CityRealty Insider > City Rhyme: New York in Poetry

City Rhyme: New York in Poetry

JUNE 15, 2010

Chicago has those Big Shoulders, but the Big Apple has inspired plenty of poetry.

Walt Whitman’s Manahatta may be a good counterpart to the Carl Sandburg ode to the Second City—the former was certainly a huge influence on the latter’s life and work. The magic of New York at night inspired both Hart Crane’s paean to the Brooklyn Bridge (via The Poetry Foundation) and Amy Lowell’s New York at Night, while Anna Hempstead Branch favored the early morning hours. Sara Teasdale seeks love in Union Square and Nikki Giovanni ponders the possibilities while Walking Down Park. Jack Kerouac set his blues to music on MacDougal Street.

Poets are often best at bringing details—the everyday drama of a subway platform, a gritty laundromat—to life. Baseball poetry is a given—Robert Lord Keyes’s Yankees “knock birds out of trees”—but even handball and bocce ball get some play on the city’s bard beat. Read-and-rhyme centers like Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Bowery Poetry Club inspire poets of all ages and keep the tradition alive for the present and the future. For written inspiration, I Speak of the City: Poems of New York explores the New York of generations of poets verse by verse.

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