Pub Date : 2014-09-22DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.003.0023
Steve Zeitlin
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Pub Date : 2014-03-22DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.003.0012
Steve Zeitlin
The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) is bumper to bumper. Up in the cab of the POEMobile, I can see a clear and beautiful view of nighttime Manhattan on my left, but curving ahead for miles along this crazy, twisted excuse for a highway, traffic is at a standstill. I'm returning home from the POEMobile's celebration for the Muslim holiday of Eid at Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights, Queens. The POEMobile is a magnificent, brightly painted, poem-bedecked art truck with painted iron wings arching above its roof and poems in a two dozen languages emblazoned on its side--beneath which hides a dilapidated 1988 Chevy Step Van, which could conk out at any moment. The name POEMobile is inscribed in cut metal above the cab above the Pablo Neruda line: Llego lapoesla a buscarme / Poetry came in search of me. The POEMobile, sponsored by Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore, projects poems onto walls and buildings in tandem with live readings and musical performances in neighborhoods in New York. As poets perform in their native languages from the street or plaza, the words float above their heads, often several stories high. The projections open with an animated, feathered wing brushing words onto the building, inspired by a Martin Espada line: "God must be an owl, electricity coursing through the hollow bones, a white wing brushing the building." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With the POEMobile stuck in a classic late night New York City traffic jam standstill, my mind wanders back to our recent programs--a Russian/Ukrainian Yevgeny Yevtushenko tribute on the Bowery; a Persian Norooz/ New Year celebration in DUMBO, and both a Korean and a Chinese New Year celebration in and around Flushing Town Hall in Queens. Specially designed software enables poems in their original language to morph into English and vice versa. The community experiences the impact of the poetry in their spoken tongue, while the English-speaking visitors and neighbors grasp the deep poetic experiences of the foreign language poets they live among. As traffic inches forward, one car length at a time, my mind muses on this guerilla poetry, set up in diverse urban neighborhoods, creating momentary beauty in words and music and light, and traveling under the radar of both news outlets and, for the most part, the authorities. Under the radar. This contraption travels under the radar. That's what sparked the traffic-induced dream.... World War III breaks out, and the aides are under attack from all fronts. The crew of the POEMobile is out of work, as all funding for the arts has been summarily axed. The new AXIS powers of Iran, Iraq, Korea, China, and Russia move to take over the world. It's a scene right out of a cheesy Hollywood movie. The Allied powers are on the verge of collapse. Our Nighthawks, Raptors, and drones can't penetrate their missik defense systems. Our counterattacks are continually repelled. Hey," I say to mypartner in crime, the poet Bob Holman, director of Bowery Arts + Science.
布鲁克林-皇后区高速公路(BQE)上车水马龙。在POEMobile的驾驶室里，我可以清晰而美丽地看到左边的曼哈顿夜景，但沿着这条疯狂而扭曲的高速公路向前蜿蜒数英里，交通陷入停滞。我刚刚结束在皇后区杰克逊高地多元化广场举行的穆斯林开斋节庆祝活动，正要回家。“诗车”是一辆华丽的、色彩鲜艳的、装饰着诗歌的艺术卡车，漆过的铁翅膀拱起车顶，车身侧面印着24种语言的诗歌——下面隐藏着一辆破旧的1988年雪佛兰Step Van，随时都可能抛锚。POEMobile的名字刻在刻在驾驶室上方的金属切割上，上面是巴勃罗·聂鲁达的线条:Llego lapoesla a buscarme /诗歌来找我。由Bowery Arts + Science和City love赞助的“诗车”(POEMobile)将诗歌投射到墙壁和建筑物上，同时在纽约社区进行现场朗读和音乐表演。当诗人在街头或广场上用母语表演时，歌词就会在他们的头顶上飘来飘去，通常有好几层楼高。投影开始时，一只充满活力的羽毛翅膀将文字刷到建筑上，灵感来自马丁·埃斯帕达(Martin Espada)的一句台词:“上帝一定是一只猫头鹰，电流穿过中空的骨头，一只白色的翅膀掠过建筑。”当我的诗车卡在纽约市典型的深夜交通堵塞中时，我的思绪又回到了我们最近的节目——俄罗斯/乌克兰叶夫根尼·叶夫图申科(Yevgeny Yevtushenko)在鲍厄里街(Bowery)的献礼;在DUMBO举行波斯新年庆祝活动，在皇后区法拉盛市政厅及其周围举行韩国新年和中国新年庆祝活动。特别设计的软件可以将原文的诗歌转换成英文，反之亦然。社区感受着母语诗歌的影响，而以英语为母语的游客和邻居则感受着他们所生活的外语诗人的深刻诗意体验。随着车流一点点向前推进，每次一辆车的长度，我的脑海里浮现出这种游击式的诗歌，它出现在不同的城市社区，用文字、音乐和光线创造出瞬间的美，在新闻媒体和大部分当局的雷达下行进。在雷达下。这个精巧的装置在雷达下运行。这就是引发交通诱导梦的原因....第三次世界大战爆发，助手们受到了来自各方面的攻击。诗车的工作人员都失业了，因为所有用于艺术的资金都被草率地砍掉了。这是好莱坞烂片里的场景。同盟国正处于崩溃的边缘。我们的夜鹰，猛禽和无人机无法穿透他们的任务防御系统。我们的反击不断被击退。我对我的犯罪伙伴，诗人鲍勃·霍尔曼(Bob Holman)说，他是鲍厄里艺术与科学学院的主任。“还记得吗?这件事很低调。”毫无征兆地，喷气发动机出现在POEMobile的铁机翼上，这个疯狂的装置起飞了。鲍勃调整了他的头盔，电流在他的血管里流动。第一站是华盛顿广场的和平集会。我们需要CJ，我们的投影专家。…
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Pub Date : 2013-03-22DOI: 10.1515/9781618114198-006
Holli G. Levitsky
My parents took their honeymoon in 1946, at the Nevele Country Club in Sullivan County, New York. The Catskills beckoned the young couple, as they had welcomed tens of thousands of Jews, young and old, American and immigrant, families and singles, for decades. Like my mother and her family, the Jews vacationing in the Catskill Mountains came primarily from New York City. In this city, and this America, it was expected that my mother's friends' parents--like her own--had thick foreign accents, spoke fluent Yiddish at home, and worked hard to succeed. One sign of success was the ability to take a summer holiday in the Catskill Mountains. Families and close friends or neighbors might share the cost of a rented van for the two-hour ride from Brooklyn to Sullivan County, and then rent rooms or cabins at the same bungalow colony or kuchalayn (boarding house). My mother remembers her first kuchalayn, in Ellenville, as a large farm with chickens and hayrides, and her father--like the other fathers--coming up only on weekends. The American and immigrant Jews, who had made the many hotels, bungalow colonies, and farms of Ulster and Sullivan counties their summer retreats year after year, were always looking for family, for landsmanshaftn (society of immigrants from the same town or region), for a home away from home. As a second home to generations of Jews, the Catskill Mountains became a place where a Jewish family could bond as a Jewish family--that is, they could practice the culture of Judaism without the pressure to assimilate. Families spending summers together with other Jews could anticipate re-creating--and recreating with--these Jewish friends year after year. The Jewish threads of their winter lives might seem to be slowly unraveling through their increasingly secular lives, but the Catskills remained essentially a subculture that they renewed each year, as yet another summer of Jews were beckoned there. Because the Catskill Mountains summoned one with the promise of prolonged engagement and deeply felt connections--replacing the congestion of the city for the wide open spaces of the Mountains-- children and adults mingled in acts of community: feeling nachis as the children paraded their gifts through the weekend talent shows, cooking meals together in the common kitchen of the kuchalayn, meeting for card games every evening. For the parents, each day must have been another rare and wonderful moment when time stands still amid the deep well of family love, safely netted by a sense of community so complete it seemed impossible to find elsewhere. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] By the time my mother's modern Orthodox family took their summer holidays in Ellenville, or Monticello, or Woodridge, staying at chicken farms or rooming houses, it was already a segregated world. Lost was the innocence of the Founding Father's declaration that "All men are created equal." Jews were restricted from participating fully in American society in a number of ways--they e
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Pub Date : 2011-09-22DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.003.0008
Steve Zeitlin
My family and I love August in New York. Parking is easy, and we even get a seat on the subways. But the first week of August every summer, we, too, flee the sirens and horns, abandoning the cacophonous clatter of City Lore's First Street and First Avenue offices for a week at the beach in Garden City, South Carolina. My wife and fellow folklorist Amanda Dargan's parents rent the house, and all of her sisters and our nieces and nephews pile in, spending afternoons and evenings on the screened-in porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and sea. Among our traditions is an evening spent reading poems on the porch, a tradition Lucas Dargan, Amanda's dad, eagerly anticipates, with his at-the-ready 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But we all bring a few poems down to the beach to read, and Aidan Powers, now 10 years old, comes equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poems from books like Falling Up. (One of the Silverstein lines delivered on poetry night has even become a kind of family expression: "We can be friends forever," I joke with Aidan. "There's really nothing to it. I tell you what to do, and you do it!") Masterpieces and ditties are read side by side. Poems from the English Romantics like Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron are read side by side with cowboy poetry and nonsense verses. One family story reminded Lucas of an old limerick that he mostly recalled: "A wonderful bird is the pelican / His bill holds more than his belly can...." Then Lucas forgot a line, which we were able to recapture thanks to the internet, available even at the beach in recent years. "Ah, that's it! 'He can take in his beak / Food enough for a week / But I'm damned if I see how the helican.'" But the poems that waft onto the sea air that evening carry with them not only the finely wrought words of their creators, but the family stories and personalities and ethos of the family gathering. Each year, for instance, Amanda's sister Sarah reads "The Minuet" by Mary Mapes Dodge in honor of her mother: "Grandma told me all about it / Told me so I couldn't doubt it / How she danced / my Grandma danced / Long ago." She reads that poem every year, because it reminds us all of a story that: Frances, now 94, loves to tell of how she once jumped up on a table at the Junior Senior ball and danced to Cab Calloway's 1931 hit "Minnie the Moocher." We could have guessed what poem would come next. Lucas, a forester and environmentalist, never misses a chance to read Shelley's "The (Cloud": "I am the daughter of Earth and Water, / And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores; / I change, but I cannot die . …
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