There is music in the street.  It’s easy to be enthralled by the sounds of the natural world, but urban noise frequently distresses us, disrupts our head space or intervenes into the sounds we are plugged into at the moment.  But sometimes, the city bustle has its charms. So much of the urban noise that we think of as a distraction from some other narrative that has captured our attention or an intrusion into our sealed-off domestic space is seen as ugly.  

But perhaps we just need to learn to listen.  Is it the sounds themselves that are the issue or our reactions to them?  Maybe instead of sonic garbage, the clatter and hum is part of the chorus of life.  As I get older and crankier, I try to remember to leave that door in myself open so instead of pushing things out, I can let them come and go.     [Read more…]

On the back cover of Frank O’Hara’s classic City Lights Books collection, Lunch Poems, he defines his efforts succinctly:

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noontide, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch his favorite meal…. 

While I have always loved O’Hara’s work and sought in my own writing to emulate his temporal discipline and culinary wisdom, what I find most useful about the form he invents is how it can present the most ordinary of moments in a way that captures the extraordinary.     [Read more…]