Taking the train back from Princeton to the City on Saturday morning, I thought about Mom and trips to the city, years and years of train rides into the city and back, my whole life, wondering what will unfold on the day when I arrive, where the city will take me.
“Always the new city grows as the old one is shrinking…” writes Eileen Myles, in Inferno, their poet's novel of a young female writer, discovering both her sexuality and creative drive in New York. “It was a fantasy place….” they go on, describing St Marks Church, where the poets are buried on 2nd Ave and 10th. Reading Myles’ Inferno, it's hard not to think of Dante's story of exile and envy, influence and politics.
"Man is the one who has spread it like a disease; cultivating it, empowering it," writes Dante about Lucifer. Of course, we have our own darkness, our own Faustus, we're contending with. Throughout the tabs, people are upset with the video he posted of the Obamas as monkeys. He disappears people, guts aids prevention, healthcare, cuts vaccines, reintroduces measles, alienates allies, erodes 4th Amendment rights, terrorizes trans people, and now a few republics are offended, I wonder looking at the blowback from a few Senators who finally decided the Obama monkey videos were a little too much.
Politics is a messy path, full of our own hopes, pitfalls and letdowns, compromise and detours.
"I am the way into the city of woe, I am the way to go among the lost," writes Dante, who knew something about being lost, about exile.
‘Be an inferno’ Myles’ teacher advises, the same professor Myles introduced us to in the first line of the story, whose “ass was so beautiful.” Images of volcanos, of Vesuvius, floods of red, lava and blood, passion and excess, come to mind.
Myles has seen a few of the pitfalls in the city as well. They were around, organizing us to read poems together at East River Park, to hold off the bulldozers.
I recall watching her read this story last fall, embarrassed of the lines she’d forgotten about, but still reading, human and thoughtful, inviting us to think about the tragedy and Gaza and the possibilities of the city.
I’d been with Mom all morning, enjoying breakfast, taking in the cold Saturday morning.
"He was too wild with curiosity," Mom laughed, as we read The Magician's Nephew. Perused the news, looking at old black and white photos of Julia in Paris, on a bright, snowy Saturday.
Back home, I made plans for the afternoon, making it out into the cold to see a few friends.
First stop, Art Bar, an eclectic bar and lounge in New York's West Village, on 8th Ave, where a grad school romance came to an end years and years ago. And I met Ray. We talked about my novel. I thought it was a memoir, said Ray. Nope, a novel, all made up, I reply. We chat about the demos taking place everywhere, us not getting arrested the week before, the world pushing back on ICE. I have something for you, he says. Ray digs into his bag. Pulls out a book, giving me a copy of his majestic memoir of poems: "63 poems spanning 63 years, The Night of Swaying Grass: A Memoir in Poems is the debut poetry collection of R. Diskin Black. It tells the story of his life beginning in 1963, tracing narratives of childhood loss and grief, a coming of age and coming out, resilience and reinvention."
Like Myles’ Inferno, this is a story of New York.
Reading the poems last fall, I wrote blurb:
“‘All grown-ups were once children... but only a few of them remember it,’ writes Antoine de Saint-Exupery. There’s a little of him, a little prince feeling in this collection, a sense of a child passing through time and space. New York and the carnage of AIDS, the wonderment and anguish of it all, the beatitudes of movements, the horrors of George Floyd’s murder, bodies in the streets, sex, sweat, loving, protesting. Our lives are an epiphany. We are plopped here with no explanation why, losing parents, friends, animals in the process. So, what’s to be done? Read a poem in a garden. Demand joy despite despair. This memoir told in poems by R. Diskin Black reminds us of the mystery of it all.”
Snapping photos and perusing the beautiful volume, Ray posts a note:
“On this arctic Saturday in NYC, Benjamin Heim Shepard helped me celebrate the arrival of the advance copy of my collection of memoir poetry titled THE NIGHT OF SWAYING GRASS at Art Bar on 8th Avenue. The collection will be available from Parisian Phoenix Publishing on March 1, 2026.”
All weekend, I read this collection of gems, stories of a parting glances, wondering about a man who looked like jean-paul belmondo from breathless, with KS lesions on his face, wondering what happened, a spider who came to stay, voices in our heads, sex against fascism, a reminder, an epiphany after another ghost. I’ve seen Ray read these poems in gardens and pubs, captivating us with his stories and sweet sensibility.
Look out for the book launch events, as well as reading April 19th at 2 PM at Village Works.
Finishing my conversation with Ray, I strolled, wind howling about, up 8th through the cold to 23rd, where James and Barry were coming back from seeing the Gregg Bordowitz show and the Possibilities in Theory, recalling old Heimat films. We shared stories and sparkling wine. Their apartment is like a gallery. I hadn’t seen them since before the pandemic, when we sat watching Berlin Alexanderplatz at our house. We picked up the conversation from there, gossiping away.
On the way back, I stumbled into Max, who was between Durban and Japan, on a layover in New York, meeting me in Chelsea, where we strolled down 8th Ave talking about it all, recalling Keith and the Rawhide, the wild ride we’re on.
I glimpse through my notes on the way home, thinking about my students and friends, organizing comrades and movements. I look at the world and stop. We know about the horrible things. But I'm grateful for the good things, the friends who look me up through the years, the activist comrades whose lives are always changing, the stories of our friends finding each other, the people looking out for immigrants, the kids pushing back across the city, the person driving the snow plow, clearing the road, my students and the conversations we have, the people, the city ever in motion.
All week, I met friends after class,
Wednesday night, from Shan to the Library, with the Magician in the Lower East Side, in between. Brennan came at 637. And Athena at 701. And Doug at 701 and Virginia at 744. And Christine at 735. And JC at 802. Between volcanos and lost islands, rats and horrible breakups, lots of stories are shared.
Smoking a cigarette, JC talked about the testimony from Wendy Chapkis, about her experience, being assaulted and detained by ICE, the cops who laughed as she suffered, the cruelties. It's cold out, I think of the Auschwitz guards, who made the kids do roll call in the snow, many in barefeet, standing in order, frostbite taking their toes.
Music played at Barbes on Tuesday, we all sat chatting about it all, a warmer week about us. There will be a day when no one cares about the Epstein files. That day is not with us yet. There will be a day when ICE is defunded, considered pariahs. That day is around the corner.
Sunday night, we all converged at Al’s house, for the Superbowl and its halftime show.
Wow, what a message. Brandi Carlile, a Grammy-winning, openly lesbian Americana singer-songwriter and a prominent advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, sings America the Beautiful. And then a Spanish half time show from Bad Bunny. What a message of tolerance. Wow. Protests at the Olympics. People are speaking out more and more.
“Love speaks louder than hate,” they say.
At 5: 30 AM, we left, making it up for them to catch the bus back to Boston, the sun popping out on 34th street, walking out through the morning, into a gorgeous day, protests and resistance everywhere, all over the papers, all over the city.
SaysKate Barnhart:
“I felt things starting to shift a little while ago- I’m glad that it’s blooming into this widespread multifaceted thing.”
Hope so, we concur. I hope so.
I think about the kid, on their way back to Boston, finding their way, just as I found mine, one year at a time, in between cities and states of mind, a little pain, a few ups and downs, unwanted visitors in the guesthouse, a snub here, a wound there, life lessons there, on the way to growing up.
Perused Jill Lepore’s story about her college years in The Chapman House, in Boston, a story in the New Yorker this week:
“No house can contain the messiness of those years of yearning and wanting, wanting, wanting, and I hated it and I loved it and mostly I loved it, even if no small number of the housemates drove me up the wall…”
And even some progress.
“BREAKING: Approximately 10,500 NYSNA nurses at Montefiore, Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Morningside and West reached tentative agreements with their hospitals late Sunday/ early Monday. Nurses fought for and won tentative agreements that:
- Maintain enforceable safe staffing standards and increase the number of nurses to improve patient care.
- Protect their health benefits that hospitals threatened to drastically cut.
- Protect nurses from workplace violence.
- Protect immigrant and trans patients and nurses.
- Safeguard against artificial intelligence in their contracts for the first time.
- Increase salaries by more than 12% over the life of the 3-year contract to recruit and retain nurses for safe patient care.
- Beat back aggressive take aways on healthcare and safe staffing enforcement.
- Return all nurses to work after ratification.
More details on the tentative agreements will follow ratification. Congrats nurses! ✊
https://www.nysna.org/press/victory-nurses-montefiore-mount-sinai-hospital-and-mount-sinai-morningside-and-west-reach
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