![]() ![]() Although under Mayor Giulianiâs zero tolerance policies the city lost its ranking as murder capital of America, the associations still linger, from movie shoot-outs to gangsters, aliens laser-gunning the Chrysler building to American Psycho. Violence has always been associated with New York. ![]() Its racism is beautifully embodied in âThe King of Harlemâ when Lorca observes: "Your grand king a prisoner in the uniform of a doorman." In âNew York (Office and Denunciation)â he succinctly captures the fetish made of consumption and the waste this entails: "Every day in New York they slaughter, / Four million ducks, / Five million hogs." Elsewhere the poet even touches on environmental damage, denouncing "The conspiracy / of these deserted offices / that radiate no agony, / that erase the forestâs plans." These were all issues engaged with by the eventâs readers, with varying levels of rage, from Meena Alexanderâs elegiac verses that noted  even as she was in mourning for her city  that she no longer felt safe wearing a sari, to Russian poet Evgeny Reinâs sarcastic âNew York Insomniaâ lampooning the "universe of squares." In his deft funny take on New Yorkâs self obsession and removal from the rest of the world, he read: Lorca also despised America for many of the same reasons developing nations and anti-capitalists cite today in their attacks on the west. Although discussing the stock market collapse of 1929, in âDance of Deathâ there is something prescient in his description: "The mask will dance among columns of blood and numbers, / among hurricanes of gold and the groans of the unemployed, / who will howl, in the dead of night, for your dark time." More shocking still is his image in âDawnâ of how "Crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs / as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood." To read Lorcaâs Poet in New York now, in the light of the cityâs attack, is to be shocked by its almost prophetic relevance. By asking for a response to Lorcaâs dark, angry sequence â one of the first âanti-Americanâ pieces of literature  Poetry International both gave the poets a more interesting, oblique entry point into the debate and made criticism of America difficult to skirt over. However, the desire not to offend could have easily led to a series of toothless, careful poems. As the USA (with Britain) prepares for another war, the idea of âAmericaâ and what it stands for in the current climate is one literature needs to address. The commissioned poems read on 26th October were an inspired idea. Even if we have never been to the city, like some of the eventâs poets, we feel we know it intimately enough to comment. Where dreams come true, and love can be found at the top of the Empire State. It is a place where everything feels larger and more pregnant with possibility. But as Amjad Nasser also observed in his wonderful response, âAn Attempt at a Poem for New Yorkâ: "Like everyone else, itâs entered my bloodstream in films, in dreamsâ¦" Even to those who despise the capitalist ethic it is built on, New York can be seductive. For many, New York is a symbol of western excess  a phenomenon made concrete in Wall Street. ![]() Manhattan has always been a place that divides, that brings out in all of us, as Amjad Nasser observed, "Love, and hate." The most visibly manmade of all cities, etched out on a mathematical grid, it can almost embody our love/hate relationship with humanity itself: our creativity, hubris and invention pitted against criminality, pollution, greed. "New York, New York, so good they named it twice." So New Yorkers have often bragged, but at the Poet in New York event  part of the Royal Festival Hallâs Poetry International season, in which writers were asked to respond to Lorcaâs sequence in the light of 9/11  many of the contributors seemed to see another doubleness at work a city with a split personality. Then US poet Bob Vance gives his view of Lorcaâs work and its setting.
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