Sunday, October 4, 2020 - Sporting reflections: Andre Agassi’s Open - “The End” - from the U.S. Open - August 31, 2006. by Jordan Myers
I first felt compelled to read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, earlier this year. I could have sworn that it was at my parent’s house, and I spent an afternoon looking for it, but without any luck. Two months later I felt the pull to read it again, and this time I wouldn’t give up until I found it. I had spent the last two weeks of March, and the entire month of April, and the first three weeks of May in the Midwest, away from New York, and I had decided that I wasn’t going back to New York without Open.
I played tennis only in spots while growing up. And though I was on the middle school team in eighth grade, after one season, I quickly decided that I’d focus all of the attention and energy that I had reserved for athletics on one sport: soccer.
I played again a few times with a few friends ––– here and there, while in college; and also once or twice over at the clay courts along Riverside Park circa 2014 and 2015, but I never made the time to commit to consistently re-learning and enjoying the game again. Still, there must have been something unresolved within me –––-– stemming from my thirteen-year-old self, who had ditched the tennis racket and shorts with pockets and committed to the soccer cleats (and goalkeeper gloves), who needed to be heard.
Find Agassi’s book, Open, read it –––– find it now, read it now, I kept thinking, until one afternoon, I found it. Once I was back in New York, as the city was settling into its early shutdown rhythm and slowed pace, I set the book atop my refrigerator and didn’t touch it. As I had a copy of Open, I knew that I had access to a few of Agassi’s reflections, and maybe this was enough for a while –––– just to know that I could, at any moment, actually begin reading. Two more months passed.
Then one morning in August I read the introduction, “The End” –––– in which Agassi describes his preparations for the final match of his career that he would win, a 2006 U.S. Open second round draw against Marcos Baghdatis. It’s four hours! And went like this: 6-4, 6-4, 3-6, 5-7, 7-5.
The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of Open’s first page, below: More reflections to follow.
“I’m a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently my mind doesn’t feel like my mind. Upon opening my eyes I’m a stranger to myself, and while, again, this isn’t new, in the mornings it’s more pronounced. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife is Stefanie Graf. We have two children, a son and a daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I’m playing in the 2006 U.S. Open. My last U.S. Open. In fact my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.
As this last piece of identity falls into place, I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over.
Then: I’m not ready for it to be over.”
Saturday - October 3, 2020 - “Lemon” by Kate Ginna
“I’m walking to the Center for Fiction,” he texted. “I’m going to write something. Gimme a prompt.”
I was flattered he trusted me to provide the cue that would inspire his writing. It felt intimate. Then I was anxious about providing a good one. I recycled a prompt I had been given in a high school English class because it was the only salient thing to me in the moment.
“Lemon.” Then I panicked and added, “Or laundry.” “I’m gonna write about last night.”
I felt like I had told a joke in a bar too loud for anyone to hear the punchline. He didn’t mean it dismissively. In fact, I knew he meant it as a way of sharing his thoughts in real time, his excitement over the clarity of his decision, but I still blew air out of my lips slowly and let my chest deflate. Maybe, I thought, he would find a way to work me into whatever he was going to write. We had texted the night before while he hung out with a group of college friends that were tangential enough to me that I wasn’t offended not to have been invited.
He promised he would send me what he wrote and signed off. I texted back, “I’m holding you to that.” An hour and a half later, on break from rehearsal, I checked my phone to find that he had pasted the freshly minted passage into iMessage. The break wasn’t long enough for me to read and reply to it, so I spent the rest of rehearsal filled with the dread that he might think I hated it. Such is the anxiety of texting with a crush who is new enough that you worry you have dropped the baton in your flirtatious relay race if you aren’t pinging back responses within seconds. You lost your one chance, better luck next time!
Finally, after what seemed like eons but was in reality twenty-five minutes, the rehearsal ended. As I waited for the E train in Long Island City, I read what he had sent, hoping at every turn to find a mention of myself. When I got to the end, I was faced with the embarrassment of my unmet expectation. And because I had read it in search of something that wasn’t even there, I had retained none of it. So I scrolled back up to the top, tail between my legs, and prepared to read it in the way one does when you know a response is expected of you -- ready to tag certain sentences for compliment, memorize specific phrases to repeat back to the author with glee.
It was beautifully written. I wondered, at first, if he was trying too hard. Calling upon analogies that didn’t fit just right, choosing words that, though used correctly, stuck out like a child waving his hand wildly to be picked on.
After reading it a third time, I decided I was just licking my wound from earlier. He didn’t write like most of the aspiring male authors I knew – men whose writing was filled with florid language, like they had only ever read Faulkner and Fitzgerald, like every sentence – every word! – was their perfect first-born son that they had ejaculated right onto the page. He wrote with a gentle care. It was the kind of writing that made you feel like you were in on a joke, told at no one’s expense.
How silly I was to be hurt that he hadn’t used “lemon” as a prompt. And yes, perhaps my feelings for him clouded my judgment, and if he were to break my heart, I would reread the essay contained in the gray bubble of my iPhone and conclude, No, I was right before, he tried too hard. But at that moment, in the romantic buzz of being twenty-three, I just smiled to myself and typed back “thank you for this” – and I meant it.
_______________________
Friday - October 2, 2020 - Flower Studio by Blondie’s - 787 Tenth Avenue (between west 52nd & 53rd). by Jordan Myers
I’m standing outside the Flower Studio by Blondie’s on Tenth Avenue at a quarter till noon. The sidewalk and the streets are dark and soaked with rain. A grey mist is holding in the air and hanging above the city. Car horns are crying out but only in the distance, and softly. Closer is the sound of the birds chirping. A few moments before, I’m seeing the flowers and plants and trees outside of Blondie’s while standing on the other side of Tenth Avenue. From one hundred feet east, the space outside of Blondie’s looks like a small forest. After taking the first sip of my English Breakfast tea, the green on green on green on green begins pulling me across the street, west.
Thursday - October 1, 2020 - Five authors of Greenwich Village, as told by Kate Alsbury: John Updike.
JOHN UPDIKE IN NEW YORK
Quietly unassuming, John Updike was not what is always thought of as a modern literary icon. A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, he penned an enormous body of work during his career: fiction, reviews, poetry, essays, and drama. As a self-described “solemn thinker” who “writes with precision,” he expressed admiration for those living a “less bourgeois” life than himself. Stories often detail everyday situations we can relate to, offering windowed insight into lives not our own.
His time in Greenwich was brief, but fruitful, taking up residence on West 13th Street. He landed a position as staff writer for the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column, remaining there for two years: “I was a Talk of the Town writer, which means that I both did the legwork and the finished product. An exalted position! It was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations.”
His first story “Ace In The Hole” was published by the New Yorker in 1955. Looking back on his early work, he saw what he called a “vanished world” without electronics, embodying a fresh, wet paint quality. He was attempting to “bottle some small portion of the truth” and “give the mundane its beautiful dew.”
Updike loved the city but ended up spending less time here than other places. At the 2005 New Yorker Festival he said, “I loved the idea of being in New York, and having an office that looked out on skyscrapers, and living in the West Village, and riding the subway every day and always going in the right direction. All this meant a lot to me.” Later, he would elaborate on why he began to feel it wasn’t the right place for him, “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
Questioning whether he was getting everything he could out of metropolitan life, Updike moved his family to a more rural setting along the Massachusetts coast. He continued as a New Yorker contributor long after leaving the hustle of big city life behind.
At the very least, his time here must have provided some inspiration for “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” the first in a series of stories following a newly married couple, the Maples, throughout their life. Appearing in the New Yorker in 1956, the story begins on West 13th, the street he lived on at the time. It chronicles an ordinary conversation between the couple and their friend, Rebecca, shadowing them out onto the misty, snow-dusted streets of a wintery downtown.
Revisiting characters over time was a technique Updike mastered and wielded similarly in the Rabbit novels, and to a lesser extent, with Bech. At times, his writing took on a sensibility not unlike the works of John Cheever, setting stories in Manhattan and the suburban northeast.
Updike frequently returned to New York, coming back for public appearances, business meetings, and casual visits. As Robert Silvers put it in an interview with the Observer, “He saw it as a kind of adventure.”
Updike’s residence on West Thirteenth Street, image by Kate Alsbury
Kate Alsbury is a writer and marketing consultant. Her creative work has appeared in journals like Frogpond and Modern Haiku, along with several anthologies.
Wednesday - September 30, 2020 - Hybrid Auto Tech: 519 West 47th Street. Open 24 Hours. by Jordan Myers
Hybrid Auto Tech: Body shop. Oil change. Brake change. Alignment. Towing. Inspection. Open 24 hours.
Tuesday - September 29, 2020 -Vote whatever way is the best way for you. by Jordan Myers
Vice-President Joe Biden: Prepare to let people vote; they should go to IWillVote.com. They should decide how they're going to vote, and when they're going to vote, and what means by which they're going to vote. His own Homeland Security Director, as well as the FBI Director have said that there is no evidence at all that mail-in ballots are being manipulated or are a form of cheating –––– they said that.
The fact is that there are going to be millions of people because of Covid, who are going to be voting by mail-in ballots, like he does, by the way. He sits behind the resolute desk and sends his ballot to Florida, number one.
Number two, we're going to make sure that those people who want to vote in person are able to vote because enough poll watchers are there to make sure that they can socially-distance; the polls are open on time; and that the polls stay open until the votes are counted.
And this is all about trying to dissuade people from voting because he's trying to scare people into thinking that it's not going to be legitimate. Show up and vote.
You will determine the outcome of this election. Vote. Vote. Vote. If you're able to vote early in your state, vote early. If you're able to vote in person, vote in person. Vote whatever way is the best way for you. Because he cannot stop you from being able to determine the outcome of this election.
And in terms of whether or not when the votes are counted –––– and they're all counted, that will be accepted. If I win, that will be accepted. If I lose, that will be accepted. But by the way, if in fact he says that he's not sure what he's going to accept, well let me tell you something, it doesn't matter.
Because if we get the votes, it's going to be all over. He's going to go. He can't stay in power. It won't happen. It won't happen. So vote. Just make sure you understand: you have it in your control to determine what this country is going to look like over the next four years. Is it going to change, or are you going to get four more years of these lies?
Monday - September 28, 2020 - Governor Cuomo extends the state's stay on evictions through January 1, 2021. by Jordan Myers
Residential tenants who have had trouble keeping up with their rent payments since the outbreak of Covid-19 this past spring are breathing another sigh of relief. Although rent has not been cancelled, as several tenant advocacy groups have called on Governor Cuomo to do, the extension of the stay from October 20th, 2020 to January 1st, 2021, offers tenants facing financial difficulties an additional three months to make decisions and formulate plans. This is significant.
Even after January 1st, 2021, landlords who hope to move forward with evicting tenants with rental arrears will face backloaded housing court dockets to work through, along with New York City’s already-strenuous and involved process for carrying out residential evictions.
While the temptation may be to chalk Governor Cuomo’s decision up as a win for tenants and a loss for landlords, to do so would be reductive, and would miss the point, which is this: the economic and financial fall-out from the spread of Covid-19 has been, and will continue to be, tremendous. And as the city continues inching closer and closer to any sense of normalcy, decisions concerning how, when, if, and to whom to offer financial support –––– including the asset of time to catch-up on arrears –––– must be made with caution; with consideration and intention; and with care.
Sunday - September 27, 2020 - Two days without sunshine / in a grey city. by Jordan Myers
Two days without sunshine
in a grey city. Just clouds
above the humid air, then
all at once, the evening sky.
Saturday - September 26, 2020 - From our poetry archives: Angela Sundstrom - “Requiem” - Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.
See if you can read Angela Sundstrom’s poem, “Requiem” only once. Its final two lines, “The red flower / expanding at dusk” we think ––– after a brief pause ––– provide an invitation to begin reading the poem from its first line once more.
“Requiem” was written, at least in part, to honor one of Sundstrom’s colleagues and friends from the New School, Bean Haskell, who passed away on April 12th, 2018. When we interviewed Sundstrom approximately one year later, for Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19, she referenced one source for her work at the time.
“A few people that I knew died in close proximity to each other in 2018 and that affected my poetry. There’s a lot of death in my writing in general, but in particular, a lot of my chapbook, Where the Waters Still, has myth poems that deal with death.
I have a poem called “What is Grief?” and I also wrote poems while specifically thinking about the individuals who had died. I have poems in the book that specifically deal with desire, including “The Beginning before the Beginning.” I think I went into it wanting to write poems about the people I knew who had passed away, but then other things came out.”
- Portrait by Alexandra Bildsoe
Requiem
There’s a solitary sparrow
in the church’s spires.
Still, you’re not here.
The traffic on Rogers Ave
insists with a hush.
Still, it rains.
The earth filling itself
over and over.
What is it to be you?
All that is light
and all that goes dark.
The red flower
expanding at dusk.
Friday - September 25, 2020 - From our archives: an excerpt from our interview with Angela Sundstrom - Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.
The excerpt below is from our interview with Angela Sundstrom, which appeared in Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.
Sundstrom’s poem, “The Beginning before the Beginning,” presented below, also appears within the issue. The physicality of the poem caught our attention first; can you feel desire “walking along the shore at night / swell[ing] with box proximity and distance,” or can you see it as “the color of milk / [and] the forest’s green after the storm”?
- Portrait by Alexandra Bildsoe
____________________
The Beginning before the Beginning
In the niche of a movie theater
desire moves like a volt.
It begins in the pelvic floor,
its hot kernel stoked
into extremities.
Desire hunts in the woods,
climbs the radio tower,
propels forward, gives no choice.
A priori;
it resides within itself.
Desire is needy, demands a lack
in order to operate,
requires the possibility of not being fulfilled.
It walks alone along the shore at night,
swells with both proximity and distance,
worships at the altar of the forbidden,
plays in a tableau of the taboo.
It’s robin’s egg blue, strung through.
Desire darkens and expands,
unravels and reforms of its own accord.
Desire is a still life,
translucent green grapes,
a solitary, pale orange,
the curvature of a peach,
absence.
Desire is a venomous muse,
resplendent in not-knowing,
what is almost revealed, but cannot yet be seen.
The image at its conception,
the moment before creation begins.
It is the color of milk,
the forest’s green after storm,
slash of birch bark
against an expansively skeletal sky,
a structure begging for collapse.
_____________
Interviewers: What do you find yourself drifting toward, in your writing?
Angela: There’s something ephemeral, even to me, about how I approach what I’m writing. I think I can answer this question by going in a linear fashion. My chapbook has a lot of older material, so it’s been interesting to write new material and to try and synthesize them. A lot of my older writing has to do with myth. I have a few poems that are very image-based, but more so I’ve researched myths - Cantabrian mythology or Greek mythology - I love the language, imagery and symbolism of myths.
I’ve used the research as a jumping off point in a lot of my poetry. Some was drawn from my personal and internal world, but I think it’s been much more so catalyzed by the external. Whereas now, I think I’m more personal, but the tone is similar.
A few people that I knew died in close proximity to each other in 2018 and that affected my poetry. There’s a lot of death in my writing in general, but in particular, a lot of the chapbook has myth poems that deal with death.
I have a poem called “What is Grief?” and I also wrote poems while specifically thinking about the individuals who had died. I have poems in the book that specifically deal with desire, including “The Beginning before the Beginning.” I think I went into it wanting to write poems about the people I knew who had passed away, but then other things came out.
Sometimes I don’t even know what the poem will be about before it happens. Sometimes, I just write notes and something pops into my head and I’ll say, I could have a poem about this. Then other times ––– and this is true with “The Beginning before the Beginning” ––– it will be more conscious.
With that one I was reading Anne Carson’s new translation of Euripides’ “The Bacchae” and it triggered a thought or a line. It just came to me. It was one of those much more muse-like writing experiences ––– you feel really excited and alive with the language and the content.
So, since you had asked what I have been drifting towards in my writing. One part of the answer would be death. Since I was young I remember being fascinated with exploring mortality. I remember discovering Baudelaire when I was in high school. He’s quite dark, and I remember learning about the romanticism around death in the Symbolists’ poetry. I loved that when I was young. I remember really loving The Flowers of Evil.
Interviewers: Were you reading these poems in the graveyard?
Angela: That’s funny. I did not hang out in the graveyard, but I wanted to. I went to an all-girls prep school and I was definitely the only really gothy person. Some of my friends . . . we liked the same music and they would sometimes dress in goth fashion, but it was definitely a part of my overall persona for a lot of high school. There were all kinds of weird rumors about me. Someone said they saw me hailing Satan or performing witchcraft on my roof.
Interviewers: Was that true?
Angela: No. I’ve never been on my roof. It was in the suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs.
Interviewers: The suburbs of?
Angela: Detroit. Specifically, West Bloom- field. Metro Detroit is a sprawling mass. It’s huge. So you can drive through the suburbs for hours. Of course, there were some cooler towns in the suburbs, places that were more funky and artsy. There were used record shops. There was a goth fetish store called Noir Leather that I was obsessed with when I was in high school. I used to hang out there all the time.
Interviewers: What does that entail, hanging out there, rather than shopping there?
Angela: I’m trying to conjure a nineties mall movie. My mom would drop us off in a town called Royal Oak. In the late nineties Royal Oak was pretty funky. It had cool cafes and vintage stores, and it had Noir Leather, which also had gothy things as well as BDSM attire. Where my parents lived, it was much more homogenized; it didn’t have any quirky small businesses. So we would go to Royal Oak. I used to wear rhinestone dog collars and pieces like that.
Interviewers: Do you still have that attire, back home anywhere?
Angela: My mom does have an odd assortment of some of my clothing, which is kind of weird. I don’t think she has any of that stuff, but who knows. I think she has my prom dress. I remember seeing a dress I wore to a formal dance when I was fifteen. I know that I got it from one of the stores in Royal Oak. Red and black velvet, floor length. It looked really good with my braces. I just remember a photo . . . it’s so bad. I’m sure there’s a subReddit about outfits like that.
Donny: The Blunder Years.
Angela: Exactly. This would be perfect for that. I remember the photo my mom took. I was also in band, I played saxophone, and I was goth. I was not cool.
Interviewers: But, you were you?
Angela: I was me. I went to a dance with a boy in band who also played saxophone. He went to the all-boys school which was next to the all-girls school. Band practice was in the all- boys school, which was another level of terrifying for an adolescent girl.
But for the dance, I had this really goth dress on. I remember the photo my mom took because my face was white like a ghost because I didn’t really know how to put makeup on. I basically just put on white powder and had thick eyeliner and was smiling with my braces . . . it’s great.
Interviewers: Do you remember having a good night?
Angela: I don’t really remember. But Roy- al Oak, it was a cool and funky place, but no longer. I have friends still in Michigan, and when I go back I always say, “Let’s go to Royal Oak!” because Noir Leather is still open. But Royal Oak has become much more bougie, and it’s become a place where a lot of young, wealthy people move to, which is funny because that’s pretty antithetical to how I thought of it when I was young. There are a lot more high-rise apartments and upscale places. I’m really surprised that this goth fetish store is still in business. It’s been open since 1983.
Interviewers: So you’ve made it back there recently?
Angela: I haven’t. Every time I go back to Michigan I say I’m going to go, and then I don’t. I don’t have a license, so I would really have to ask my mom to drive me.
Interviewers: That could be a nice mother-daughter moment?
Angela: It would! It would be like, Mom, drive me to Royal Oak, like she did when I was thirteen.
Interviewers: Were you writing back then, when you were in high school?
Angela: Yes. I actually remember that I wrote a vignette about Noir Leather, something like, “The smell of the incense wafting when you entered the space.” God, I wish I could get my hands on that.
_________
Angela Sundstrom is a poet and writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Broad River Review, the Best American Poetry blog, and Time Out New York magazine, among others. She received her MFA from the New School. Angela is the founder and host of “Litost,” a reading and music series in Brooklyn.
Thursday - September 24, 2020 - On this day in New York History: Take a Giant Step premiers at the Lyceum Theatre - 149 West 45th Street. by Jordan Myers
Take a Giant Step - Adapted into a 1959 film.
The playwright, Louis S. Peterson, holds the distinction as the first African-American to have a dramatic play produced on Broadway: Take a Giant Step, which premiered at Broadway’s oldest continually operating theatre, the Lyceum (149 West 45th Street), on September 24th, 1953.
Peterson, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1922, graduated from Morehouse College in 1944, and earned a Masters of Arts in Drama from New York University in 1947. His parents both worked in banking.
Take a Giant Step, which starred Louis Gosset Jr. as a seventeen-year-old high school senior, Spence Scott, is a loosely autobiographical work for Peterson, as its set in a New England town, and Scott’s father is a banker. The play explores the social and societal pressures ––– along with the mounting loneliness ––– of a young African-American man who is growing up in an all-white community.
Although the play received criticism for dealing too directly, and without space for more nuanced and complicated characters with the tensions and isolation that Peterson must have felt growing up, the work, nonetheless, made an impact, as it was adapted into a film in 1959.
Clips from the 1959 film, starring Johnny Nash (“I Can See Clearly Now”), are available on YouTube; and Turner Classic Movies will show the work on November 18th, 2020 at 2:00pm.
Wednesday - September 23, 2020 - City facades from abroad: Curlew Lane, Eagle Township, Indiana. by Jordan Myers
Stretching less than a quarter-mile from east to west, and located within the Eagles Nest neighborhood of Eagle Township, Indiana; Curlew Lane is approximately twenty-two minutes away from downtown Indianapolis; as well as a twelve hour drive from New York, New York.
Tuesday - September 22, 2020 - New York Bridges & Views - No. 1. by Jordan Myers
Through the view of Manhattan from the Manhattan Bridge, the Empire State Building stands alone, midtown. From the view of Manhattan from the Williamsburg Bridge –––– especially in the morning –––– one long glance up the East River will create a mirage, one in which neither the river, nor the island of Manhattan ever reach an endpoint.
While the views from the Manhattan and the Williamsburg bridges have a way of entering, then never quite leaving one’s subconscious mind; the view of Manhattan from the George Washington Bridge goes further: it reaches not just the mind, but if you’ll allow, it can occupy a space within your heart as well. Here’s why: the views of Manhattan from the bridges that stretch over from Brooklyn lack the dramatic arc, which is inseparable from the view of Manhattan from the George Washington Bridge.
While viewing Manhattan from the east –––– from Brooklyn or Queens, one is either coming in from Long Island, or more likely, has already passed through or driven around Manhattan from the west.
But entering New York from the great west, and seeing Manhattan in the distance for the first time just before crossing the Hudson River –––– which separates New York City from not just New Jersey, but also, from the rest of the United States –––– offers a first breath, one in which entering Manhattan from the east simply cannot match.
Monday - September 21, 2020 - The Definitive & On-going list of New York’s Streets named after Fruits,Vegetables, Plants, & Trees. by Jordan Myers
Beginning with the fruits, Brooklyn Heights, which in 1965 was New York’s first neighborhood to be dedicated as a Historic District, is home to the city’s Fruit Street Sitting Area.
Overlooking the East River and situated between Columbia Heights and the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the Fruit Street Sitting Area’s name is a natural extension of the streets that extend from the other side of Columbia Heights and stretch from the east to the west: Cranberry, Pineapple, Orange, and Willow.
Willow, of course, rather than a fruit, is a type of tree. By history’s account, the willow tree was the favorite of Lady Middagh, who lived one block north of Cranberry on a street that’s now known as Middagh Street, and who in the earliest breaths of the Twentieth Century made certain that these four streets held their fruit and tree inspired names. Our list is on-going.
Sunday - September 20, 2020 - From our poetry archives: Julia Knobloch - “Dispatch from Buenos Aires: Sur/South” - Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19.
Julia Knobloch’s poem, “Dispatch from Buenos Aires: Sur/South” is one of several dispatch poems –––– short and quick poetic letters, some more urgent than others, which are included within her first full-length collection, Do Not Return (Broadstone Books 2019). We like the wind that moves across and through this poem, picking up and carrying more energy and steam as the piece sprints toward its final few lines.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Barracas. Santa María de los Buenos Ayres, the winds are not fair! They hiss and creep around your blocks and squares, blow dirt into your apartments, tear your hair, lift your skirt, unveil, expose you! Posters clatter in the cold sun of May, splendor of the southern hemisphere. Don’t trust a place where north is west and the moon has no face. The winds, the airline, the light, the pizza, the meat — austral! The currency — austral, sailing, swirling, scintillating at demonstrations, pickets, sit-ins, Argentina, Argentina! Freedom, freedom! Scream, Santa María de los Buenos Ayres, on Brandsen, on San Juan, scream — against these southern winds, against this vermouth frenzy, at the buzzer, scream! On Belgrano, scream, on Rivadavia, on Entre Ríos, scream, the intercom may be broken! Hello, hello, it’s me, Mary, it’s me! The holy trinity has long cashed in! It’s May Day! May Day! It’s every man now for himself!
Saturday - September 19th, 2020 - From our poetry archives: Julia Knobloch - “Industry City” - Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19
There are dozens of reasons to love Julia Knobloch’s prose poem, “Industry City,” which appeared in Issue No. 6 - Winter 2018-19, here’s one: reading Knobloch’s stacked lines and rhythmic and repeating cadences allows you to ride along as she travels by bike, an over priced vintage Peugeot, across the Manhattan Bridge, from Brooklyn to north Manhattan (Inwood), down and across the East Village, and then back into Brooklyn once more.
Even before “Industry City” brings an intimate “you” into the world that the poem creates, it imbues its protagonist, the bicycle itself, with a personality and spiritual significance that surpass the antagonist “you.” The fact that the bike was, and will likely continue to be, a powerful and living force is made clear from the poem’s first beat: “I took my bike to die in Industry City today.”
After reading Knobloch’s poem, you get the feeling that even though she left the bicycle “leaning against a scaffolding at 2nd Avenue and 35th Street,” the vintage Peugeot, as well as Knobloch, still think of each other, and perhaps even, quite fondly.
- Portrait by Adrian Moens
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I took my bike to die in Industry City today. It was the first bike I bought in New York, I bought it used in the East Village, an overpriced vintage Peugeot frame. Over the years I spent more than 1000 dollars to maintain it because soon after I bought it, it needed repairs and kept needing them. Now I had let it sit in the yard for too long, the tires first flat then porous, the rubber grips viscous, the saddle fissured, the chain rusted, snow falling and melting on it, a nuisance in disrepair to my neighbors and landlords. The bike took me all over Manhattan in those first years, to Inwood along the river, through giddy summer nights on the Lower East Side, winter storms on Columbus Circle, up 1st Avenue, where I was doored twice, once by a police officer who begged me not to report him but then didn’t call in the evening to hear how I was doing. The job on 1st Avenue was the first of three jobs where I was bullied, my old pre-immigration self is still confused why this kept happening. The bike took me from Manhattan to Brooklyn when I moved there for more space and less rent before everyone, including you, was moving back in the other direction. I loved the bike like other people love their pets, like I had loved my car -- a Renault, come to think of it -- my companion who waited for me at whatever lamppost I left it. In the picture I took of it in the middle of the Manhattan Bridge I can almost see it smile. There is something about bike rides, these moments out of time, a common theme in movies, you know, you studied these things, narrative. Sometimes I imagined how we would ride together along the bay down to Coney Island, I owned two functioning bikes for a while, and when you said you didn’t know how to ride a bike, I thought how fun it would be to show you how, I imagined how you would laugh like I imagined what you would look like when you swim. I don’t know if you know how to swim but there are several reasons why I think you know, one being that parents are commanded to teach their children how to swim, and even though you said that your dad thanked G-d for no longer being responsible for you when you turned thirteen, I’m sure your parents made sure that you wouldn’t drown. We never rode together along the bay down to Coney Island, and the bike started rusting away, everything, the basket, the bell, the frame, not just the chain, and I was unable to do anything against it or with it or about it. I was incapable of leaving it at a random corner or putting it out on a Monday or Thursday night and waking up hearing the garbage truck, but finally today, a few days before the summer solstice and just hours before flying to Europe for my father’s birthday, I took it to Industry City, after all it is a Peugeot bike, and maybe Industry City is where hipster bikes, even in a state of despair, want to go when they die. Frankly I also chose Industry City because it reminds me of you, it reminds me of the 1970s movie we saw together, the one with the car chase through quite different looking blocks between 3rd Avenue, and 2nd Avenue, and the piers. I forget the name of the movie but it was one of our better movie nights, not as good as the one when we saw the preview of that Victorian horror drama, I don’t think it ever made it to the real screen, an abandoned work of unsuccessful narrative, but the memory of the complicity of that night still brings me pleasure, and I wish it does to you, too, although I don’t know if you remember; then again, knowing you, I believe you remember everything, definitely the names of movies. Industry City is also the place where we had one of our first bad nights, in that gallery I assume you’re still frequenting because you always seemed more into art than into poetry. You had begun dragging me to readings in art galleries but ignored me once we got there, flirting with women whom you called friends, potential clients, saying that if I couldn’t bear to watch you network why did I come with you in the first place and in fact, why didn’t I just leave, I clearly wasn’t enjoying myself, you wouldn’t be too long, and I walked the few blocks back home, convincing myself I was giving you space. You came hours later, your hair smelling of bonfire and alien fragrances, your breath of liquor. It was time to let you go but I think I mentioned that I was doored twice and bullied three times; I think there is a connection between these things, and then you left, and I watched the snow fall and melt on the bike for almost two years until today. At first, I imagined leaving the bike at the entrance to that gallery, but then I didn’t remember what side street and what warehouse entrance, and I didn’t want to look up the address for a piece of performance art that only I would see. I left the bike leaning against a scaffolding on 2nd Avenue and 35th Street, I padded the saddle and said thank you for your kindness in the extraction of this, wishing you well, happy strong sun strawberry moon solstice and walked away past the coffee lab, the wine store, and the pickle shack, in the ever-increasing June light.
Friday - September 18, 2020 - Manhattan Greenery: St. Luke’s in the Fields - 485 Hudson. by Jordan Myers
Along Hudson, just north of Barrow Street, there’s a garden beside St. Luke’s Church; where you can find a place to sit, read, and think. There’s no prayer required. It’s only as holy as you want it to be.
Thursday, September 17, 2020 - On this day in New York history: 1927 - René Lacoste wins his second consecutive U.S. National Championships - Forest Hills, New York. by Jordan Myers
René Lacoste in 1922 - National Library of France.
Are you wearing a polo shirt, and does it have a crocodile on it? If so, René Lacoste, the Frenchman who was ranked No. 1 in the world in 1926 and 1927, and was inducted to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1976, would be proud.
Lacoste, who earned the nickname “the Crocodile” for his hard-charging and tenacious playing style, refused to compete in matches in full-on button-down long-sleeved dress shirts and slacks, and instead, insisted on playing in polo shirts.
Although he didn’t start playing tennis until he was fifteen-years-old; he went professional at seventeen, then only seven years later, retired from the game at twenty-four. In his brief and glorious seven year career, he not only changed the standard attire for gentlemen who were sprinting up and down and across and over tennis courts everywhere; but also, through the use of the crocodile mentality, he won –––– a lot, or said otherwise, he cleaned up: 262 wins and only 43 losses; 24 career titles; as well as a bronze metal in men’s doubles at the 1924 Olympic games, which took places in his home country of France.
Although the video isn’t available, all reputable accounts have established that this is what happened: on a mid-September afternoon or early evening, or perhaps, morning, the twenty-three-year-old Lacoste, more than likely donning a polo shirt, walked onto the main grass court of the Westside Tennis Club in Forest Hills, NY; shook hands (perhaps) across the net with his opponent, the American, Bill Tilden; then walked back to his end of the court and examined the strings of his wooden racket one last time before the matches’ first point.
Although Tilden (“Big Bill”) was a tennis titan, as he was ranked No. 1 in the world from 1920 through 1925, Lacoste had won the tournament the year before. When it was all over, from the best out of five sets, Lacoste had won in three straight: 11-9, 6-3, 11-9.
Six years later, after having wound down his tennis career, Lacoste would form the clothing brand which shares his surname and features the crocodile logo. Since 1971, Lacoste, the clothing brand, has been the official sponsor of the French Open, the annual Grand Slam at Rolland Garros.
Per the tournament’s official store: “Lacoste dresses the referees and linesmen of the French Grand Slam. This year, Lacoste is also dressing the ball boy’s outfits: polo shirt, sweatshirt, shorts, pants and cap will be adorned with the famous crocodile.”
This year, from the men’s section, the Rolland Garros store features twenty-eight varieties of t-shirts; twenty-one different polo shirts; twelve unique pullovers and sweatshirts; and nine Lacoste-designed jackets and blousons. No dress shirts are for sale.
Lacoste at Wimbledon in 1925; the first time he won England’s Grand Slam.
Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - Endless days. by Jordan Myers
Endless days having oatmeal
for lunch at 4:30pm. Endless
days listening to Blossom Dearie
& the Blue Stars’ The Pianist,
her jazz piano: quiet; her French /
luxurious. Endless days watching
summer sprint away for the year;
hail autumn, here’s the cue:
you’re up next. Endless days,
endless days, endless days.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - Ninth Avenue at dusk: Between West 57th and West 50th. by Jordan Myers
Walking down Ninth Avenue at dusk it’s possible to see something new every day. By something new I do not mean different people, or different objects, or different cars, or anything else that’s always changing along the avenue.
In particular, I’m referring to the portion of Ninth Avenue that’s a downslope, which descends from West 57th Street on a slight angle and does not level-off again until one reaches West 50th Street. The descent, oddly, is less noticeable while walking north, and on an incline, than it is while walking south.
This is most true at dusk. At dusk, if you time it just right, and if you pace your steps at a rate that’s just slow enough to be gradual, yet not so slow that they’re belabored, then you’ll notice the way the sun sets against the fire escapes that stand upon the facades of the brownstones, mixed-used buildings, and multi-family walk-ups that line the avenue.
If Ninth Avenue were a forest, then the buildings’ facades would be the branches of its trees, and the fires escapes would be the birds perched, almost without moving, upon these branches.
I’ve walked this stretch of Ninth Avenue maybe one hundred times, yet for the first time this evening, at dusk, I saw the way the sun, row-by-row, casts its light across the side of each building in the distance, all the way down the hill. I don’t know how I missed this -––– it felt like living inside of a painting -––––– but I just never saw it before.