Michael T. Martin

Yankee Stadium in the foreground, the old Polo Grounds in the background. When baseball ruled New York

This photo reminds me of a gas station on the edge of Bishop, California. We stopped in for a pack of smokes after camping in the open-air in the mountains. Hispanic kids skateboarded in the parking lot, trucks with bumper stickers derided the government, and the clerk told me about what it used to be like out there. The gas station was the center of town and everyone was making the American scene.

(photo by Robert Adams via We Make Money Not Art)

One (two) of my favorite writers in New York

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

After a day at a funeral, Walt Whitman seem the most prescient. From “Song of Myself”

#brutalism (at Spoonbill & Sugartown Books)

Words for Love by Ted Berrigan

for Sandy

Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow
as like make me tired as not. I go my
myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged
by a self that can never be still, pushed
by my surging blood, my reasoning mind.

I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn
this, my weakness, smites me. A glass
of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark-
ness of clouds at one o’clock obsess me.
I weep for all of these or laugh.

By day I sleep, an obscurantist, lost
in dreams of lists, compiled by my self
for reassurance. Jackson Pollock René
Rilke Benedict Arnold I watch
my psyche, smile, dream wet dreams, and sigh.

At night, awake, high on poems, or pills
or simple awe that loveliness exists, my lists
flow differently. Of words bright red
and black, and blue. Bosky. Oubliette. Dis-
severed. And O, alas

Time disturbs me. Always minute detail
fills me up. It is 12:10 in New York. In Houston
it is 2 pm. It is time to steal books. It’s
time to go mad. It is the day of the apocalpyse
the year of parrot fever! What am I saying?

Only this. My poems do contain
wilde beestes. I write for my Lady
of the Lake. My god is immense, and lonely
but uncowed. I trust my sanity, and I am proud. If
I sometimes grow weary, and seem still, nevertheless

my heart still loves, will break.

I might feel shame this week

and doubt

the bee you see turned green

turned inside out

and I unscrewed the lid

so to inspect

my satisfying smote of this insect

the buzz this week by Katy Rossing

“If you believe people do whatever they can get away with, you might imagine [Davidson’s] portraits of people peering out windows or sprawled on beds to be portraits of lust and false-heartedness. Manhattan’s geography generates infidelity: ours is a capacious city, a vast island whose size permits isolation and therefore betrayal.”

“Argumentation is a good skill to have, but the real argument should be with oneself. ” from “The Essay, an Exercise in Doubt” by Philip Lopate

When the mediocre is elevated by speculative greed, the real genius of an artist…is diluted. How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art via The Village Voice