ABlog

“El Corno Emplumado,” she said….“I read all of the back issues for a feminist studies symposium. It wasn’t that I loved all of the poetry, but there was something wonderful there….I could never put my finger on what it was, exactly, that gave me such a sensation of the sixties.”

“It was mulch,” I said. “Those were the days of ‘publish it all and let God sort it out.’ So of course a bunch of crap got published along with the great stuff…not that even more crap doesn’t get published now!” (I myself was now starting to have trouble “putting my finger on it.”)

We were talking at the Bowery Poetry Club after a reading/performance by Bea Gates, Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón (co-editor, with Margaret Randall, of El Corno Emplumado, published in Mexico City from 1962 to 1969), and Chilean-American poet Cecilia Vicuña. The Bowery Po Club, for those who don’t know it, is a distinctly ungentrified space, with funky chairs and wobbly tables and a red velvet curtain separating the small stage from the noisy food service area. They keep the po machine cranking day and night, so it’s no wonder that the gears get a little gummed up occasionally. The event I’d just attended was the serendipitous result of a scheduling mixup, Bea and the other readers having made separate reservations for the same time slot. All readers shared the space amiably, with a graceful bilingual introduction from Electa Arenal. Some of us went out for dinner afterwards, a no-spring-chicken crew, walking up Bowery reminiscing about what used to be here and there.

I was thinking of a Times article I’d just read by an ex-renter remembering the funky apartment she’d occupied lower down on the Bowery in the 70’s and 80’s, abandoned when the place went co-op because she didn’t have the $25,000 to invest—a space now selling for several million dollars. I thought of the feminist literary party I’d attended in Kate Millett’s loft, probably in 1974: goodness knows how I got invited, goodness knows I don’t miss the feeling of nervousness as I waited on the lonesome pavement wondering if I’d come to the right place and how I was supposed to get in and who might accost me or follow me up the stairs…but what wouldn’t I give to see Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich immersed in comradely debate beside the cheese and crackers?

“…pieces of a more non-gentrified universe that I’m not sure exists in the same way anymore…” a student writes, in appreciation for the vision behind David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, with its record of guerrilla art galleries created on the walls of West Side riverfront warehouses that served gay men as cruising grounds in the 70’s and 80’s. (Having observed weeds sprouting in the crevices of the buildings, Wojnarowicz once sowed grass seed in the rooms, creating a fugitive art piece.)

When exactly did “gentrified” become the norm, both in the literary world and in the physical neighborhood? And how is it that the mounting corruption, debasement, and unsustainability of both our cultural and natural environments seems inevitably accompanied by such massive and temporarily successful efforts to smooth over the surfaces of lack, of deprivation, of exclusion? Outraged and depressed by the sterility of the suburbs, in my youth I fled to a city that was certainly no paradise, that often wore its misery on its sleeve in ways I do not wish to forget about, or return to. But what is the price of removing the appearance of anguish without removing the anguish? And where do the manifestations of said anguish go when they are banished from our “viewshed” (as they say in the once-wild West)?

At that Bowery Poetry Club reading, Sergio Mondragón read a poem about a Wal-Mart opening right next to one of the great pre-Columbian temples of indigenous Mexico. And Cecilia Vicuña told a story about a Mayan wise man who visited New York and was greeted with questions from North Americans wanting to know how to save themselves when the ancient Mayan prophecies are fulfilled and the world comes to an end. “But it’s already happened!” was the answer. “We’re just living out the consequences—when an indigenous person has to look at the TV to see an animal!”

These days, it seems that every other block in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn is occupied by a giant construction crane, there to assist in the building of yet another office tower or “luxury” apartment complex. (Just when did “luxury” become something unquestionably attractive? Was it before or after the word “capitalist” stopped being a term of opprobrium in the minds of capitalists themselves?) I always feel as though one of those cranes might come crashing down. Sometimes I cross the street to avoid them. Last week my apprehension was vindicated. A big piece of one fell on a yellow cab and crumpled it like a beer can. I saw the picture in the New York Times.

What The Company of Cannibals has to say on this subject:

Kids coming up can’t hardly remember when the country wasn’t waiting for the market to uptick. They’ve missed the whole point of the techno-life treadmill. All they see’s the gridlock, the dysfunction, the spongiform corruption nibbling at the E-net. Their elders, too, neophiliacs in their day, are looking to catch a break from the endless round of connections and arrangements, the glitches, the upgrades, the days spent trapped in airports and traffic jams, long minutes staring into space waiting for the machine to reboot or listening closely to the following menu of options….The passwords, PINs, security checks, the CAT scans and MRIs, computerized database searches, the patdowns, the probings of orifices, concealed cameras, the tests of bodily fluids, DNA analysis, thefts of identity. The secret symbiosis between encryption and hacking, surveillance and terror, medicine and disease.

[We’re] exhausted by the terrible speed of money…