Cityscape poetics
From Black Mountain College to St. Mark’s Church: The Cityscape Poetics of Blackburn, di Prima, and Oppenheimer by Burt Kimmelman
116th street fish smells, pinpoint la marqueta
up under the park avenue, filigreed, viaduct
elevated tracks
where graffitied trains run over language
there is a pandemonium of gumbo colors sitting up
jambalaya rhythms
spanish harlem, erupting
street vendors on timbale sidewalks
where the truth of things is what’s happening now…
–Quincy Troupe, “116th Street & Park Avenue”
“New York was, in Koch’s words, a place ‘of dizzying anonymity, the feeling of freedom,’ the ‘availability of experience’, as Marianne Moore says in a poem about New York, the ‘feeling of excitement and nervousness’. The city was a place of noise, chaos and intimacy where people were thrown together on crowded streets and public transportation…”
(via woods lot)