bart plantenga
From NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor
The Unloaded Camera Snapshots [Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor] were launched as an exercise to document the not-quite prose poems, not-quite journal entries “snapshots” of everyday life in Paris with Paris Scratch. & this continued upon my return to NYC. The exercise consisted of every day “taking” a written “snapshot” – 365 of them. I, like other New Yorkers, had become, as Flora Lewis described it, “inured to the ravages around them they scarcely notice anymore.” A deadening of our senses &, never mind our idealism, allows us to believe we’re outwitting our environment. A.E. Housman noted: “Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon, I would go out for a walk. As I went along, there would flow into my mind, with sudden & unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or 2 of verse, sometimes a whole stanza …”
• The Fit of a Sweater
I meticulously fold the sweater my mom had knit for me 1 Christmas that I never wore like I’d seen them do in Soho boutiques. I place it on top of a trashcan on a gift box with the idea that it’s winter & maybe a homeless man could use it. A week later I see a guy wearing it & it looks pretty good & I think maybe I should tell him that my mom had knit that sweater for me! & that I wanted it back! But how: jump him, bribe him, coerce him, call the cops, embarrass him or simply wrestle it off his torso? I don’t know. Maybe just take a picture of him instead. Send it to my mom.
• The Exhausted Park
The park had gone through more than neglect; it had borne witness to murders & other unpleasantries. It wasn’t really a park so much as a piece of land they couldn’t figure out how to apportion profitably. Someone had pissed on & then torn down—was it?—the Yogi Berra statue. All the swings were already down for the winter. The seesaws could us a coat of paint. What’s with the 4 shopping carts dumped over the ledge there where the walkway just ends like an nihilist’s sidewalk design? Do people know the carts cost $175 a piece? Do people really ever sit on the 2 crumbling benches here to meditate or figure out how to beat the IRS?
• The City That Finally Fell Asleep
The 1st big snow is always magical. Everyone scurries about with a glee that only snow can bring. Giddy kids go aimless with their tongues catching flakes or rolling big ball torsos to build snowmen. Even the old man smiles & forgets he hasn’t eaten for how many days. Even the guy hauling big boxes of food on a dolly has to pause & smile as he pushes through the stuff. Even the first snow-related fender bender couldn’t kill the joy & as you walk, you hear the silence as an absence of noise but also as abandonment, quiescent as when the very last car of the guy who closes up the supermarket parking lot leaves at midnight. Everyone moves slower & with a sudden awareness of life all around them, however fleeting. Paralysis brings us back to life. The only beings who venture out into traffic at 10 mph are the cabbies & bus drivers. The city sounds like it has, indeed, finally gone to sleep for a night.
• Poster in the 13th Snowfall
The snowfall is massive, beautiful, but it is by now the 13th snowfall of the season, so all a bit redundant & tiring. The poster taped 4 side by side: INFORMATION WANTED CONCERNING A BIAS ATTACK LAST FRIDAY IN THIS AREA. At approximately 10 PM, several black men were attacked by a gang of white men, some of whom had baseball bats. The incident took place in the vicinity of Prince & Mott Streets. If you have any knowledge of this event or of any of the assailants, please call 212-312-****.
• Side Streets to Beer History
To investigate the mystery of those who line up nightly to get drunk at McSorley’s Old Ale House I stand outside & just stare. I want to tell them that to drink there will not buy their way into any history, esteem, status—women were denied entry & it’s motto was “Good Ale, Raw Onions & No Ladies” until mid-1970. At least it’s better than McDonald’s or TGIF or Bud Lite … That “Be Good or Be Gone” is it’s new motto, is a sign of progress. But, lining up for 45 minutes of shivering & sleet before you get in the front door is the nature of the hype of the hype. I should work for a local bar, help reroute them to other incredible backstories for a fee …
• Blood of Ink of Ice
I stood on the rotting docks far west, just beyond the shadows cast by Wall Street. New Jersey’s bitter shore about to crash into piers already collapsing into the neglect of all of us like a precarious plate of cheap, cold food left behind by a drunk in a diner. Few realize how many others realize how buildings that keep you out can make some of us so contemptuous that we end up spitting on their walls as we pass by. The cold made the ink in my pen stubborn & invisible. But I rub it between my hands to warm it up so that the ink will begin to flow again. I write about sheets of ice like rafts to float out an adventure on, floating down the Hudson, resembling crying panes of high-rise glass or the windshields of trashed sports cars, tossed from high cliffs (revolution, insurance or spite?), north of the city, outside of the kingdom, this side of Kingston.
