New York 2

September 29, 2017

Began yesterday with my visit to Bryant Park, mossy green under the brilliant sky. Walked to MOMA, where I was apparently early and people keep shouting at me that this gallery or that was not yet open, but some were, so it was confusing. Gorgeous Max Ernst, kind of sickening Louise Bourgeoise, the permanent galleries, as usual, profound, and the rest largely of the moment. Sat in the garden and contemplated the moving waters. Ate falafel at a deli near the Park. 

Late in the afternoon I began my trek to the New School (which is wonderful, and I wish I had known it when I could have used it). Deep tiredness was on me, and for the first time in my life I suspected I wouldn’t make it if I tried to walk, so took the subway and arrived early enough for a merlot at a sidewalk café on 6^th Avenue. Twenty seven poets of some renown gathered in the tiny green room before the reading, passing our books around to be signed by the others. There were famous names: Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, Joyce Carol Oates. Our editor started the evening by reading a long poem by John Ashbery, who is in the anthology though recently deceased. It was awful, the poem was, like all Ashbery poems I know, learned, self-satisfied, flat, assuming much and discovering nothing, the conversation of elegant Upper East Side fags over prosecco and hors d’oeuvres. Long boring poems were the rule of the evening, in fact, which began at 7 and ended just before 10. Joyce Carol Oates’ was among the longest and easily the worst, a desiccated and barely imagined diatribe against, of all things, Marlon Brando. I need to teach a class in The Long Poem, which should not be like an unruly lawn, just spreading out in all directions willy-nilly, but like a great tree, growing from a point toward a point with green and solidity between. In all that mass there were four poems worth listening to: mine was one. Mine was also quite the shortest. The audience was huge (about 300) and young and very kind. I prayed our tediousness didn’t set any of them off poetry. What happened afterwards I don’t know, as I was launching toward 14^th street and the subway.

         

Wandered Times Square, then back to the Paramount for drinks. Met A, VP of Sales at Casa Dragones, a liquor importer. I noticed him because, though I walk down the streets of New York noticing handsome men, he was the most handsome I had seen all night. Big, blond, a little thick with middle age, he looked like a model for a Join the Marines commercial. He was in fact a Vet, and very much the businessman, and about as right-wing as you’d expect. He buttoned a button that was undone on my shirt. He bought me a drink and showed me his son (in military uniform, at VMI, his own alma mater) and his three wives, all heart-stoppingly gorgeous. The current one is the least gorgeous but the most beautiful, which I said and which he seemed to understand. He said, “You are the one professor I have ever met who was not full of bullshit.” We actually were able to talk a little educational politics. He’s afraid his son is being “brainwashed” by liberal professors, and my response was that liberal professors often take that stand for fear their students are being brainwashed by right wing bigots; it’s all to balance the input, all in genuine concern for the young. This seemed to sound reasonable to him. The bar man cut him off, which angered him and puzzled me, as he wasn’t drunk or disorderly that I noticed. I need encounters like that in my life. I love hotel bars.