"I Got the Line-Up, Partner"

The way an express train
snubs the passengers at a local station

-Charles Reznikoff, from By the Well of Living and Seeing

(Jackson Heights, September 2012)

Here are all the poets and poems in the BTB's (Not Exactly) Poetry in Motion series.

Consuelo González Amézcua (Chelo), "I have a world in my thinking..."

Elizabeth Bishop, "The Man-Moth"*

Paul Blackburn, "The Franklin Avenue Line"*

Louise Bogan, "To an Artist, to Take Heart"

Bertolt Brecht, "Changing the Wheel"

Charles Bukowski, "The Laughing Heart"

Tom Clark, "Oracle"

Gregory Corso, "Birthplace Revisited"

Robert Creeley, "The Bird"

Emily Dickinson, "To few the mornings be..."

David Ferry, "At the Bus Stop; Eurydice"*

Paul Goodman, "Handball Players"

Miroslav Holub, "Napoleon"

Martin Jacobvitz, "Five Ways of Looking at a Flower"*

Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms (#39a)

Anna Kamieńska, "Those Who Carry"

Ryszard Kapuscinski, "Ecology" (Ekologia)

Urszula Kozioł, "A Day Went By"

Philip Larkin, "Long Lion Days"

Denise Levertov, "O Taste and See"*

Eileen Myles, "Truth"*

Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions (xxv)

Charles Olson, from "Maximus, to Himself"

Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"*

Charles Reznikoff, from "Going To and From and Walking Up and Down"*

Charles Simic, "That Little Something (for Li-Young Lee)"

Stevie Smith, "The Pleasures of Friendship"

Wallace Stevens, "Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock"

Robert Walser, "On Robert Walser"

William Carlos Williams, "The Locust Tree in Flower"

(The title of this post refers to what MTA conductors on the 7 train say to the motorman, or v.v., when they have the signal to leave Times Square.)

In the Orchard

We began our alternative Poetry in Motion series with Eileen Myles' "Truth." We close it, some eighty days later, with another truth, Denise Levertov's, "O Taste and See."

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

As subway posters become more and more standardized and corporate--an entire train's worth of American Express U.S. Open ads--it becomes harder and harder to find any inspiration there. Yet somebody did with the Jet Blue poster on the 82nd St. platform.

Tomorrow: "The Line-Up"!

Flower on a Crowded Subway

The penultimate poem in our summer series, Is Poetry Motion?, is by Martin Jacobvitz, one of the students to whom Kenneth Koch taught poetry at PS 61 in 1968. Koch used poems he loved, like Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as models and inspirations for the children's poems. As he writes in, Rose Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children, "They wrote remarkably well."

(Source: KennethKoch.org)

Five Ways of Looking at a Flower

          1
Sitting on a chair
Among gray buildings
Is a flower.

          2
People of New York
Imagine the country?
Can they see a flower
On a crowded subway?

          3
Waving wind
Moving a small plant
A bright shining sun
Paints the shadow of a large flower.

          4
A flower is embedded
My thoughts are with it
So are an insect's.

          5
The flower wilted to the the ground,
It was the finish of many things.

For What? For Whom?

Pablo Neruda's poems from The Book of Questions seem ready made for Poesía en movimiento. Here's one to ponder in a subway car or coming across the Gowanus viaduct on the BQE:

Will our life not be a tunnel
between two vague clarities?

Or will it not be a clarity
between two dark triangles?

Or will life not be a fish
prepared to be a bird?

Will death consist of nonbeing
or of dangerous substances? 

(XXXV; tr. William O'Daly)

No será nuestra vida un túnel


entre dos vagas claridades?



O no será una claridad


entre dos triángulos oscuros?



O no será la vida un pez


preparado para ser pájaro?





La muerte será de no ser


o de sustancias peligrosas?

Water Babies

Those aren't sunspots on the windshield or raindrops. They're signs of progress on repairing the center lanes of the Gowanus Expressway West. Sprinklers are set up for curing the newly poured concrete. In just 28 days or so we'll have new roadway. And the jersey barriers will be moved as another section gets ripped up....The cycle of birth and detour.

Baby Bump

Update on the morning's post ("Roll Out"). It's a speed-bump in the offing.

Not very high yet, or decorated with stripes. But an excellent idea, DOT.

Roll-Out

Signs appeared on Monday morning.

That afternoon, this pair arrived:

More warnings:

Tuesday morning, a DOT guy was hosing down the red roller.

By Tuesday afternoon, it was all done. I don't know what they did.