Only the Poets Know Brooklyn
Only the Poets Know Brooklyn: A Journal of the Plague Years
By Edward Moran
As a self-avowed, practicing poetry nerd, I have developed a set of peculiar and idiosyncratic rituals to celebrate the Brooklyn poets I most admire. For the birthdays of Walt Whitman (May 31) and Hyam Plutzik (July 13) I sport a sprig of lilac as a nod to the flower that inspired two of their finest poems. On Marianne Moore’s birthday (November 15), I take time to savor her sweetest poetry morsels while munching on a bowl of M&M’s I keep in a tricorne-shaped bowl next to my Dodgers cap. And on the day of Hart Crane’s suicidal plunge into the Gulf of Mexico (April 27), I solemnly suck on lavender-tinged Life Savers, not only as a posthumous token of mercy but also to honor Crane’s father, Clarence, who had invented and patented the familiar ring-shaped mints a century ago.
The Brooklyn poets I have come to cherish are those who write with life-saving fire in the lyre and rage on the page. Even though they are today sometimes dismissed as very dead and very white, I continue to be summoned to the deep river by the savage honesty of Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” and by Marianne Moore’s “rock crystal thing to see.” Miss Moore especially is often unfairly faulted for a delicacy and fastidiousness that does not sit well with today’s devil-may-care poetasters. “Brooklyn has afforded me the kind of tame excitement on which I thrive,” she wrote—hardly a riveting summons to a poetry slam. When she arrived on Cumberland Street in 1929, she found a neighborhood characterized by decorum—a place “where a touch of diffidence prevailed,” as she later remembered. By the time she left the ‘hood in the late Sixties, her beloved Brooklyn seemed to have sunk into an indecorous state—the Dodgers had fled, the Eagle had flown, and even the venerable Brooklyn Academy of Music was trying to stay afloat by renting its main stage to a karate academy.
Despite her critics and her inharmonious surroundings, Moore festooned. In 1967, just as she was quitting Brooklyn after her thirty-eight years in Fort Greene, Langston Hughes anointed her “the leading Negro female poet in America.” She found authenticity in the artistic ferment of the Sixties, as when she heaped lavish praise on Harlem’s dancer Arthur Mitchell, calling him a “contagious gem of virtuosity.” A sports fan from her early years as Jim Thorpe’s teacher at the Carlisle Indian School, Miss Moore penned the liner notes for Cassius Clay’s boisterous album I Am The Greatest! In which she wrote obliquely: “If it savors of diatribe, consider: ‘I worry not the danger, I have archly crossed the moor.’” Earlier, in her poem “The Labors of Hercules,” Moore had penned fervid lines that blasted the racist attitudes held by her Modernist colleagues like Eliot and Pound, insisting instead “that the Negro is not brutal/ that the Jew is not greedy/ that the Oriental is not immoral,/ that the German is not a Hun.”
Scarce indeed were the dooryards with lilacs abloom when I took up residence in Fort Greene in the spring of 1980. There was then a palpable sense of doom and dread in the borough as well as in the larger city it had long been yoked to. The despair was visceral, paralyzing, primordial. Like Whitman’s unhinged doors and doorjambs, words themselves were now being ripped from their roots, their scrambled letters flung across a crippled cityscape till it resembled the marquee of a long-abandoned theater. Language itself was under siege in that troublesome twilight, and morphology, too. Brooklynites listened helplessly during this decade of discontent as the old discourse started devolving into ever-more-sinister homonyms. It was a time when the mellifluous violet of Whitman’s lilacs morphed into violent then disintegrated into vile before finally shrinking into the vials that were then littering the streets underfoot. Even Marianne Moore’s Pastelogram—one of her many buoyant suggestions of a moniker for the Ford Edsel—got weaponized into a dreaded pistolgram. Pistol-packing mayhem stalked the streets, and the quiet majesty of poetic expression was often its first victim.
It might be easy to assume that poetry itself vanished from Brooklyn during this season of discontent. Nothing could be further from the truth. If, as Hyam Plutzik put it, poetry’s final distillate is “the eternal stuff pure and radiant as a drop of uranium,” then Fort Greene was ground zero for an explosive resurgence of rhythm and robustness bubbling up from the turbulent vernacular of Brooklyn’s mean streets.
No, these mean streets were not without meaning. These new voices, after all, were drinking from the same wellsprings of language as had Whitman and Moore before them, though wellsprings poisoned by injustice and tyranny, overlaid by a dark American legacy of dreams deferred. Writing as a Jew in solidarity with the victims of lynchings, Hyam Plutzik declared, “For each man who is strung up, shot, or castrated,/Do you not think we shall have to pay a debt?/For the daily callous rebuff, infinitely repeated….” Plutzik himself is another shining light in my pantheon of Brooklyn-born poets, one with psychic ties to both Whitman and Moore. Born in Brownsville to Jewish refugees from Czarist pogroms, Plutzik became a reporter on Whitman’s old Brooklyn Eagle in the 1930s. After a stint at Yale, he went on to write poems excoriating Hitler and the Nazis with the same fury he used to condemn Jim Crow and racism in the American South. In 1961, just weeks before his untimely death at 50, he invited Marianne Moore to read at the University of Rochester; it was her seventy-seventh birthday.
By 1980, I was living on the top floor of a five-story walkup overlooking Fort Greene Park. I took refuge there knowing that my building was situated at the exact midpoint between 260 Cumberland Street, where Moore and her mother had lived, and 107 North Portland Avenue, in whose dooryard Whitman’s lilacs had once bloomed. From this eagle’s perch, at a point of perfect poetic gravipoise, I felt myself infused with the ichor of both. Galvanized by this yin-yang symmetry, I mused on how the monogram WW turned on its head is MM, that MM upended is WW. Thus fortified by muses both female and male, I strained to hear an America singing still in the streets below--in a new, explosive poetry that defied convention, that refused to have its dreams deferred any longer. It was a visceral poetry that festered like a sore, that crusted over syrupy-sweet, but that was no less authentic than the poetry that Moore and Whitman were writing decades earlier on either side of the park.. . .
I dreamed one night a dream of Moore and Whitman approaching the martyr’s monument from opposite sides—Moore from the DeKalb side, Whitman from the Myrtle side. Stanford White’s column rises at the center of a wrestling arena. The two poets meet beneath it wearing bright tunics emblazoned with fiery initials: MM and WW. Without a word, they lock themselves into a grapple, rolling around furiously, bellowing their poetry to the wider world.
In my mind’s gyre, I see them locked in a wrestle of letters, spinning in a fiery circle:
MM/WW/WW/MM
Woman/Man/Whitman/Woman/Moore/Blackamoor/Whitman/White Man. . .
No, poetry had not vanished from Brooklyn. It became ever more urgent during those lean years of pestilence and desolation. As the Eighties progressed, Brooklyn became an epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, a plague that carried off thousands in the prime of their lives, just as civil war had done more than a century earlier. Marianne Moore’s own grandmother, a minister’s wife in the Gettysburg of 1863, had died of typhus she contracted while ministering to the wounded there. That same year, Walt Whitman left his dooryard lilacs in search of a brother in a Confederate prison. He ended up spending the rest of the war in Washington hospitals as a volunteer nurse, a wound dresser, writing: “Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,/Straight and swift to my wounded I go.”
It was against that backdrop that the poetry of Brooklyn became bulwark to me. As a volunteer caregiver in those anxious days, I spent many an afternoon and evening at Cumberland Hospital, sustained by knowing I was following in old Walt’s footsteps. Cumberland Hospital, I learned, was built on hallowed ground: the very block where Whitman’s home had stood a century earlier. In “The Wound Dresser,” Whitman could have been speaking for all Brooklyn when he wrote: “I am faithful, I do not give out.”
Lines like these affirmed for me the ancient truth that poetry does make a difference. It inspires. It provokes. It revives the faint-hearted. It summons the soul to new enterprises of the spirit. It is an agent of civic revival that can even make tweets lose their sting.
In those plague-ridden days I would also repair to the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church to sit for a spell in pew number 56, the tiny upholstered bench that Marianne Moore and her mother occupied after they joined the congregation in 1935. (Had the Moores purposely chosen such a diminutive pew to preserve their jealously guarded privacy? It was scarcely able to accommodate a third worshipper, certainly not Gertrude Stein, who met Moore in 1932 at BAM, where the two got caught in a revolving door together.) I could not help noticing that the Moore pew was located along the church’s west wall, squarely between two stained-glass windows, one depicting an angel, the other an apostle. The two figures face in totally opposite directions, turning their backs to one another, as though Moore wanted to be reminded of the antipodean struggle that marks much of her poetry.
Edward Moran in Marianne Moore’s pew, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn. (photo by Alison Cornyn)
Seated in the very pew where Miss Moore received what she called “the spiritual food,” I meditated on the lines from her World War II-era poem “In Distrust of Merits.” These were the words that would fortify me for my visits to those dying at Cumberland, words that convinced me that Brooklyn is still a work in progress:
As contagion of sickness makes sickness
Contagion of trust can make trust
…Trust begets power
And faith is an affectionate thing.
. . .
ENVOI: By the end of the Eighties, as the crack epidemic made pedestrian life in Brooklyn increasingly treacherous, I began to appreciate the utility of Marianne Moore’s appreciation for animals like the jerboa (“It honors the sand by assuming its color…in its flight from a danger”) and the pangolin (“another armored animal…serge-clad, strong-shod”). These creatures now became talismans for me on my considerably more perilous peregrinations through the neighborhood. One sultry summer evening in 1988, as I was making my way home to Washington Park from the Lafayette Avenue subway station. I encountered a gaggle of youth voguing to a boombox in front of Moore’s old apartment building at 260 Cumberland. Beneath the cotton-ball fretwork and carved lions that had guided Auden and Eliot and Bishop to her door, I saw only the sheer flash of a box cutter as the youths circled me, their eyes demanding tribute. What better tribute is poetry, I thought. Not missing a beat, I instinctively began rapping Chaucer to my bewildered audience: “So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.” On and on I droned in the Middle English of my poetic ancestors, rhyming up a cloud and a pillar of fire until the white teeth of the terror melted into slaphappy smiles and riffs of “That’s cool, man, that’s down.” Fortified by the power of poetry—shared poetry—I passed through the gathering as safe as toast, and with chastity that, wrote Miss Moore, “conveys a particular strength.”
From a faraway shore, I heard the splash of a life saver troubling the waters.
Edward Moran is a literary historian and poet who has lived in Brooklyn for more than forty years. An editor of the World Authors reference series, he also wrote the afterword for Letter from a Young Poet (Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 2015), a book he edited based on the correspondence between Hyam Plutzik and Odell Shepard.
Edward Moran in front of Marianne Moore’s former residence, 260 Cumberland Street, Brooklyn. (photo by Edward Moran)