October 5, 2017

Handel from the radio downstairs. The morning was supremely beautiful, silver against silvery blue. Last night spent singing Brahms and having cocktails afterward: a kind of paradise.

Coffee with SS, much new information about the situation at the Magnetic. I am amazed by my capacity to, with a whirlwind thundering about me, sense nothing, anticipate nothing, fail to see the herd of dinosaurs rocking over the hill. Part of it is innocence, I hope.

Planted two more expensive tree peonies, where I will see them this spring when I walk out the front door.

October 4, 2017

W opened his book tour at Lipinsky, and did a reading with support from balladeers and other storytellers. I rejoice in it all; he is the last person on earth whom success will make an asshole. About fifty alumni rushing up to say how they remember me and how I changed their lives. My first thought, “is someone paying them to do this?” But my second thought was otherwise.

October 3, 2017

Return to classes, triumphant, I think, except that my voice was ruined by the winter flux, which seems to be better this morning. Shelley in one class, Keats in another, the writing of poetry in the third. Discussion of comprehensive exam grades. No failures in our batch.  Night Music rescheduled for February. Uranium 235 proceeding apace, but lacking men. What with two plays and one book, almost too many details to keep up with: a situation long dreamed-of.

Of all the people I know in New York– who were warned by Face Book that I would be there–none bothered to look me up. Some made excuses– “Oh, that weekend is SO crazy. . . I’ll be out of town. . . “ One deals with the truth that nobody wanted to bother.

Tom Petty is dead– a year younger than me.

So, the big Scribner’s New School reading– the take away is that even in that august company I am the best, or at least among the best, and among the few who entirely “get it,” who get what a poet should be and do and for what reasons. And I am surely among the most obscure. What to do with that truth? If I thirty years ago I could have thought of anything but “soldier on,” I would have done it.

October 1, 2017

Stroll Sunday morning from the hotel to Columbus Circle in the clear autumn light. The Trump-stench hovers over that part of town, but it could almost be forgotten. Horse carts moving up 8th Avenue for their day’s work by the Park. People lament this, but the horses looked happy and fulfilled to me. Huge controversy in Spanish in the shuttle going to the airport. The people behind me were angry that things were scheduled so that they would wait five hours in the airport. They wanted to be taken back to their hotel and be picked up later. Finally, no. I wanted to ask them if they hadn’t, as I had, scheduled themselves. Multiple bloody Marys in the Newark airport.  Wrote on my new play.

New York 3

September 30, 2017

Dedicated the day to the Metropolitan, which is deucedly hard to get to from this side of the island. Bought Michelangelo’s Notebooks, Spent a good time in the Classical sculpture, which looked so cool, clean, tranquil, and, tranquil, mused upon tranquility. A Chinese woman was abusing her child—she snapped at him, looked around, and when she felt herself unobserved, slapped him viciously across the face. I moved toward her, staring my most teacherly stare. She recoiled, then bent down to the child and pretended to explain patiently the reason she had hit him. I hoped she would attack me, so to learn what happens when one attacks someone your own size. Happy, full day. China’s revenge was to give me a Chinese cabbie on the ride home, who spoke not one word of English. It was excruciating.

          

Evening to the Beckett at Theater Row to see, The Suitcase Under the Bed, short plays by the Irishwoman Teresa Deevy. She is one of the “neglected voices” that the Mint company specializes in reviving. Had I read the pleading producer’s forward before, I might not have gone. Why had I never heard of her, when I am in the top 1%, probably, of those who know the Irish theater? The suitcase under the bed was where her manuscripts lay un-looked at for fifty years. The theater was intimate, the acting good. The plays were, sentimental, modest, well-made, almost exactly what one would have expected.  As for her assertion that they represented the truth of Irish life in her time, who knows? The Irish must have been very innocent.

        

Wrote two poems. My bottom line was that they be better than when we heard Thursday night, and they were.

Rather lovely day wandering around in the Village, both West and East. Sat in the Think Café in the north of the Village, among actors discussing acting, among writers tapping furiously at their lap tops, and where I myself began a new play based on the reminiscences of an old woman I met in the Paramount Bar the last time I was here. Bought a jacket at a military surplus store. Cruised Washington Square, visiting the scene of the Diamond Shirtwaist Fire. A red haired man played a grand piano in the light rain of the Square. Lunch at a sports bar off Astor Place, where cheers went up for one soccer team or the other.  Saw As You Like it at CTC on East 13^th. It was radically cut—by ¼, I would think—to accommodate doing it without intermission, I guess. It featured movie star Ellen Burstyn as Jacques, rather a mistake, for she was frail and tentative and it was hard to see exactly how she fit in. Duke Senior and his men were absent, to make way for the love story. It was, all in all, not the ideal rendition. What I remember most was how bad I had to piss when it was over, and the restrooms were packed, and I couldn’t find relief until Bryant Park.  

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.

New York 1

September 28, 2017

          Seventeenth floor of the Paramount Hotel. View into the ventilation shaft, as usual. My seat companion for the flight was Brendan, an investor on his way to present his company, Singing Machines, the world’s largest maker of karaoke machines, to a group of investors. The company’s stock fluctuates between 2 and 20 cents, so he thought it might be an excellent buy for me. His knowledge of the markets was detailed and fascinating, but he seemed at the moment slightly diminished from former glory. He sold his two houses and now rotates among the houses of friends. He did not vote for Trump but was glad he won, because Hillary is a murderess. I asked him how he knew this and he said there is a book outlining how all the Clintons’ associates end up dead in mysterious housefires or commit suicide with TWO shots to the dead. This seemed implausible to me, but I realized I had no facts to support my doubt. He was an attractive man and I saw how he might make his way.

          Slightly unpacked, then made for the Iron Bar, which I do because it is, sort of, my local. Waitress Jennifer (from Staten Island, right beside the central fire house) talked to me about the Midwest, which In didn’t understand until I realized the credit card I’d given her is from a bank in Omaha. The city is not packed or frenetic just now, so the tour through Times

was nostalgic.