New York

Abstract

New York is a city of poets. 1 Rising out of the harbour, Emma Lazarus's sonnet 'The New Colossus' graces the feet of the Statue of Liberty, offering 'world-wide welcome'. Across the water on Manhattan, cast in bronze on elegant railings overlooking the Hudson, are the words of Walt Whitman, hailing 'Proud and passionate' New York as the 'City of the world! (for all races are here; / All the lands of the earth make contributions here'). Next to Whitman's words are lines from New York School poet Frank O'Hara's prose poem 'Meditations in an Emergency', celebrating the city's natural sensibilities and countercultural joie de vivre: 'One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes'. From Whitman to Claudia Rankine, O'Hara to Maggie Nelson, Langston Hughes to Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Bishop to Vijay Seshadri, poets have infused New York's streets, statues, street corners, parks, squares, buildings, districts, institutions, public transportation systems, bridges, waterways, and even phone booths with their joy, their politics, and their personal lives. As the city's poets negotiate its variousness, in both their writing and their lives, New York takes on alternate guises, manifesting itself in poetry as a subject, a setting, a muse, a witness, and a medium through which emotions, memories, and perspectives are refracted. In a poem called 'New York' (1921), Marianne Moore reflects that the appeal of the city lies not 1 Notwithstanding the nineteenth-century poet Bloodgood Haviland. Cutter's valiant efforts to put Queens on the literary map with such poems as 'On Observing a Beached Whale at Little Bayside' and 'On Tobacco Smoking in Queens County Court House', or Allen Ginsberg's invocation of 'holy Bronx' in 'Howl', or poems about the Staten Island Ferry (such as Edna St. Vincent Millay's 'Recuerdo' or Audre Lorde's 'A Trip on the Staten Island Ferry'), 'New York', where poets are concerned, tends to be shorthand for 'Manhattan', and sometimes for 'Brooklyn'.