New York City preserves itself.

The NYC Landmarks Law turns 50 this week. And this is the story of just one building it saved.

John Jacob Astor III and his wife Charlotte founded The New York City Cancer Hospital in 1884 in a fortress of a building at Central Park West and 106th Street, largely in response to former President Ulysses S. Grant's inoperable throat cancer. It is important to remember how much the entire nation loved Grant for his efforts to bring the North and South together again.

Cancer was thought of as a dirty disease, a disease of bad hygiene and poverty. It ruined people's lives with humiliation, let alone the deadly consequences. Grant's illness brought national attention to cancer.

This building's sumptuous design owed as much to the French gothic as it did to turn of the century advances in hospital care: round rooms to provide cleanliness and ample head space between beds and massive central ventilation shafts to clear the air of germs.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose practiced nursing here.

Because cancer continued to be so deadly, however, the hospital was stigmatized by New Yorkers and even nicknamed The Bastille. It deteriorated from lack of funds. In 1955, it closed its doors as a hospital and moved its services across town to become the new Memorial Sloane-Kettering hospital for Cancer Research.

It suffered a few poor incarnations, abandoned at certain times, jerry-rigged as a nursing home at others, and falling apart as NYC did in the 70s. But fortunately, it was granted landmark status in 1976.

Many developers tried to use the building, but most certainly it would have been torn down if not for this protection. Finally in 2000, it was purchased and developed into condominiums.

After a massive restoration and repurposing which included adding a residential tower behind the original building, today the round rooms are exquisite apartments fetching upwards of seven million dollars a pop.

I'll never get near one of those apartments, but thanks to this law, I get to pass this building several times a week, and I always point out its captured glory to captive and captivated visitors.

The Met through my eyes. Monet.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse. Claude Monet. 1867.

Remembering nothing is accidental in a masterpiece, I took some time studying why Monet places us, the viewers, so far above this gathering. The vanishing point is high up on the left of the canvas, nearly off the painting.

In placing us there, he divides the canvas up into three even planes: land, sea, and air. Take the fence off the water's edge and measure for yourself. And where else do you see three even fields in the painting? It is a very French work indeed, and almost patriotic in its geometry.

It is also rather two-dimensional with plane sitting on plane, in a nod to the Japanese wood-block prints with which Monet had been recently enthralled.

Monet spent the summer of 1867 with his family in Sainte-Adresse, a channel resort near Le Havre where my grandmother would be met by my grandparents some 90 years later. I love the painting for that bit of trivia. I also love the fact that clearly Monet was at odds with his father that season, placing him in the foreground but with his back to us. His cousins fare no better, featureless as they are.

But they are not the stars here. It is the light. And perhaps the light hitting that one parasol, not accidentally dead center and also in the fore, the blazing yellow-white cut off crisply by a sharp shadow, perfectly, on a perfect summer's day. I look at that, at the sunlight hitting the silk brocade of the dresses, striking the men's collars and cuffs, the glint on a shoe, a Panama hat, and I feel the afternoon sun in my soul radiating from this canvas from which Monet seems to have sucked every bit of humidity. It is dry and warm and breezy. One can hear meteorologists brag about this kind of day in one's head today, as if they were responsible for it themselves, but it is the kind of day, one perfect day, accidental perhaps, but purposefully immortalized in Monet's hand a hundred and fifty years ago.

Much of the painting is filled with smooth unnoticeable brush strokes. But most of it is dappled with Monet's signature strikes and dabs, playful and perfectly placed. He was a master manipulator of the medium and boasted in letters home that crowds would gather to watch his virtuosity before the easel.

A painting of perfect sunlight from me to you in the midsts of a blustery brutal winter.

The Met through my eyes. Hammershøi.

Moonlight, Strandgade 30. Vilhelm Hammershøi. 1906.

A few seasons back, The Met curated a show about window paintings through the ages. And that is where I first saw this Hammershøi, which is part of the permanent collection.

Windows are both portals and barriers, creating a simultaneous sense of danger and safety, community and isolation. 

While it may seem nothing is happening here, there is a tension inherent to the window, one that Hammershøi exploits even further by adding the closed door, inviting us to stay and to leave at the same time.

Bathing the entire vignette is the soft glow of moonlight, the night light of the forest, keeping elves and whatnøt away in the enchanted Danish kingdom, both frosty and warm, a chilled light, if you will, leaving everything mauve in its wake.

Hammershøi displays a masterful skill rendering all of this symbolism in this perfectly balanced painting of his very own apartment in Copenhagen, mystery and comfort dancing on a quiet tense tightrope in my mind when I encounter this work, thick with silence as it is.

The Met through my eyes. Renoir.

Eugène Murer. Auguste Renoir, 1877

Eugène Maurer was an enigma.

He owned a pastry shop at 93 Boulevard Voltaire and worked long hours at the oven to amass a bit of a fortune. He was something of a poet, a published novelist, a largely self-taught but minor painter, and he loved the company of unknown artists, names that would have elicited a laugh or two perhaps in their day, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Pissarro. He would receive his friends at his pastry shop and support them as best he could. At one point, he owned 122 Impressionist paintings, many of them the masterpieces of today's collections, particularly those found on the walls of the Musée d'Orsay. The hotel he bought in Rouen towards the turn of the century would spell his financial ruin and he died broke and nearly friendless in 1906.

But much earlier, in 1877, he sat for Renoir.

I've written before, Renoir is not the artist I run to at The Met. I find his works too pretty. But this painting's honesty is urgent, with an edge, and it catches me off guard each time it catches my eye. Murer's enigmatic stare is so deep, so full, so full of the glamour of youth and almost self-indulgent, the self-indulgence of one in love with poetry and sadness that only youth has the luxury of time for, the silly sadness of the self-possessed, and utterly forgivable, the studied pose, the poseur with his aquiline features at their height and set against the beauty of nature as if to dare the blooming flowers behind him in competition. I know him, that fellow: Wasting time, luxuriantly, unaware the bloom falls off the primrose. 

This is Renoir at his best, painting his enigmatic friend with deep affection.

Victory victorious.

The Victory Theatre opened in 1900 on the cobbled prairie known as 42nd Street as The Theatre Republic, built by Oscar Hammerstein I with a play starring John Barrymore. 

In 1902, impresario David Belasco named it for himself and opened the famous play Abie's Irish Rose, the longest running play in its day. After Belasco named another theatre for himself on 44th Street, the house was renamed simply The Republic.

From 1931 to 1941, Bill Minsky owned it as ran it as NYCs first big burlesque house called Minsky's Burlesque. Its most famous act was Gypsy Rose Lee. His most infamous act? Tearing the grand staircase off the front of the building.

!n 1941, it became a movie theatre named The Victory to support American troops in WWII.

It did a stint as a television studio!

In 1972, it became the first theatre to show pornographic films.

Times Square and 42nd Street fell into neglect, poverty, and despair.

But in the early 1990s, and you hear me say this all the time, the artists moved in. The city had taken control of The Victory and all of the the theaters along 42nd Street and invited artists to do installations in the deteriorating spaces. The marquees along the stretch were filled with poetic aphorisms that made commuters stop and look and think.

The Theatre for a New Audience staged Romeo and Juliet in the water-stained filthy shell of The New Victory. People showed up.

And people started to notice. 

(Including the Disney Corporation who struck a deal with the city to revitalize the entire block.)

The New Victory was entirely restored to its Edwardian splendor, the grand staircase was rebuilt, magnificent torchieres greeted audience members, and the New Victory now does a season of vital, well-attended, children's programming.

A beautiful important theatre, visually and historically, falls on hard times, is abandoned, and it is the artists that make us see it new again so that new life is breathed into the forgotten.

Christmas card, NYC, December, 2014.

There is a small evergreen in the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel. Nothing much, but it stood there today on such an historic spot, in the cemetery that dates from 1766, on land that suffered two devastating city fires over the centuries, and, of course, land buried more lately under the weight of two fallen 110-story buildings that awful day in September, well, there it stood, as did I, a wee tree and me, but as it was all dressed up in lights, I felt compelled to take its picture. It obliged.

In the frame of the first photo is the tree, then the new WTC Transportation Hub by Santiago Calatrava, a few sycamore trees, the new One WTC, and the churchyard bell.

The way they all stood side by side made me happy. A new happy conversation of form and shape informing one another, informing the historic and the future, and here was I, present, a silent witness eavesdropping in the middle of it all.

I wandered through the gravestones and took the second picture. Nothing can, and this, from me, who is there five times a week, nothing can prepare one for the majesty of this new sweeping sculptural architecture. It seems impossible the way I'm sure the Brooklyn Bridge once seemed to those eyes that first fell there. And so I thought,

"My. Here, in the dead of winter, in an urban cemetery of all places, anything seems possible."

The three chapters of the Corbin Building.

The Austin Corbin Building was designed by Francis Kimball and opened on Lower Broadway and John Street in 1888. Only 20-feet across on its Broadway edge, it floats down John Street in a magnificent arcade. For decades, it held the offices of Mr. Corbin's banking interests, offices for steam pipe makers, watch makers and sellers, lighting fixture manufacturers, and, notably, diamond whole sellers.

It fell into dark times, forgotten, neglected and filthy. As the rest of the block was replaced by miserable low buildings in the 1960s, architectural critics noted it looked like a bookend holding up nothing. After 9/11, as plans were drawn up to turn the entire block into an ancillary hub to the new transportation building at the World Trade Center, the fate of the Corbin Building seemed certain: The wrecker's ball.

Fortunately, the ever-heroic New York Historical and Preservation Commission saw the diamond-in-the-rough and successfully lobbied for the building's elevated status as a cultural landmark. They succeeded. And nearly a decade of restoration began.

Look at how the thousands of pieces of applied terra cotta were cleaned and fixed, the brownstone cleaned, the cast iron window bays painted, and perhaps most triumphantly, the pyramid finials in each tower restored giving the building its original flair and pluckiness once more! 

It is a beautiful building, an arcade of Romanesque revivalism and richness, a symphony of materials, and its survival has been protected for many generations to come.

A reflection on September 10th.

After a night of nightclubbing in Lower Manhattan, in love with the city and the quiet it can surprisingly produce at 4AM, unexpected and dense like a blanket that fell from your mother's arms, I stumbled upon this view. It was the early 1990s and I was unstoppable. But these towers stopped me dead in my tracks with a mighty awe, these quiet mountains of glass and steel standing guard over the end of the island and my false sense of impenetrability. As will do the moon, sometimes things just look enormous in the night sky. And that night, these buildings looked bigger than my imagination. I felt so safe in their presence in a dark city that was in those days still a bit dodgy and dangerous.

Nobody ever much liked Towers One and Two of the original World Trade Center. The most that many could say of them was that they looked like the boxes the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings arrived in. But that is unfair. They were a benign presence of simple elegance and they defined our skyline for thirty-three years. Tomorrow, I'll remember the people. But thirteen years ago today was the last day of these buildings. And while I'm rather a cheerleader for the new World Trade Center in a much larger field of critics, today, I'll miss this view, the view of my youth, and miss these mountains that took me by surprise one night as we yielded to the unbearable morning, the twins who made me realize my place in the world, tiny and vulnerable, important, sure, but cut down to right size.

Jeff's Music Corner. Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story Suite, Joshua Bell.

I was walking around Gramercy Park the other day when I passed Joshua Bell and my mind went reeling back to this stormy night a decade ago when tens of thousands of us put our fear of lightening on the back burner, transfixed by the lightening-fast hands of Mr. Bell as we were. Leonard Bernstein had approved a violin suite for his score to West Side Story in the same year he died. I'd never heard it until this night, and rearranged as it is, one gets a new appreciation of the complexities of Bernstein's mind in the way motifs play off one another throughout. Mr. Bell wrote the cadenza and it is a dizzying piece of virtuosity. Listen right afterwards as Mr. Bell plays the first few notes of "Somewhere." A rumble of thunder swept over Central Park as though God Himself heard the strains and wanted 'in.' Who wouldn't want to play with the New York Philharmonic? It was a very special night. And here it is for you.

Jeff's Music Corner. Peter Grimes: Now the Great Bear and Pleiades from the opera by Benjamin Britten.

Should you think opera a distant conceit of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, I give you this, Benjamin Britten's dark masterpiece of 1945, PETER GRIMES. Peter is a fisherman whose apprentices have the unfortunate and careless habit of dying while in Peter's care, and this small, small-minded, gossipy town comes to life in Britten's moving and fascinating score with stunning words by librettist Montagu Slater. This particular aria, "Now the Great Bear," is a study in terror, Peter singing for his life on nearly merely one note throughout, an E, while descending harmonics in the orchestra underscore his existential plunge into questions of Fate and Determinism. Tenor Jon Vickers was the quintessential Peter (even though it is rumored Benjamin Britten rather disliked his interpretation!) and his performance almost singlehandedly brought this opera into the standard repertoire. It is difficult to pull off this very modern anti-hero with any kind of honesty while making an audience care for him. I think Vickers straddles this delicate balance brilliantly. And he is a consummate musician. Listen as he creates a veritable auditorium in his mouth, placing the voice up front and directly dead on in the mask while lifting his soft palette into a cavern of resonant sound, most especially at around 1:32. I'm including the lyric below because it is one of the densest poems I have ever encountered in opera. How smart to have the melodic line subordinate to these heartbreaking words.

Now the great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher
In storm or starlight
The written character
of a friendly fate
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again? 

By the way, PBS just recorded the new production by the English National Opera, and it is a smashing version. Stiuart Skelton has one of those once in a lifetime voices of richness, power, and clarity and I love his performance, a man who doesn't need an orchestra to have a thousand overtones ringing through the room.

Jeff's Music Corner. Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3.

Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is famous, of course, notoriously difficult, a favorite at competitions for the virtuosity that must be displayed. But most importantly, it is achingly beautiful. There are many remarkable recordings, perhaps the best by Horowitz with the New York Philharmonic. You can hear Rachmaninoff himself play it with the Philadelphia Orchestra. But this concert by Martha Argerich has always been a personal favorite. She is powerful and expressive, exacting and judicious on the pedal, and it is fun to watch her succumb to what every pianist does when climbing this Mount Olympus of concerti--she mumbles to herself. She tackles the cadenza at 11:05, the huge ten-fingered chords, in spectacular rapid-fire succession with gusto leaving even her conductor smiling in awe. (It is fun to note that Argerich and Ricardo Chailly were probably dating at the time.) She has precision and grace and fire and, yes, ice.

When you've the time, listen to the entire performance. But for now, at least listen to the First Movement. I always think of it as a battle of two melodies. It begins with the sad little Russian peasant tune that breaks free in a whirlwind of variations. Then Rachmaninoff introduces the second melody in fractures, giving us glimpses of it for the next twelve minutes, turning it inside out and upside down, each time you hear it think he is fully realizing it, but he is not. When he finally gives it its full voice, its due, its moment at 12:40, it feels like redemption, like the glory of the simplest moment in the history of the world. Sometimes, I can't even take it, it's so beautiful.

Jeff's Music Corner. Shostakovich - Piano Concerto No 2 Op. 102, II. Andante

I love me the Russians. Their sweeping lush harmonics are rooted in centuries of folk temperaments, of peasant misery, of lone survival in a mass of humanity. The dotted eighth notes in the first measures take me on a trip to the Urals, and the thirds and fifths in triplets set against eighth notes play at my hidden heartstrings. The progression at bar 77 in transcendent. This is not nearly the most complicated Shostakovich, but if you're just meeting him, this is a sweet sweet spot to jump off. 

Jeff's Music Corner. Arturo Márquez - Danzón No. 2

Laurence Olivier said that we wouldn't get people into the theaters until we made them as exciting as football. And that is what Gustavo Dudamel is up to here; on display, the starry fireworks of his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. When this was recorded, the average age of the musicians was 18 years old, yet they'd all been playing together for at least ten years already. Their fun is infectious, and they also get my vote for the sexiest symphony orchestra alive (with the exception of the bands to whom I've had the good fortune to give tours). The Danzón No. 2, inspired by the national dance of both Cuba and Mexico, and popular as well in Puerto Rico, starts off is a simple melody played first by the clarinet, then brought into laser focus with the oboe. The instruments respond to one another throughout the orchestra in all kinds of wonderful variations and dynamics and finally rendered romantically by this particularly large string section at 4:58. At 6:19, all hell breaks loose and I defy you to watch this and keep still. It is crazy joy and I wish I could bottle it. I turn to this whenever I'm feeling moody blue because this is all kinds of yellow sunlight. It is a soccer match. I wish I was smack in the middle of this orchestra. But I'd watch them from the stands in a fluttering heartbeat. Enjoy.

Jeff's Music Corner. Mahler - Symphony No.1, III, Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen

Perhaps never has the battle between life and death been waged more musically and effectively so than in Mahler's Titan Symphony, his first, and particularly here in the third movement. A funereal march begins dirge-like in the drums, and the familiar strains of Frère Jacques are picked up scratchily between the strings, mocked by the bassoons in a round and set in a disconcerting minor key. Like an embattled ray of sunshine, however, a little boy meets the march in a merry martial tune at 1:21, our friend the oboe singing his little sailor song head on against the march. Mahler, like most of the Romantics and post-Romantics, relied heavily on his cultural roots and folk traditions to make his sweeping melodic gestures and here, at 2:47, a Klezmer band meets the march, and then at 3:14, another! A minor skirmish, a happy battle of Jewish folk tunes ensues, lushly in the strings, giddy in the oom-pah-pah drums. But while Death may have taken a holiday, it infects the melodic lines and all turns minor. A lovely lilting Viennese tune breaks out at 6:00; life wants to live of course, and we are swept up in the now, savoring the time signature, living in the moment. Always lurking is Jacques, though, the sad sleeping brother, who brings the movement to a solemn sober conclusion.

This performance is crisp and fine under the precise baton and hawk-like eye of Christoph Eschenbach.

Jeff's Music Corner. Barber - Canzonetta for Oboe & Strings, Op. 48

I think this best illustrates why Samuel Barber touches a part of me that, what, I don't want to know very well. The strings at the top are so sad but the oboe, alone, sweet and silly, forges on above them. Barber composes simple acts of bravery. And it is sublime and frightening. 

The first three minutes are as perfect as any three minutes I've ever encountered.

An ado in Central Park.

I very rarely see productions of plays I have myself once been in because I know them too well to enjoy them, because I am jealous by nature and hate that I haven't been cast in this one, but mostly because I get hit with the longing for what the French poet Villon called "les neiges d'antan" or  "the snows of yesteryear." Luckily, my career has not been so huge that this has much curtailed my theatre-going. But it almost did tonight, that, and a bout of bronchitis I'm just getting over. But because my friend Kate DeWall, who was an intern what seems like just the other day and is now Master Electrician for The Public Theatre's legendary Shakespeare in the Park, invited me to tonight's closing performance of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, I said yes.

Seeing a production in Central Park normally means waiting twelve hours in all kinds of weather on a sometimes festive, sometimes furious line to obtain one of the 1600 free tickets they dispense to each performance. Sometimes, they run out before they get to you and you are rewarded with nothing for your troubles. Sometimes, you wait the twelve hours, get your ticket, and the performance is cancelled by a thunderstorm, as it was twice this week. To walk right up to the Delacorte Theatre without having waited one second and see my friend who handed me my ticket was the first delight of the evening.

When I played Benedick, I was far too young, a freshman in college in my first Shakespeare play. These many years later, and on the most beautiful evening I can recall, the air the same temperature as my skin so it seemed I was one with the night, we all were, not knowing where each of us began and the others of us ended, swimming in each other, my heart ran a slight chill, the snow that capped a realization that I am now too old to play Benedick. But the stars came out up above and down below, seated near Zachary Quinto and Lucy Liu, and the accomplished director of the show, Jack O'Brien as we were, and the most Italian production I have ever seen the few times I have of a play that takes place in Italy began like a wash of warm Tuscany, complete with tinny melodic mandolins on a spectacular set of an Italian villa lit beautifully, to perfection, with the help of my very own friend.

The cast included Broadway powerhouse performers like Brian Stokes Mitchell and John Glover. But also a lot of movie and TV personalities, including Pedro Pascal, Lily Rabe, and, playing Benedick, Hamish Linklater. In NYC it is less likely one becomes famous merely on their looks and all of these actors have the chops or at least the good guts to take on Shakespeare. And as the play unfolded, none disappointed me, many thrilled me. They bit into the text with a particularly American bent, Shakespeare, of course, transcending dialect. It wasn't until I developed a cramp that I realized my left hand was in a knot. 

I didn't want to like Hamish Linklater, and at first, I'm not sure I did, a few of his flourishes ringing false to me, his bravado, unearned, I thought.  It took the spasm in my arm to a let me to the fact that I was at odds with myself, that he was utterly charming me, and that it was time to let go. Of the snows.

Here we all were, nearly two thousand of my fellow New Yorkers and my friends Kate and Kayliane and Cort in a sweet spot of a clearing in the park on a perfect night, everyone pumped and psyched to see Shakespeare, all of us laughing, guffawing, groaning, rooting, cheering, even weeping for a moment or two, the sadness of a funeral, the exquisite music written for this production ringing through the trees and off Belvedere Castle in the distance, William Shakespeare, dead for centuries, had turned us all into his Groundlings at The Globe once again, his poetry dripping off the tongues of some of America's most accomplished actors and thawing in my mind the memories of my youth, hey, Hamish, I got a laugh there decades ago, my friend, ha ha, but you are wonderful, dear boy, just delightful, all of you simply delightful and near the end, during the death scene, as the little ensemble broke into a bit of my favorite verse in the entire canon, accompanied by a lushly sad tune and the words, "Pardon, Goddess, of the night, those that slew thy virgin bride," I kid you not, a shooting star burst through the sky above and my heart nearly burst out of my chest.

This is one of the reasons I live in NYC. And I regret none of it. 

My Willa.

Willa Cather was born in Virginia but spent her formative years on the plains of Nebraska where the drama of the landscape and the pragmatism of prairie life mingled in her mind. She set out to become a physician, an unusual pursuit for a young woman at the turn of the last century, but her gifts as a writer were obvious at a young age and she switched her major to English at the University of Nebraska. After moving back east, she wrote for journals, newspapers, and magazines for ten years in Pittsburgh, PA, home to my favorite female authors, before moving and settling for the rest of her life in NYC, in Greenwich Village at the age of thirty-three. Here she wrote her masterpieces, Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, much of it on Bank Street where you can still see her home. Her work is full of wistful romanticism flavored with an unusual economy, the hallmarks of her life in Nebraska, and while she produced quite a bit of verse, it is the free-form flowing prose-poetry I highlight here, a bit of wonder from My Antonia.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Hughes and Poem.

Born in Joplin, Mississippi, you cannot talk of Harlem without talking of Langston Hughes. The Harlem Renaissance was nearly his invention, he certainly was its greatest voice, and he sought to give African- and Caribbean-Americans a similar voice, one without self-hatred, fear, or shame. He wrote columns, novels, and plays, but I love him for his poems, many short, some epic, all empowering. He inspired his contemporaries like Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Thurston, and Aaron Douglas and many foreign authors including black writers in French-speaking Africa. He discovered Alice Walker. Published often in The Crisis, the official literary magazine of the NAACP, he is most known for The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Weary Blues, Let America be America Again, and Harlem, What Happens to a Dream Deferred? But it is the short poem below that took the wind out of my sails one day and I've never been quite the same since. It says nearly nothing, but because it is so specific, a moment we've all experienced--a poem about not having the words to write a poem--that it says everything to me, the bravery of a heart that puts a friendship in a box on a shelf because the silence is far more powerful than the poem. That is a courageous writer. And every time I encounter this piece, part of me cracks with a perfect sadness.

Poem.

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There's nothing more to say.

The poem ends,

Soft as it began--

I loved my friend.

Poe, alone--

Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem below at the age of twenty, upon the death of his stepmother who raised him, on the very verge of his move to New York City. Poe was a haunted man, and the deep wellsprings of his passions were tightly wound around a moroseness and longing he harnessed with the exactitude of his verse. See how he breaks up the lines here, tearing apart his own meter he had perfectly established. The effect is as isolating as his words, as isolated as his heart. Poe was born in Boston, raised in Richmond, attended UVA and West Point, wrote Israfel, To Helen, and The City in the Sea in NYC, moved to Philadelphia, and wound up wandering a street in Baltimore where he was hospitalized then died, all and by the age of forty. But not before inventing the detective novel, some precursors to science fiction, and penning some of the most widely-read better-known and hauntingly beautiful American poetry.

Alone.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —
Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —

Milay.

While many places may claim her, her birthplace in Rockland, Maine, her childhood home in Camden of the same state, Poughkeepsie where she wowed them at Vassar, even Paris where she made a splash, we, here in New York, sing her praises perhaps the loudest, the city where she wandered Greenwich Village at the height of its Bohemia, and produced some of the loveliest poetry and in particular the most splendid sonnets in the English language, certainly the American canon. I love Edna St. Vincent Millay for her complicated heart. Hers was raw and fierce and brutally honest. As wonderful as life was, it was a painful affair to be sure, and as full as life was, it was unfair that it be snatched from even anyone in death. She lived by Thomas' words, raging against the dying of the light. In the poem below, she turns beauty on its head and I understand the terror of a brightness so brilliant that it blinds, the darkness in the light, an unrequited, thwarted love, the foul fairness, the poisonous libations that both beckon and maim:

When I too long have looked upon your face,
Wherein for me a brightness unobscured
Save by the mists of brightness has its place,
And terrible beauty not to be endured,
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause; and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark.