NYC Blizzard Photo Gallery

5th Avenue in Brooklyn around 7:30 a.m. It's a major commercial thoroughfare but we were walking straight down the middle of the street. Hard to tell exact accumulation because of the wind, but definitely pushing 2 feet.

6th Avenue in Brooklyn, mostly residential. It's a great day to have no responsibility for shoveling out a car.

The back courtyard of the bar. First we shoveled this. Then we had to close the umbrella and shovel the whole thing again.

Steve's next-door neighbor, sculpting a polar bear.

This was 5th Avenue in Brooklyn at about 9 p.m. last night. Steve and I were walking back to the apartment after shoveling the sidewalk around the bar. At that point only a few inches had fallen and the wind, while brisk, was not gale-force.

This is the view from my bedroom window this morning. The wind is bizarrely loud. The gusts sound like a semi-trailer grinding up a steep gravel road. In a few minutes Steve and I will suit up again for shoveling, and I will update you on actual conditions. I think they're pretty bad, but I can't tell a thing about accumulation yet.

 

New York City is now under a blizzard warning, and tomorrow's bus back to Portland has been canceled. Yesterday morning, as the weather situation became clear, I did make an early decision to buy a seat on the Wednesday bus, afraid that if I dithered too long I wouldn't be able to get out of town till even later in the week. So I'll be zoom-teaching from Brooklyn on Tuesday, and in the meantime I'll be hunkering down in Gowanus, making spaghetti and meatballs for Stephen and the kids and experiencing the amazement of New York City stopped dead in its tracks.

Yesterday's event for Baron went really well. The room was packed with so many poet friends and acquaintances. Baron's family was there too, and hearing his work in the air through so many different voices was sweet and also intense. Afterward P and I walked for a couple of miles along the Hudson River, basking in the strange mild air, watching dogs and joggers and babies and birds, watching the water ripple past. New York has been wry and beautiful in its gray February cloak.

We stopped in Chelsea to walk through the William Eggleston exhibit at a gallery, then headed back to Brooklyn to meet up with the family for pizza and ice cream. And now an unstructured day unrolls: any plans to be busy in Manhattan have dissolved because of the oncoming storm. Stephen and I will go out for groceries at some point, and then I will cook. And snow will fall and fall.

It rained most of the day yesterday, but I was out and about nonetheless. I met the kids for breakfast, and then P and I went to the Frick and afterward the Strand, where I managed to make my way through fiction shelves A-G before P was ready to leave. Next time maybe I'll reach H-M, but maybe not. Shopping at the Strand is a very slow job. I did find a beautiful early 1950s edition of Henry Green's novel Concluding, and since I suspect I am one of the few people alive who actually reads his writings, that felt like a secret message. It was skewed to one side, half-obscured on a bottom shelf, and I almost didn't bend down to look at it. But there the book sat, waiting for me.

 I've seen three musicals on Broadway: Pippin and Fun Home, both with Paul in high school, and now Ragtime. Pippin was a big fun spectacle, and Fun Home was small and gorgeous and heartrending, but Ragtime manages to combined elements of both and become a heartrending spectacle. It includes a huge ensemble cast, brings a Model T on stage, and includes a dozen disparate settings, including the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the emotions, though also large, remain complicated and ambiguous. Even though it's a musical, its language hews surprisingly close to Doctorow's, and the singers were top-notch.

It was a fun day altogether: for lunch I ate a fried oyster po' boy at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central; for dinner I had chicken in coconut sauce at a Cuban restaraurant near Lincoln Center. I visited with friends at the bar after the show, and then I slept hard till after 7 this morning.

In a little while I'll meet the kids for breakfast, and then I think P and I will go to the Frick. The Polish Rider is waiting for me.

 Good morning from the bus. It's already daylight, and I've already had a crisis: I left the whitefish bagel sandwich I'd bought especially for the trip in Tom's truck, so I had to text him frantically to turn around and bring it back to me. The thought of no breakfast, no comforting delicious special sandwich, was very sorrowful. However, he heroically reappeared with my breakfast, and the surrounding passengers very much enjoyed the dramatic handoff. And now I am hoping that a lost-and-found sandwich will be my only panic of the day.

A surprising thing happened yesterday: I put together a manuscript.

I think it's a tad too short in its current iteration. Nonetheless, it's complete, even down to the table of contents and an acknowledgments page. As sometimes happens, I had a burst of focus, when suddenly an arc became clear to me and the poems began to talk to one another and I began to talk back to them and, voila, a fluttering sheaf transformed into the possibility of a book.

I feel nervous and excited, like I always do at these moments. Yesterday evening I kept opening the file to fidget with it, and often my fidgeting was no more than making the pages larger or smaller on my screen so that I could absorb their visual effect. At this stage making a collection is so much more than just reading the poems for content. It requires simply looking at them . . . and then at other moments simply hearing the silences between them . . . for every poem is surrounded by a different silence, and how that quiet overlaps feels so important to me.

The most recent New Yorker includes Kathryn Schulz's review of Richard Holmes's biography of Tennyson. Schulz opens it by asking, "What was the formative sound of your childhood?" and then speculates on the sea's influence on Tennyson's ear:

No one alive can say if this is true, but I like to think the sound that most shaped [him] was the surf at Mablethorpe, a barren stretch of beach on the remote eastern coast of England. . . . Tennyson spent the rest of his life returning to that desolate seascape, literally but also literarily. You can hear it, first of all, in his impeccable sense of rhythm. These days, he is widely regarded as having the finest facility with metrical forms of any poet of his generation--a grasp of prosody both perfect and unpredictable, as if the complex metronome of that turbulent coastline ticked on within him.

As an ear poet myself, as a recent wallower in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, as a person in the midst of putting together a poetry collection in a rush of wonder (a collection that happens to include a long poem titled "In Memoriam" that refers throughout to Tennyson) . . . well, is it any surprise that I was gobsmacked by this description?

"Both perfect and unpredictable." The words alone make me feel a little faint.