Poems of New York

by SCHMIDT, ELIZABETH

• ISBN13: 9780375415043
• ISBN10: 0375415041
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-13
• Publisher: Everyman's Library

Summary

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetryranging from Walt Whitman's exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets' moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city. All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes's Harlem to James Merrill's Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices. Encompassing as many moods, characters, and scenes as this multifaceted, ever-changing metropolis has to offer,Poems of New Yorkwill be treasured by literary lovers of New York everywhere.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, a former poetry editor at the New York Times Book Review, is the editor of the acclaimed anthology Poems of New York and The Poets Laureate Anthology. She lives in New York City and currently teaches American literature at Sarah Lawrence College.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Mannahatta Broadway

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

The House-Top: A Night Piece

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

The Taxi Anticipation

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Arrival at the Waldorf

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Great Figure

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Union Square Broadway

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

New York

Claude Mckay (1889-1948)

The Tropics in New York The City's Love A Song of the Moon

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

Recuerdo 'If I should learn'

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Observation

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

"Taxis toot whirl people moving"

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976)

"Walk about the subway station"

Federico GarcÍa Lorca (1898-1936)

Dawn

Hart Crane (1899-1933)

To Brooklyn Bridge The Harbor Dawn The Tunnel

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

The Weary Blues Good Morning Harlem Juke Box Love Song Subway Rush Hour

Helene Johnson (1906-1995)

The Street to the Establishment

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

Refugee Blues September 1, 1939

George Oppen (1908-1984)

Pedestrian

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The Man-Moth Letter to N.Y.

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)

Seventh Avenue

May swenson (1913-1989)

Staying at Ed's Place At the Museum of Modern Art

Karl Shapiro (1913-2000)

Future-Present

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- )

"The Pennycandystore beyond the El"

Amy Clampitt (1920-1994)

Dancers Exercising

Grace Paley (1922- )

The Nature of This City Fear On Mother's Day

Howard Moss (1922-1987)

The Building The Roof Garden

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

The Cabdriver's Smile

James Schuyler (1923-1991)

This Dark Apartment An East Window on Elizabeth Street March Here

Wislawa Szymborska (1923- )

Photograph from September 11

Kenneth Koch (1925- )

Girl and Baby Florist Sidewalk Pram Nineteen Seventy Something

Gerald Stern (1925- )

96 Vandam Let Me Please Look Into My Window

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

Steps Gamin

James Merrill (1926-1995)

An Urban Convalescence 164 East 72nd Street

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

I am a Victim of Telephone My Sad Self

W. S. Merwin (1927- )

St. Vincent's

Galway Kinnell (1927- )

Room of Return Running on Silk

John Ashbery (1927- )

A Sendentary Existence So Many Lives

Charles Tomlinson (1927- )

All Afternoon

Philip Levine (1928- )

Get Up

Richard Howard (1929- )

209 Canal Among the Missing

L. E. Sissman (1929-1976)

Tears at Korvette's Visiting Chaos

Adrienne Rich (1929- )

Upper Broadway

Gregory Corso (1930-2001)

Eastside Incidents The Whole Mess . . . Almost

Derek Walcott (1930- )

The Bridge

Amiri Baraka (1934- )

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

If I Should Learn
by Edna St. Vincent Millay


If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again--
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man--who happened to be you--
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud--I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place--
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

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Excerpted from Poems of New York
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.