A Poem I Loved: "New York Poem"

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I chose this poem, mistakenly believing that somewhere in the body of the text, it referred to New Year’s. Ah, well. There is no reference to New Year’s, in this Terrance Hayes poem, but there is an unmistakable feeling of newness. Which is why I love poetry, for its ability to implicate, maybe, at even greater degree than fiction. Everything is implied. Which is why it’s sort of a miracle that a couple of lines and stanzas, a handful of words, can impart anything at all. But that’s the magic of words, and of this poem. 

Start with the first line:

"In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown

one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles

of buildings where there are more miles

of shortcuts and alternative takes than

there are Miles Davis alternative takes."

Hayes’ familiar love for wordplay rears its endearing head. The futurism of New York is depicted here, and along with it, everything that particular brand of futurism depicts. A kind of hope- because we associate the future, in all of its infinite iterations, with possibility. And New York is also the nexus of possibility amongst thousands of cultures and nationalities, perhaps hope’s very epicenter, in America, a very famously hopeful country. Maybe that’s why I associate this poem with New Year’s. That feeling of endless possibility, which one can wear very briefly, like a new, shiny coat, and imagine themselves as someone else. You, too, can imagine yourself as someone else, when reading a poem. Miles Davis’ improvisational genius is referenced here, in that witticism of “more miles of shortcuts… than there are Miles Davis alternative takes”. So many different ways we could go. So many different ways we could think of something, so many different people and lives to meet and lead.

This is almost a different world. A different New York.

“There is a white girl who looks hi-

jacked with feeling in her glittering jacket

and her boots that look made of dinosaur

skin and R is saying to her I love you

again and again.” 

Hayes zooms in on a particular moment of intimacy. What the hell are "dinosaur boots"? Who is R? Why is he saying I love you? What a lovely turn of phrase- “hi-jacked with feeling”. We are not told anything. We are merely assaulted with specifics, with the unbearable detail of this scene. I love how Hayes captures the eventful monotony of a party where you are privy to the secrets of strangers, whose mouths have been loosened by liquor. The only privacy is the privacy that the reader, or the witness, affords the conversation. Everything here is illusory. 

A stream of consciousness follows the rest of the poem. 

“Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty word for “slaughterhouse.” Someone says mermaids are just fish ladies.”

Hayes is talking about language as a means of transformation. Of not just our immediate surroundings, but the textures and colors of our griefs, our sorrows, our heartaches and joys, that particular brand of melancholy that one can feel thinking of a particular month, associating it with an ex-lover, how someone can look at a synonym for the word “slaughterhouse” and find it beautiful. Writers are people who look for the pain in beauty, and the beauty in pain. Writers are exactly the kind of people who would say mermaids are just “fish ladies”, dressing down that magical concept of supernatural creatures into something tangible, something meant to be comprehended by human concepts. We can do both. We’re very contrarian in that way. But to be a writer is ultimately to be that person, who is un-self-consciously admitting that, yes, a word for slaughterhouse can be beautiful. How else are we supposed to dress up all this dreary death? Give us something to work with, Hayes seems to be saying, a plea directed at Life itself. 

Hayes ends the poem with these few lines: 

“That’s how I think of New York. Someone

jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,

and someone jonesing for grace.”

I’ve always struggled to comprehend what these last few lines mean. I know, of course, of Bond girl Grace Jones. Hayes is building on the idea of a contranym referenced previously in the poem. He is explicitly stating that he is not a man afraid of contradictions. He's a poet, for God's sake. New York City is a city full of contradictions. This poem is distinctly alive. The man writing it is alive. If anything, contradictions, and this poem, by extension, show a distinct awareness of how absurd it is to exist as any iteration of anything.

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Citation: Hayes, T. (2010, November 22). New York Poem. The New Yorker. 

New York Poem | The New Yorker