I agree with O’Hara when he talks fondly of New York in his poem Personal Poem, as well as his other poems. His poems are seeped with imagery that paints New York as a wonderful place and it seems like the speaker of the poem has special connotations with places in the city that to others would seem ordinary. Even the gritty parts of New York are painted with positivity as O’Hara says:

“It’s my lunch hour, so I go 

for a walk among the hum-colored   

cabs. First, down the sidewalk   

where laborers feed their dirty   

glistening torsos sandwiches

and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets   

They protect them from falling

bricks, I guess.”

          These lines remind me of my own New York City memories. One aspect of my college essay was discussing the memorable moments I have in my own neighborhood. The lines below from my college essay remind me of the nostalgia O’Hara has when he discusses New York.  

          The streets that I wandered and learned to love make up the vast city of New York, which I call home. I memorized every inch, from the cracks in the sidewalk to the homeless people’s signature corners. The brick wall on the south side of Houston between C and D that I came to memorize every morning from kindergarten to my senior year while walking to school– excited eyes turning into tired eyes. These streets capture everything. They capture the metamorphosis of the carefree child, who sang songs while walking down them, to the teenager still singing– but now too soft to be heard. They captured moments on corners: The corner of first kisses, 9th and A, to the corner of first coming out, 7th and B.

          I learned and cataloged those streets like that knowledge was more important than anything.

          Even though I love New York, the dystopian view of city life painted by Ballard in Billennium also resonated with me. The cramped living situation depicted made the reader feel suffocated at times. The idea of an overpopulated city reminded me of New York, specifically of the gentrification that has been spreading across the city. Many people are forced to move due to increase rent. Gentrification causes neighborhoods to lose their soul as well as lose their original residents. Billennium and it’s dystopian feel made me think of the byproducts of gentrification, and the migration of people from suburbia into the city In my neighborhood, local pizza places that have been around for decades, such as Nino’s Pizza, has been replaced with Starbucks and other local chains. This is a different type of nightmare than the one painted in Billennium but is one nightmare faced by people of this city

.

Frank O’Hara depicts New York City as a metropolis filled with good memories, while J.G. Ballard depicts an overcrowded dystopian city. Even though I agreed with aspects of both works, my New York City falls somewhere in between.

Like O’Hara, I enjoy the simple pleasures of New York City – the sunsets, the wide array of people going about their daily lives, the lights, etc. But the feelings of claustrophobia and overcrowding in Ballard’s story, resonated with me too, bringing back horrifying memories of pushing my way through Times Square through throngs of tourists who seemingly don’t understand that sidewalks are for walking.

I truly have a love-hate relationship with New York City.

On the one hand, I love the anonymity it provides. It lets me go wherever I want to do whatever I want with only a slim chance of running into somebody I know. While at home in Long Island, I would rather not go to the mall alone, so I don’t look like I have no friends. In NYC, I am comfortable enough to go the MoMa on my own when I have a craving for art, or wander around Chelsea and the Highline (which happens to be my favorite place in the city) without a specific purpose in mind. I could even walk around crying and nobody would think twice about me.

On the other hand, it is almost scary and isolating to be so unknown in the city. Nobody would think twice about me crying in the street! I understand how easy it is for Ward to just go with the flow of “a shuffling mob” but it is also frightening to be so surrounded by strangers just going along with their hustle and bustle. For all I know, as I sit and let the subway carry me from place to place, the person next to me is the perfect friend or partner for me, but I will never know because social propriety dictates that we should sit in silence instead. In “Personal Poem” O’Hara writes that “I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is thinking of me” then “and go back to work happy at the thought of possibly so” but as I read that line, I shudder, thinking about how the answer is more like “probably not”.

That probably makes me sound like a cynic, which I am not completely. I know their are both pros and cons to the anonymity of city life, just like there are pros and cons of small town life (aka being so known drives me crazy too). A song, “Union Square” by Chumped perfectly summarizes my mixed feelings toward New York City. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOj1w353sg).  The lead singer, Anika, sings “And the Subway smells like shit, but it’s lovely isn’t it, in the sense that it will take you anywhere”. She then describes the contradictory feelings of being with other people, but alone in New York City with “Yeah, we’re all in this together, but what does it all mean? Not a damn thing”. She then concludes “We are not alone, At least until our stop arrives.” Chumped encapsulates the jumbled feelings of being alone and part of the crowd of the city.

There’s a distinct feeling to an afternoon in New York, newly in love, sitting across from your lover at a café or next to them on a park bench. It’s poetry in real life – was the poetry inspired by the feeling, or the feeling by the poetry? And there is such beautiful poetry to describe this completeness – “Having a Coke with You is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne… in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles,” wrote Frank O’Hara, describing a simple lunch with the man he loves.

Or a poem from the New York City subway:

Its beauty struck me in the late summer, so much so that I felt compelled to write it down, send it as a text to my own newly found partner. “All we want is a metropolis of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding and park benches,” I read, and thought about how we had spent the summer the same way, holding hands on park benches or on picnic blankets, thinking only about the effect we had on each other and ourselves. But the point isn’t the art itself, it’s the person it makes you think about, and Frank O’Hara describes this – “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.”

Troye Sivan captures the same feeling of lightness,  of infatuation, in “Youth.” He uses the video to depict himself, a young gay man, finding a lover at a party, and the lyrics describe the way that this consumes you – “My youth is yours, run away now and forevermore.”

Or in Grimes’ song “Artangels,” a love letter to a city (Montréal), a theme which we so often see dedicated to New York. We see the power of cities, the way they make us feel, in encouraging these wonderful, over-the-top feelings, and she is also describing that feeling of devotion to another person, of doing anything they want and listening to anything they have to say – “You’re my darling girl, tell me what’s on your mind, tell me anything, anything you feel like… Think I need you and you know the things that I would do…”

But though we don’t need the art when we’ve fallen for another person, though they are all the art we need, we have all this poetry about that feeling, about the artist’s lover. This poetry is best when it’s light, casual, comfortable, like the love affair itself, and we need a way to express that feeling to our lover and to the world. Frank O’Hara says it best as he, in this reading, looks into the camera to say his final line – “What good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank…  it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.”