Walking Cities within Cities: Blackburn, Wakoski and the (partial) Erasure of New York City

by Kristi Moos

 
 
Poet Diane Wakoski, in her poem “Walking Past Paul Blackburn’s Apt. On 7th St.”:

I wanted to take a walk
and think of the city
whose only remaining beauty
is that you wrote about it. ¹

This is New York City, East Village, perhaps sometime near or after poet Paul Blackburn’s death in 1971. Years have passed since Blackburn lived there. But to Wakoski, the place will always be his. There will always been the faded memory of seeing his face on the corner of 7th and Avenue A, near Tompkins Square Park. Blackburn had been a central figure in making a “place” for poets in the Village in the 1950s and 60s; he held poetry readings and offered vital encouragement to emerging poets associated with Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and the New York School. For these poets, as long as 7th street still exists, poetry will echo in its windows and doorways. The spirit of the Blackburn’s impact on the place can never fully be erased.
 
 
Leaving a store beneath his apartment, Wakoski writes:
 
 

Paul, I walked out
thinking how you have taught all of us
to dwell in this city and
to make friends with our neighborhoods.

Blackburn’s own poetry was steeped in the streetscapes and ecologies of New York City, where he once wrote “Visitation 1″:

Magic of Morning
 
walking thru the autumn of west 24th St. slowly
                                      late to work
a schoolboy slowness along the sunburst sidewalk
Cold air, sun on the walls
                                      one
:                                      sees
on the walk the broken bits
of color glistening in sun like frozen
smashed Christmas tree decorations or bits of glass
imbedded in cement, that are only paper somehow, only
                                     paper. ²

Blackburn didn’t just write about New York City; he rejoiced in the minute details of the city’s life. Afterall, what is more magical than a walk down a hushed city street in the cold, early morning hours? –Or (for Wakoski) taking that lone walk down the street where a dear friend once lived?

For the poet of place, the answer to that question varies. For Thoreau, the answer lies far outside the city limits. The famed writer of the woods might have scoffed at Blackburn’s admiration for sidewalk concrete and Wakoski’s nostalgia for urban life. Thoreau would have urged them to take a walk out in rural nature:

“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods; what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?”

Ok, Thoreau was not a celebrator of urban spaces. But in the mid-19th century, it would have been easier for Thoreau to make a clear distinction between human and non-human landscapes, to say “forest” vs. “garden,” “city path” and “nature path.” Consider the following:

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, — even politics, the most alarming of them all — I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. ³

 
What about today? Today, politics occupy all places. No place is left untouched, in some way, by humans. For poet Mahmoud Darwish, a person can never be in a single place in time. Place is forever haunted by people, political systems, histories, and the physical and psychological legacies of each. Darwish’s poetry enters the gap between “the place that once was” and “how the place that once was–is now.” In mourning the loss of pre-modern lands in the poem “Counterpoint”, the individual can never escape memory, can never escape historical loss:

New York, November, Fifth Avenue,
the sun a shattered metal saucer,
I said to my estranged self in the shade:
Is this Sodom or Babylon?

…

I asked: The outside world is an exile
and the inside world is an exile
so who are you between the two? ⁴

Here we are still in New York City, but far from Blackburn’s city. New York is partially erased, and in its place Darwish inhabits an internal (and historical) landscape, one connected to his Palestinian homeland.
 
Joshua Kryah’s poem “Holy Ghost People” which enters the same ground of internal exile that is at once rooted in the self and in place. In the image that follows, Kryah evokes the fall of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11—:

My voice once a city,
a people.

                          Now flames, glass shattering,
                             the huddled and hurrying away—

Ground Zero is symbolic of the destruction of American sense of place. After 8:46 a.m. on 9/11/11, New York City is never the same city. The United States is never the same country.

If Blackburn were present during 9/11, what images would he have used to represent the catastrophe? I think his metaphors would have been similar to Kryah’s, in which the self is transposed on the city and splinters apart with it. Kryah’s poem ends with the idea that the individual voice is lost when the place itself is lost (and, of course, its people):

                                                            no word adheres, no

                                                     amount of thrashing, convulsing

                                                                               can make the body bring it

                                                                                                            (o word, o home)
                                                            back. ⁵

But where did that voice go? Where did New York City go—the city before 8:46 a.m.? Surely the voice isn’t gone. Does it lie in the same place, at exile within itself? Does it lies in the memory, in exile from current experience?

Moving for a moment to the world of fiction: Destruction of place is central to Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, in which New York City is, yet again, destroyed. But in reenacting the destruction, Whitehead is delivering the city to an older version of itself. This partial erasure is also part revelation, part restoration:

“New York is always destroyed…Giuliani and Bloomberg got rid of the old New York. I think each time you destroy a tenement and put up a luxury tower, you’re ruining New York and making some sort of a new version of the city.

I’m walking around with my idea of what New York was thirty years ago, twenty years ago. So is everybody else. And we superimpose that ruined city over what’s here now. It’s cleaned up, but we’re still seeing that old shoe store, dry cleaners, that old apartment where we used to live. So, any street you walk down in New York is a heap of rubble because that’s sort of how we see it if we’ve been here a while.” ⁶

And so, the City of today is an “other.” It is a ruin built on top of a true place in the imagination— For Whitehead, Wakoski, and countless others, it still is, in part “the old apartment where we used to live.”
 
Blackburn spent his last years far from his old apartment on 7th street, far from the city made beautiful, as in Wakoski’s loving poem, because of his presence and his poems. It is fitting, then, that the end of Blackburn’s sixteenth section of “The Selection of Heaven” takes its final leave from place, bringing the song and rhythm of landscape inward:

…
 
Let there be soft
                                    wind
where he is, let him hear gulls cry
above the
bridge,
                                    and be home. ⁷

 
 
 
—–
Notes

¹  Wakoski, Diane. Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975. pp. 48.
²  Blackburn, Paul. “Visitation 1.” Paul Blackburn. ed. Jack Krick, May 2008. University of Buffalo. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/blackburn/blackburn_visitation.html. Accessed December 31, 2011.
³  Thoreau, Henry David. “On Walking.” Thoreau Reader. ed. Richard Lenat, 2009. Iowa State University. http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html. Accessed December 31, 2011.
⁴  Darwish, Mahmoud. “Counterpoint.” New American Writing 27. Mill Valley: OINK! Press, 2009. pp. 1
⁵  Kryah, Joshua. “Holy Ghost People.” New American Writing 27. Mill Valley: OINK! Press, 2009. pp. 71.
⁶  Whitehead, Colson. Whitehead’s ‘Zone’ Is No Average Zombie Apocalypse. National Public Radio, October 17, 2011. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141352394/whiteheads-zone-is-no-average-zombie-apocalypse. Accessed December 31, 2011.
⁷  Blackburn, Paul. “The Selection of Heaven.” Paul Blackburn. ed. Jack Krick, May 2008. University of Buffalo. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/blackburn/blackburn_selection_16.html. Accessed December 31, 2011.