Writing New York

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1977

August 9, 2010 in Music, Sports, Writing New York by Cyrus | No comments

Bryan noted in a post the other day that I was out of town: I’d been in Amsterdam and London on NYU Abu Dhabi business. I got back at the end of last week, but I didn’t stay in New York for long. At least, not present-day New York. My family was going to the Midwest for a week to visit grandma, so it seemed like a golden opportunity to step into my mental time machine and beam myself back to the summer of 1977, when the Rolling Stones were on the verge of recording the album Some Girls, which I’ve been contracted to write about for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.

The summer of ’77, of course, is famous for the blackout that occurred in mid-July, setting off an orgy of looting and arson in all five boroughs.

I missed it; I happened to be in summer camp in Rhinebeck, NY that July, and I don’t think that the fact of the blackout made much of an impression on me when my parents told me about it on the phone.

So I decided to live it (I can’t very well say “re-live it”) by taking another look at Jonathan Mahler’s account of that year, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, which interweaves the story of the ’77 Yankees (who went on to win the World Series) and the story of the city in which they played. In New York City, 1977 was notable not only for the blackout but also for the arrest of the “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz, the opening of Studio 54, the beginning of Mick Jagger’s affair with Jerry Hall, Keith Richards’s arrest in Toronto for cocaine possession, and the ascension of one Ed Koch.

The title of Mahler’s book refers to a line that the legendary sportscaster Howard Cosell was reputed to have said during the World Series when an aerial shot of Yankee Stadium captured the view of an abandoned elementary school burning nearby. New York, like many cities in the nation, suffered an epidemic of arson in the 1970s, as landlords essentially liquidated unprofitable buildings by selling them to their insurance companies. The South Bronx was hit particularly hard, resulting in the burned-out landscape for which it would become infamous. Mario Merola, then Bronx District Attorney and a navigator in World War II, told Time magazine that “the destruction is reminiscent of the bombed-out cities in Europe.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cosell said, “the Bronx is burning.” And so it was.

Except, it turns out, he never uttered the iconic line. The release of the broadcasts of the 1977 World Series on DVD apparently demonstrates that Mahler’s memory was faulty. (I write “apparently” because I don’t own the DVDs, being a Mets rather than a Yankees fan, and the disc hasn’t arrived from Netflix yet.) During the broadcast, reporter Keith Jackson comments on the size of the fire, and Cosell notes that President Carter has recently visited the area. In the second inning, Cosell noted that the burning building had been abandoned and that no lives were at risk. The fire wasn’t mentioned again during the broadcast.

During the making of the mini-series based on Mahler’s book, the producers investigated the provenance of the remark and couldn’t find it. The Wikipedia entry for Howard Cosell speculates that “Mahler confused the documentary with his recollection of Cosell’s comments when writing his book.” (You can read more about the discovery here.)

The title glitch aside, Mahler’s book is splendidly evocative of the time and well worth reading.

Ward Dennis’s New York

June 15, 2010 in Neighborhood Scenes, Writing New York by Cyrus | 5 comments

Our third guest at last week’s Faculty Resource Network seminar was the architectural preservationist Ward Dennis, who is a member of the firm Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, which advises private, corporate, government and institutional clients on the preservation and rehabilitation of historic properties. “Denny” is also an adjunct professor in the Historic Preservation program of Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Last spring, he taught a Historic Preservation studio course that took Corlears Hook as its study area.

For Denny, change is a fact of urban life, and as a preservationist he adopts what he regards as a “curatorial” approach that can allow a city to manage the ways in which its neighborhoods change, not simply preserving buildings from the past but also finding new uses for them. He began with what might be considered the preservationist’s conundrum, using the famous Katz’s Delicatessen as an example.

The guidebooks call Katz’s a New York landmark, but from the standpoint of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, it can’t be landmarked because it isn’t architecturally distinguished. And what is it really, that you want to preserve about Katz’s? It isn’t, Denny argued, the building: it’s the pastrami sandwich — its taste and the ambiance in which you consume it. And that’s something you can’t legislate.

Katz’s signs offer evidence of another characteristic of city life that sometimes stymies preservations: the process of accretion over time. The signs were added at different times, which in fact detracts from the potential significance of the building itself. It is much more difficult to have landmark status conferred on buildings that are substantially altered over time. Change apparently diminishes architectural significance, and architectural significance is the name of the game when it comes to landmarking.

In the afternoon, he led us on a tour of the neighborhood south of Washington Square, showing us the changing architectural styles of buildings that were once tenements, pointing out features and subtle distinguishing marks that most of us don’t notice as we walk by these buildings on a daily basis. What became clear is that the idea of Greenwich village as a Bohemian space quickly became a marketing tool for developers in the early part of the twentieth century. Many buildings were renovated so that they could be more effectively represented as artists’ spaces. The tour highlighted a concept that emerged during the week as highly problematic, often evoked as a reason to resist or promote one or another kind of urban change: the idea of authenticity.

Overall, Denny offered us a highly pragmatic approach to the task of preservation, a refreshing counterweight to the nostalgia and sometimes knee-jerk resistance to change that often accompanies accounts of “lost New York.”

Ric Burns’s New York

June 13, 2010 in Film, Television, Writing New York by Cyrus

Ric Burns was our guest at the Faculty Resource Network seminar on Wednesday. We screened the seventh episode of New York: A Documentary Film (“The City and the World [1945 - Present]) in the morning and then engaged in a conversation with Ric about the making of the film and about the craft of documentary in the afternoon.

Early in the afternoon session, Ric told us a story about one of his first nights as a resident of the city: lying in bed with the window open, he suddenly became aware of the “roar” of the city — that omnipresent background noise — and he burst into tears. Not out of sadness, he said, but because he felt overwhelmed by the city. New York: A Documentary Film was his attempt to understand the history, meaning, and emotional power of that roar.

Ric cited the work of Joseph Schumpeter and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan as two of the influences that led him to explore what he called the dynamics of “persistence and change, desire and aspiration” that shaped  New York over time. When asked whether any of his beliefs about the city had changed as a result of his making the film, Ric answered that he no longer believed that the city was “unintelligible.” He suggested that much of its history arose from a few big ideas, especially the “experiment” of having all the peoples of the world living together in a single place, united not by ideology or religion but by the desire to pursue commerce. Ric spoke at length about the need for “provisional master narratives” that can help us to make sense of history.

Perhaps Ric’s belief in the importance of provisional master narratives arises from the discipline in which he works. Part of the conversation treated the difference between the documentary film and other forms of documentary representation, and Ric argued that film requires you to think in “a severe and aesthetic way”: every film is a story, even the most postmodern of films. And that story has to resonate with the film’s viewers, sometimes necessitating hard choices.

Ric presented an example of one of those choices by showing us a scene that was cut from the seventh episode (but preserved in rough cut among the extras on the DVD for episode seven). The scene recounts the crashing of a B-52 bomber into the Empire Building in 1945. It’s riveting footage and, seen by itself, makes a powerful statement. But when it was part of the seventh episode, Ric told us, it stopped the narrative flow and felt repetitive — because it was ultimately — in narrative terms — the same scene as the one that opens the episode: Fiorello LaGuardia typing alone on his last night in office and ruing the power that he had allowed Robert Moses to accumulate. Ultimately, according to Ric, the two scenes are both about large-scale forces that have been unleashed by modernity and have come to seem uncontrollable and dangerous.

And putting the footage into the eighth episode didn’t work either. That episode, “New York: The Center of the World,” was made after 9/11 and depicted the story of rise and fall of the World Trade Center as an encapsulation of the forces at work in New York’s history of commerce and globalization. There was no way, Ric said, to use the scene about the Empire State Building crash, without seeming “hideously self-congratulatory.”

Before 9/11, the World Trade Center played only a bit part in the provisional master narrative that the New York series constructed. The building of the towers is referred to only briefly as part of the seventh episode’s treatment of Robert Moses’s attempts to reshape Manhattan. The World Trade Center, Ric said, “came late in a process of anti-urbanism and urban renewal” that was already well-documented in the film. Treating it at length would seem repetitive.

But, “within hours after 9/11,” Ric told us, he realized that he had to make another film. He and his colleagues had fallen prey, he said, to a certain kind of parochial cosmopolitanism that New Yorkers often have: they give cosmopolitanism a lot of lip service, but don’t really pay enough attention to the rest of the world — and what it thinks of them. Noting that people often remember the “clear blue sky” of that day and suggest that the attacks literally happened “out of the blue,” Ric said that the eighth episode was designed to show that 9/11 didn’t come out of the blue at all. “When were those planes really launched,” he mused. “Probably 1945.” But that wasn’t an insight that many viewers weren’t ready to hear, even in 2003 when the film was finally broadcast, and it did receive criticism for its suggestion that New York and the U.S. should bear some responsibility for the attacks. For that reason, using the Empire State Building footage to frame the film would have made the filmmakers seem “insufferable.” (Click here to read an article about the episode in the New York Times.)

We ended the session with a scene from Ric’s latest documentary, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, which explores some of the themes that have interested him before: commerce, industry, and globalization (as in the New York series) and cannibalism (which Ric explored in his film about the Donner Party). The DVD and Blu-Ray of Into the Deep are available now at shop.pbs.org.

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David Freeland’s New York

June 8, 2010 in Architecture, Lost New York, Writing New York by Cyrus

Horn & Hardart's Flagship Automat, Broadway and 46th Street, 1912

Author David Freeland visited our Faculty Resource Seminar today and offered us a glimpse of the city as it appears to him: as a palimpsest with layers of meaning waiting to be rediscovered if one knows where to look and what to look for. He took us through sites that animate his book Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure: the Atlantic Garden on the Bowery, once the city’s most popular German beer garden; the American Mutoscope Studio, once located atop the Roosevelt Building on Union Square; Tin Pan Alley; and Horn & Hardart’s flagship automat on Times Square. As David puts it in his book, one reason he has chosen to “spotlight buildings of entertainment and leisure (as opposed to those devoted strictly to government or business) is because these are the places that most often disappear after their economic usefulness runs out, casualties of an American popular culture that is always moving to the next trend.” What interests David mosts are culturally significant sites that little chance of being landmarked.

One question that arose for which none of us had a ready answer was related to the discussion of “Tin Pan Alley” on the south side of 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. Asked the origin of the nickname, David recounted the anecdote that he tells on page 87 of his book, in which journalist and songwriter Monroe Rosenfeld asked his friend, music writer and publisher Harry Von Tilzer, something like: “What is that you’ve been playing on? It sounds like a tin pan.” David noted that the name probably stuck because it was a pun on an extant street, “Tin Pot Alley,” now Exchange Street just south of Rector Street. But to what, we wondered, did “Tin Pot Alley” refer?

Oldstreets.com has an answer for us: “Tin Pot Alley. (L18?-M19) An anglicization of the Dutch name Tuyn Paat, meaning Garden Alley. It is now Exchange Alley and Edgar Street.”

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Faculty Resource Network

June 7, 2010 in Lost New York, Teaching, Writing New York by Cyrus

Lost Penn Station

Bryan and I began our third seminar for NYU’s Faculty Resource Network, which sponsors a variety of week-long programs each summer for faculty from affiliated colleges around the country. The subject of our seminar this year is “Lost New York“:

Has New York always been a lost city? On the heels of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage for the Dutch and the 200th anniversary of Washington Irving’s legendary reimagining of this New World encounter in his Knickerbocker’s History of New York, this seminar will explore the dynamics of creativity and destruction, nostalgia and invention, that have for centuries marked efforts to represent life in New York City. Readings and discussions will address the relationships between the literary imagination and the archives, between migrations and displacements, between loss and remembrance, and between preservation and development in the long and storied history of one of the world’s greatest cities. We will focus our analysis on two famous cultural moments in the city’s history — Greenwich Village Bohemia and the Harlem Renaissance — and explore the ways in which our approaches to uncovering forgotten urban pasts might serve as a methodological foundation for the exploration of urban modernity more generally.

In the end, we decided to cut back on the reading we planned for the course, making it less literary and more interdisciplinary. We’re featuring three guests: David Freeland, the author of Automats, Taxi Dances, and Vaudeville: Excavating Manhattan’s Lost Places of Leisure; the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns; and the architectural preservationist and Brooklyn maven Ward Dennis.

Our group includes literary scholars, librarians, architects, historians, and a scholar of immigration and public health. During our morning session, we used NYU’s Founders Hall and the old Penn Station to open a discussion of the dynamics of creation and destruction, nostalgia and counter-nostalgia, and the politics of preservation. We showed an excerpt from the seventh chapter Burns’s New York documentary (which we will be showing in its entirety on Wednesday morning in preparation for his visit) and then two scenes from the second episode of the third season of Mad Men, in which Don Draper’s ad agency (on the wrong side of history once again) proposes to represent the Mdison Square Garden Corporation, which is bent on tearing down Penn Station.

The afternoon presented a case study in the loss and recovery of a figure from New York’s downtown scene, the avant-garde cellist and pop musician Arthur Russell. We showed the biopic Wild Combination and afterward Bryan contextualized Russell’s work by linking it not only to the downtown music scene and Allen Ginsberg, but also to Frank O’Hara and his successors. My favorite insight of the day came from seminar member Alma Vinyard, chair of the English Department at Atlanta Clark University: that O’Hara’s poem “The Day Lady Died,” which recounts the poet’s activities on the day that Billie Holiday passed away, might appeal to today’s college readers because it resembles a Twitter feed!

Tomorrow we’ll be talking with Freeland and joining him in the afternoon for a walking tour of Harlem. Stay tuned.

New York Moviefone Mashup

May 27, 2010 in Film, Writing New York by Cyrus | 4 comments

Brenna Healey, one of our Writing New York students last term, calls our attention to this mashup of New Yorky films created by Moviefone in honor of the imminent release of Sex and the City 2. How many of the films can you name?

Click here for the original Moviefone page and a larger version of the embedded clip.

Thanks Brenna!

Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play

May 8, 2010 in City on Stage, Writing New York by Cyrus

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to see the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s vibrant production of  Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene. The play dramatizes life in three villages that perform passion plays. Act I is set in a village in Northern England in 1575; Act II is set in Obergammerau in Bavaria in 1934. The final act takes place in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969, 1984, and “the present.” The Irondale Center is located in the former Sunday School space of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, and it’s an inspired setting for this funny, moving, and thought-provoking play.

Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellowship winner who has been nominated for a Tony Award for her latest work, In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), wrote the first two acts in the early 1990s as a pair of one-act plays, returning to the subject in 2003 when the Arena Stage in Washington, DC commissioned her to write “a play about America” (as Ruhl puts it in the “Playwright’s Note” for the current production).”I started thinking,” Ruhl writes, “how would it shape or misshape a life to play a biblical role year after year? How are we scripted? Where is the line between authentic identity and performance? And is there, in fact, such a line?

If you’re reading this and you’re currently in my American Literature I class, those would be good questions to ask as a way of thinking about Melville’s Captain Ahab. Indeed, if you’ve heard me lecture about Moby-Dick, you’ll appreciate the way in which the play dramatizes who religious discourses can be manipulated for political ends. Those of you who have heard Byran lecture in Writing New York or read his contribution to The Cambridge Companion will appreciate the play’s metatheatrical moments. (For example:  Queen Elizabeth, Adolf Hitler, and Ronald Reagan appear in the play — the first two in acts one and two respectively and then all three in the final act — and they’re played by the same male actor.)

Ultimately, the play finds much to fault in the practice of Christianity over the centuries, but it still finds hope in spirituality — particularly the spirituality that arises from the artistic imagination. (Again, worth thinking about in relation to Moby-Dick as well.)

If your interest in the play is now piqued, you can learn more about this production by watching the video below. You can also read this preview, “Sarah Ruhl’s Sunday School Lessons,” which appeared in the New York Times on April 13.

The ensemble cast is uniformly strong, and there are talk-backs after nearly every performances. The play’s run continues at the Irondale Center (85 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene, Brooklyn) until May 30. Opening night is May 12, after which (I suspect) tickets will be much harder to come by. Running time is about 3 and a half hours.

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Cambridge Contributor: Sarah Wilson

April 30, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus

Our final contributor profile is devoted to Sarah Wilson, who received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her teaching interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature; literary modernism; theories of ethnicity, pluralism, democracy, and cosmopolitanism; and urban studies.

Sarah’s book Melting-Pot Modernism is forthcoming later this year from Cornell University Press. Here Sarah traces the melting-pot impulse toward merging and cross-fertilization through the writings of such literary figures as Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein, as well as through works of  autobiography, sociology, and social commentary drawn from the era. What interests Sarah in Melting Pot Modernism is the unexamined connection between the ideological ferment of the Progressive era and the literary experimentation of modernism. Sarah aims to reveal the richly aesthetic nature of assimilation at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on questions of the individual’s relation to culture, the protection of vulnerable populations, the sharing of cultural heritages, and the far-reaching effects of free-market thinking.

For the Cambridge Companion, Sarah has contributed the chapter “New York and the Novel of Manners,” which complicates the story usually told about the novel of manners from Henry James to Edith Wharton by situating works of Lower East Side realism in its midst. Here is an excerpt:

At the conclusion of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), the gentlemen of the Welland-Mingott clan gather in Newland Archer’s library, and their talk turns to the social disintegration implied in the rise of that “foreign upstart,” Julius Beaufort. Lawrence Lefferts, the perennial (and hypocritical) defender of “society,” thunders: “If things go on at this pace … we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers’ houses, and marrying Beaufort’s bastards.” Only a chapter (and twenty-six years) later, Lefferts’s quintessential articulation of Old New York embattlement is driven home by the revelation that Newland Archer’s eldest son plans to do just that. For The Age of Innocence, “Beaufort’s bastards” come to stand for illegitimacy legitimized by the passage of time: more specifically, they speak to a struggle over manners staged through generational change. Like many New York novels of the turn of the twentieth century, Wharton’s novel frames the rapid social change of the era in generational terms: cultural conflict comes off as family squabble. As the discussion of Beaufort’s bastards suggests, generational change stages intimate clashes between what is and is not culturally acceptable, all while troubling existing divisions between what is family” and what is “foreign,” what is private and what is public. “Manners,” in this sense, become the battleground through which turn-of-the-century New York writers bring cultural difference home; in particular, New York novels of manners reckon with such cultural difference by recognizing it as an inescapable force of historical change.

In this sense the New York novel of manners both resembles and differentiates itself from traditional novels of manners. Like the traditional novel of manners (best exemplified by the novels of Austen), these texts are concerned with the social conventions by which communities and classes can be mapped. The fiction of Wharton and Henry James remains relatively true to this tradition, while beginning to gesture at the forms of difference that press at the boundaries of class and culture in New York. However, a significant proportion of turn-of-the-century New York novels expand the populations understood to be “mappable” by novels of manners: novels by William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan, and Paul Laurence Dunbar bring into the tradition classes and cultures, races and ethnicities (and even literary genres, such as naturalism) not usually associated with manners literature as traditionally conceived. These novels share their preoccupation with manners with a polyglot host of other turn-of-the-century New York texts, reflecting the allure of manners – their diversity, even their exoticism – for chroniclers of a cosmopolitan society.

Cambridge Contributor: Trysh Travis

April 29, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus

Trysh Travis, who contributes the chapter “New York’s Cultures of Print” to the Cambridge Companion, is Assistant Professor in the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. She received her bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she designed her own major in Media Studies and American Culture. Trysh taught high school English in New York City for three years before earning a master’s in English from the Breadloaf School at Middlebury College and a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University.

Trysh’s teaching and scholarship centers on contemporary US cultural and literary history with an emphasis on the gendered history of the book. Her writings on radical feminist publishing, contemporary spirituality, and popular culture have appeared in journals like Book History, American Quarterly, and Men and Masculinities as well as in publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Bitch magazine.

Her contribution to the Cambridge Companion traces “official,” mainstream print culture in New York City. In contrast, her most recent book, The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (2009), focuses on marginal and amateur readers, writers, and publishers—but, as Trysh puts it, “on squares, not hipsters.”  You can read an interview with Trysh about the book at Rorotoko.com.

Here is an excerpt from Trysh’s contribution to the Companion:

Throughout the long twentieth century, this dizzying array of publishers, printers, retailers, and readers overlapped and intersected in New York, reflecting and giving voice to the city’s unique pluralism. The various print trades — not merely publishing but also paper manufacturing, printing, binding, and the like — had long been significant contributors to New York’s economy, and by 1900 their concentration in and around the city had created a self-sustaining synergy. The presence of so many print institutions created a marketplace of goods, labor, and ideas that drew literary talent in from across the nation and sent texts of all kinds back out in return. Critic and editor Malcolm Cowley spoke for many when he observed in 1934 that the ambitious litterateurs of his generation flocked to Manhattan because“living was cheap, because friends of ours had come already (and written letters full of enchantment), because it seemed that New York was the only city where a young writer could get published.” The city’s complex web of print cultures invited competition and innovation, attracting talent and keeping the costs of entry for new enterprises relatively low.

At the center of that web sat a concern conspicuously absent from the cultures of print enumerated above: trade book publishing, which produces those volumes we think of when we think of the generic “book” -– works of fiction, drama, and poetry, as well as all forms of non-fiction prose, from presidential biographies to the latest weight-loss manuals. Trade publishers’ enterprise went unremarked in the earlier list of New York’s print cultures because its size, longevity, and ubiquity have to a large extent naturalized its presence in the city, masking the fact that, like all those other cultures of print, it is the result of particular cultural and political-economic arrangements. But what seems a commonsense equation of New York City and book publishing has not always been so commonsensical, and this chapter examines the ways that trade publishers (“book men,” as they liked to call themselves) constructed that equation between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. To do so, they deployed specific ideas about culture and democracy that both relied on and helped to create the image of New York as an “international capital of culture,” a modern and modernist city emblematic of all that was best in the free world.

Next: Sarah Wilson

Cambridge Contributor: Lytle Shaw

April 28, 2010 in Books, Writing New York by Cyrus

Lytle Shaw is the author of the chapter “Whitman’s Urbanism” in the Cambridge Companion. He is Associate Professor of English at NYU, where he teaches courses on such topics as “New York Poetry and the New Left,” “Theorizing the Archive,” “Very Contemporary Poetry,” “The Source of the Hudson: Landscape, Theory, History,” and “Specters of Enlightenment in Postwar Poetics and Theory.” His scholarship centers on American literature with emphasis on poetics, art and theory.  A prolific writer, Lytle’s scholarly books include the monograph Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006) and two forthcoming studies: Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics and Specimen Box (on new modes of institution critique in art and poetry). He is also the editor of Nineteen Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology (2007) and the author of several volumes of poetry, including Cable Factory 20 (1999) and The Lobe (2002).

Lytle is a contributing editor for Cabinet, and has recently published catalog essays on Robert Smithson and Zoe Leonard for DIA Center, on Gerard Byrne for Koenig Books, and on The Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center.  His collaborative work with the artist Jimbo Blachly has been exhibited widely and is collected in The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse (2008). To see an example of Chadwickiana,  visit the Winkleman Gallery’s website, which features photographs of an installation called “The Genretron.” Lytle discussed his work on the Chadwicks at the Lost New York conference last fall. You’ll get some of the flavor of that presentation by looking at Shaw and Blatchly’s account of “Fort Chadwijk” in The Brooklyn Rail.

Lytle’s contribution to the Companion is really a meditation on the impact of urban experience on Whitman’s poetics and on the poetic legacy that he bequeathed to such followers as Hart Crane, Federico García Lorca, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. Here is an excerpt:

Rather than see Ginsberg, however, as simply clouding the blue Whitmanian skies over Manhattan, it is more accurate to understand him as focusing in on, and exploring, tensions already latent in Whitman’s celebration of urbanism -– his situating of the city at the center of his democratic, corporeal poetics. Before accounting for these tensions, let me elaborate on the special position of the city in Whitman’s seemingly all-inclusive poetics. Like several other passages in the poem, section 15 of “Song of Myself” presents a kind of macro-panorama of American trades, genre scenes embracing a broad array of regions, classes, social identities – from duck-shooters and deacons to spinning girls, whale-boat mates, and paving men, from “quadroons” and “half-breeds” to “squaws” and “newly-come immigrants”; this within the West, the Yankee East, the Great Lakes, the Southwest, with its “walls of Adobie,” and the Missouri plains. Passages like this propose that, with Whitman’s help, we might zoom across space to bring these disparate people and activities into a neat paratactic list – and that as we do so we experience American democratic possibility not just thematically through this array of variable vicarious occupations, subject positions, and regions but in a sense formally too through their conjoined equivalence. And yet part of the reason why the poet was so insistent upon identifying himself as “Walt Whitman, a Kosmos, of Manhattan the son,” was that the city seemed to offer a micro-Kosmos for its sons.

Next: Trysh Travis.

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