I know that most folks think that we spend all our time here at Casa de Armed Liberal reading Montesquieu's correspondence, obscure postmodern works by Baudrillard, or Jim Crews' excellent self-published book on urban shotgun. And we do all those things.
But I have a secret...I'm actually a poetry nut.
And the guy who triggered all this is a modern poet, fellow Slug (U.C. Santa Cruz type), and seriously over-the-top gay imagist, Mark Doty. Nine years ago, I was on a business trip to Washington, and I picked up a copy of Phoebe, the literary magazine of George Mason University. I have the issue here...Summer, 1993.
And I read his poem "Two Cities," and got floored. Here are some excerpts:
I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,
brutalizers of animals and one another,
self-absorbed until we couldn't see
that we ruined, finally,
ourselves - what could we make?
An epidemic ran unhalted,
The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;
...
The dawn was angling into the city,
A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
first a face, not human, terracotta,
on an office building's intricate portico,
seeming to fire the material from within,
so that the skin was kindled,
glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
they were continuous with every city's dream
of itself, the made world's
angled assault on heaven.
The city was one splendidly lit idea -
...
"Venice," Nietzsche said,
"is a city of a hundred solitudes."
New York is a city of ten million,
And my American Venice
- phantom boulevards rippling
and doubled in the dark - a city
of two hundred and fifty million
solitaires, the restless dreamers'
dreamed magnificence: our longing's
troubled mirror, vaprous capitol.
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