren’t Dead

LI-YOUNG LEE (1957– )
From The City in Which I Love You

MARTÍN ESPADA (1957– )
The Owl and the Lightning

JAMES LASDUN (1958– )
Woman Police Officer in Elevator

REGINALD SHEPHERD (1963– )
Antibody

DEBORAH GARRISON (1965– )
Worked Late on a Tuesday Night I Saw You Walking

MALENA MÖRLING (1965– )
Let Me Say This

WILLIE PERDOMO (1967– )
123rd Street Rap

DAVID BERMAN (1967– )
New York, New York

KEVIN YOUNG (1970– )
City-as-School

MELANIE REHAK (1971– )
Adonis All Male Revue, November 24

DAVID SEMANKI (1971– )
Rain

NATHANIEL BELLOWS (1972– )
Liberty Island

Acknowledgments