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Overview
The long-awaited follow-up to The Key to the City—a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986—Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital emanates a quiet and authoritative passion for social justice, embodying the voice of a subtle, sophisticated conscience.
The "displaced" in the book's title refers to the poor, the homeless, and the disenfranchised who populate New York, the city that serves at once as gritty backdrop, city of dreams, and urban nightmare. Winters also addresses the culturally, ethnically, and emotionally excluded and, in these politically sensitive poems, writes without sentimentality of a cityscape of tenements and immigrants, offering her poetry as a testament to the lives of have-nots. In the central poem, Winters witnesses the relationship between two women of disparate social classes whose friendship represents the poet's political convictions. With poems both powerful and musical, The Displaced of Capital marks Anne Winters's triumphant return and assures her standing as an essential New York poet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226902333 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2004 |
| Series: | Phoenix Poets |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 72 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE DISPLACED OF CAPITAL
By ANNE WINTERS
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2004 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-90235-7
Chapter One
THE MILL-RACE
The Mill-Race
Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth, are sunk in green light. The low stones like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers
crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the late afternoon July thunderstorm unfurling over Manhattan. Its set and luminous velocity, long stalks of stormlight, and then the first drops strike their light civic stripes on the pavement. Between the palings, oat-panicles sift a few bright grains to the stonecourse. Above it, at shoulder height a side door is flung open, fire-exits; streaming from lobbies
come girls and women, white girls in shadowy-striped rayon skirts, plastic ear-hoops, black girls in gauzy-toned nylons, ripples of cornrows and plaits, one girl with shocked-back ash hair, lightened eyebrows; one face from Easter Island, mauve and granitic; thigh on thigh, waist by waist; the elbow's curlicue and the fingers'; elbow-work, heel-work, are suddenly absorbed in the corduroyed black rubber stairs of the bus. Humid sighs, settlings, each face tilts up to the windows' shadowless yards of mercuric green plate glass. An interspace then, like the slowing of some rural water-mill, a creaking and dipping pause of black-splintered paddles, the irregularly dappled off-lighting-bottle-green-the lucid slim sluice falling back in a stream from the plank edge. It won't take us altogether, we say, the mill-race-it won't churn us up altogether. We'll keep a glib stretch of leisure water, like our self's self-to reflect the sky. But we won't (says the bus rider now to herself). Nothing's left over, really, from labor. They've taken it all for the mill-race.
In close-ups now, you can see it in every face, despite the roped rain light pouring down the bus-windows- it's the strain of gravity itself, of life hours cut off and offered to the voice that says "Give me this day your life, that is LABOR, and I'll give you back one day, then another. For mine are the terms." It's gravity, spilling in capillaries, cheek-tissue trembling, despite the make-up, the monograms, the mass-market designer scarves,
the army of signs disowning the workplace and longing for night ... But even as the rain slackens, labor lengthens itself along Broadway. The night signs come on, that wit has set up to draw money: O'DONNELL'S, BEIRUT CAFE, YONAH'S KNISH ... People dart out from awnings. The old man at the kiosk starts his late shift, whipping off rainstreaked lucite sheets from his stacks of late-market newsprint.
If there is leisure, bus-riders, it's not for you, not between here and uptown or here and the Bronx. Outside Marine Midland, the black sea of unmarked corporate hire-cars waits for the belated office lights, the long rainy run to the exurbs; and perhaps on a converted barn roof in Connecticut leisure may silver the shingles, somewhere the densely packed labor-mines that run a half mile down from the sky to the Battery rise, metamorphic, in water-gardens, lichened windows where the lamp lights Thucydides or Gibbon.
It's not a water-mill really, labor. It's like the nocturnal paper-mill pulverizing, crushing each fiber of rag into atoms, or the workhouse tread-mill, smooth-lipped, that wore down a London of doxies and sharps, or the flour-mill, faërique, that raised the cathedrals and wore out hosts of dustdemons, but it's mostly the miller's curse-gift, forgotten of God yet still grinding, the salt-mill, that makes the sea, salt. The Grass Grower
I In 1979, a woman who lived in West Harlem took a snapshot of a man who grew grass in the courtyard, her father-in-law. In a summer hat, the thin face acute, serene ... As on the first day
I glimpsed his counter and sign, JOEL HARMON, RADIO REPAIRS, propped in or part of the pawnshop's mixed economy, so those last evenings you seemed to be simply conducting, in silence, your life.
-My brow pressed to the shop-pane, the shade of the cast iron balls and Amsterdam's carhorns, a dog somewhere snapping and whining- inside, arms angled strangely, you were prising
a cathedral radio's cabinet from its mounting. It was 1949. I was in the sixth grade, and slow to go home. I'd drift through the shop you kept alone at that hour, or climb on a stool and listen; for we
talked a lot, in that early time, or you did. Flipping knobs, half-effacing your cool inflections with QXR or local Harlem "race-music" ... Shawville, a town west of Selma, you named
as a birthplace, and Georgia, where you were married. "Alabama's no place for the black man" (you said) "but a Jim Crow town in North Georgia is hurtful to man, displeasing to God."
Line by line you gave me Jim's portrait, his subtle subsets. "Say you're colored, got to go downtown out of your own part-make sure you don't drink water, and think through your memory-map
where you're going- 'Here I can hand in prescriptions, but stay standing up.' Or 'There I can sit: Jim-Crowed to the end of the counter.' There's no signs, like some think up here-you work it yourself." You ignored
our own strange suchness (seemed to), skinny white kid, black vet with pale burn-bubbles on his forearms. You preferred history-told me how slaving marched almost as many to death as Hitler, Stalin-liked words
that bit into things, anecdotes, numbers because they stood free from your voice, that even you must have sometimes wished to escape. One bad story
gave me your wife's name, a story from Georgia. "It must have been on our marriage-date. For her present, we'd picked a hat-store downtown, supposed to sell to our color. But 'Stay out,'
the store lady said to me-like a dog. Said to stay out. But I could see Sue asking to try on a hat; first they dropped a square of cotton cloth on her head, then sort of dropped the hat
on top-no way my wife's going to finger-tip-touch that hat-and she looked, cloth in one eye, such a fool- Well, those were my thoughts, you know, at that moment ..." When I showed, even past trying to show,
my shock at the cloth, you stopped me (it was like you): "That's state law; she sells some colored-touched hat to white folks, she goes to jail ..." In fact, coming back to the why of your talking, was it for transmission? Already I sensed your assignment: to order your past, live your life as history, number-to name the effectual powers. "When they called me up, I found out Jim ran the army ..." Like my father,
you'd no word for combat for me, but one day coming in-you were on the phone, back turned-I heard the long syllables I that came back years later cycling north of the Seine through the hay-ricks and spires of Amien, Rouen ...
Of course I could see through your shirt your ribbed, olive-drab undershirt, twin to my father's-why, he'd done boot-camp in Georgia, I'd lived there. But I never saw
that, not being my father, you couldn't know that, or that I could speak up and tell you. So I'd sensed, by then, that Jim, and not you, was the subject; my father had never met Jim. But I liked transmission, it was something
I could be there for. And so, for years as it seemed, I heard you tell how, on the boat back, after a poker game, you made the resolve not to go below Mason-Dixon again-"COLORED FOR SWEEP-UP ONLY- And I kept it,
Jim made me a grass-widow man here in Harlem. I wasn't about to go South again after ... the Army, and Sue ... So I never raised my own kids. But how could I go back, you tell me. Just tell me that thing."
II I had something else on my mind, in the late fifties and sixties, than you. I was scared-of my childhood, of Harlem, your own aridity; your all-too-imaginable ironies, too, on my sporadic
Civil-Rights doings. So I can't guess what you felt, when the events you'd schooled your life toward took on their dates and place names. It seems eerie, today, as Harlem outsoars Bangladesh in early deaths, rediscovers TB-that the year I met you again
in Walgreens, and our late visits began, it might have seemed Jim would someday slip from the world ... Your son, his wife June, had moved to New York. She often dropped in; you'd a super's apartment just off Columbus,
and had gone all quiet. I'd sit and watch you boil water in a skillet ("It's faster") for coffee, on your pre-war range, your profile against a seedy screen frayed thin at the perimeter ... A few words about your grandson, or the grass-growing. A sugar bowl full of seed, a trowel, the nightly waterings ... It was strange. "Where do you get the grass-seed?" (Politely.) Your far-off smile (you wore glasses, now): "I get it from the grass."
As if, your histories fallen away, each practice of the present brimmed up in you silently-when June came, you lifted the kitchen chairs into the court "to enjoy the evening." But she, who was pregnant again, preferred
to walk up and down, while you cooled the concrete before her with hose-spray. You'd fountained its cracks and random fissures with grass-tufts, untrimmed, fantastic, running to seed ...
I tilted my chair back. Night had fallen. Your glasses were dim octagonals in the arc-light that fell through the cyclone fencing. Past two buildings that lay in rubble (the long slide had begun), in the next block, we could glimpse
the high glare of downtown, a few outscaled towers, and, nearer, the gray lights of stacked stairwell windows. From the far side of your nature, no word arrived ... Only the night watering
went on, sparkling tracings as you came forward, your back to the streetlamp, your freshets waist-high in the darkness, thumb-misting the tips of the grasses with idle tendrils of light.
The Displaced of Capital
"A shift in the structure of experience ..." As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning, the city is ever alluring, but thousands of miles to the south the subsistence farms of chickens, yams and guava are bought by transnationals, burst into miles of export tobacco and coffee; and now it seems the farmer has left behind his ploughed-under village for an illegal partitioned attic in the outer boroughs. Perhaps he's the hand that emerged with your change from behind the glossies at the corner kiosk; the displaced of capital have come to the capital.
The displaced of capital have come to the capital, but sunlight steams the lingerie-shop windows, the coffee bar has its door wedged open, and all I ask of the world this morning is to pass down my avenue, find a fresh-printed Times and an outside table; and because I'm here in New York the paper tells me of here: of the Nicaraguans, the shortage of journeyman-jobs, the ethnic streetcorner job-markets where men wait all day but more likely the women find work, in the new hotels or in the needle trades, a shift in the structure of experience.
A shift in structure of experience told the farmer on his Andean plateau "Your way of life is obsolescent." -But hasn't it always been so? I inquire as my column spills from page one to MONEY&BUSINESS. But no, it says here the displaced stream now to tarpaper favelas, planetary barracks with steep rents for paperless migrants, so that they remit less to those obsolescent, starving relatives on the altiplano, pushed up to ever thinner air and soil; unnoticed, the narrative has altered.
Unnoticed, the narrative has altered, but though the city's thus indecipherably orchestrated by the evil empire, down to the very molecules in my brain as I think I'm thinking, can I escape morning happiness, or not savor our fabled "texture" of foreign and native poverties? (A boy tied into greengrocer's apron, unplaceable accent, brings out my coffee.) But, no, it says here the old country's "de-developing" due to its mountainous debt to the First World-that's Broadway, my cafe and my table, so how can I today warm myself at the sad heartening narrative of immigration? Unnoticed, the narrative has altered, the displaced of capital have come to the capital. An Immigrant Woman
PART ONE
I
Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral -the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland over tarpaper seams, gantried water butts, and splintery tenement cornices milled with acanthus and classical grasses of nineteenth-century dream-slum fantasy. We could see, from our rooftops, the endspan floating its ant-threads of traffic to the granite salients of the anchorage, and through its strands on the west the Financial District's watery silhouettes.
But it was our own foundations, crumbling in the sandy soil, that made us protest the drill rigs sounding for a wider bridge ramp to funnel the airport traffic over us into Manhattan. "Construction tremors will weaken our buildings": from the over-roosted tenements clinging near the anchorage flew manuscript lists of signatures, block-groups' painfully Englished petitions. But City Hall adoze, sleep-feeding, just flooded us II
with chimerical figures and blueprints, wearing us down. Our own "block-leader," Luz, a Guatemalan law student at NYU where I studied classics, distracted us more easily with her "pure language" or anti-Puerto Rican tirades. "Call that Spanish? Take my sitter-muy indio, still speaks some Maya mountain-language BUT the beautiful Spanish!" And so one evening this sitter, Pilar, came over-forty, perhaps, with a long fawn-tinted oval face, and read in low tones an archaic poem to the Madonna. "My daughter knows it in Quiché and English-" and she passed around, wistfully, a First Communion photo-flat cheekbones like her mother's, long black braids, straight look.
Luz told us Pilar had lost husband and son to the Violence; a machine-gunned death heap in the center of their village- "They killed all the men. But when my family came here, she came with her girl, we helped with the green card, and she's a hotel maid now near the UN ..." Much realer, this, than our own bridge-inflicted, some-day disaster. And who knew but our bridge might metamorphose, as the City said ("Global cities draw capital"), into a river of money ("We'll all sell cuchifritos on the ramp"), and anyway, mainly, summer
III
was running out, with its open evenings and windows. One Saturday, turning onto my block from the subway, I heard my name, crossed the street where twin buildings had area-ways. and saw you waving, the same, Pilar, from a window below the swag-bellied area railings. "Come have some coffee-go around in back." I walked down the building-side, and turned in a trash-littered airwell by a door with multiple doorbells. You opened from a wooden hallway, unpainted, with padlocked doors. "See, the super's cut up his flat for illegals. They took out an inside wall, so our room has a window-we all share the bath." I entered a lime-walled room-chairs and table, sofa-bed. Your front wall was the building front, the three others drywall. On the bureau, a black-shawled prie-dieu: two photos; two candles in translucent, white-waxed sacks, and a polychrome Madonna with meeting brows.
Through your window, car wheels, railings; and, above, my own second-story windows. "We saw you reading there," you said from behind me, "when we moved in." You sat me on the sofa, and formally presented your daughter (she moved her schoolbooks all to one end.) Near her, a shallow, linoleumed-over trench and a bathroom sink. You said: "I'm a widow from the mountains near Morache, very near the home-town of Señora Luz. My real work is hotel maid, and I've got a nice job, at a place called the Tricontinental." Then you paused, and I felt how clearly you'd presented yourself, as Americans do, with your job, your état civil, and I said: "I'm a graduate student at NYU, where Luz studies, no, not married, no children ..." I tried to add something else at once, to leave this less ... definitive, but nothing came, so we ran through bridge-rumors, and soon we were hardly listening, waiting for our own next word, and laughing at our gabble. Pequita told us what the priest had said about the drilling; you spoke of Pequita's First Communion, and none of us could stop finding striking things to say. Next day you came over to see my plants, and I came back for soup-supper, looking up at my windows, which in the easy half-yellow light of autumn looked oddly beckoning. As we ate, you leaned forward, with a sudden rogue's smile, and mockingly proposed that we three walk across the bridge, "There's a path up there. If the bridge is bad, we'll tell off the Mayor-" (In what spirit, I wondered, had you listened to our committee?) And when I got home I looked down, and through your sheer curtains saw you cleaning up, and Pequita, at the table, reading. IV
But next week, instead of the plank stair that zigzags up the anchorage-side, we wandered the riverside shipping alleys. From below, we could see overhead the under-arch of the bridge, and feel the resonant top-thrum of westbound subways and trucks. Then the riverside-I loved this part. A sort of post-industrial fenworld, with tiny terrace houses, big dredger-parts laid aside from the drillings, and abandoned wreckers' lots filled with sea-floor light and trembling, long-awned panicles of switchgrass. Its timelessness soothed me-though ephemeral. Even that day, one freshly tuckpointed facade, and a pair of brandnew bronze Edwardian mermaid doorknockers. I could see our quarter five years from now, say-the withering discount chains, tentative boutiques, and mother and daughter figuring, to the upscale "pioneers," as neighborhood indigenes, living on with strange literalness among them, supplying their just-permissible quantum of urban grit.
You were ahead, and Pequita trailed us, rattling weed stalks with a stray lath. As we progressed in and out of the endspan's slatted shadows, you turned and called me into a side-lot-sunken concrete, flask-green puddles, to a broken-off building wall. It had been interior, once-rows of soiled roomsized plaster squares trailing sawn pipes, with one high trembling toilet, like a pearl. In a lower square, fringed with ailanthus and barbs of gang graffiti, was a mural. Muy latino: the mountain dreaming the city: a terrace cafe with palm trees and a dancer shawled in black lace, with inward-angled castanets. And you lifted yourself on tiptoe, Pilar, to touch the lace, as you might have grazed Pequita's cheek. I felt a pang, as if I already needed you sturdy inside your sturdy body, not this gesture as if, exiled within, you reached out- We stepped back, museum-wise, to contemplate, and you said: "Luz likes to say I'm some mountain-woman, but when my mother died, I lived with my aunt in the City-I only went back when I married." I told her I'd lived in this city, with a stepmother, who'd divorced my uncle to marry my father; and beat me. "A stepmother's a curse of God," you said gently. And on the walk back, pointed out more wall palms, beaches, until New York seemed a dot in a belt of capitals high on the globe: world-cities, packed with immigrants, refugees, Gastarbeiter: a snowy latitude suffused with tropical nostalgia. V
We were a threesome. Coffee, suppers, TV, Pequita at my computer-you'd asked me to teach her- or sleeping on my sofa, one bad month they moved you to night shift. Yet only that summer, I'd worked in my window like a scholar in a lamplit bay, the night filled with myriad noises, like Roman Juvenal, to whose ears "came ever the sounds of buildings collapsing." Across, the two tenement-faces, florid, all bucrania, meanders, dusky trails of fire-escape bedding. And everything underlit by the sinister, slow-stopping car lights of our street.
But now it was the dailiness of two from another hemisphere. Through snow-fissures, winds fluting on railings and building-flaws, Pilar in her low frame paced with armfuls of laundry, washed in the sink and hung to dry everywhere. The thousand stratagems of those who simply must not spend; and the tiny mother-decisions: though you preferred periphery, housekeeping around her, you'd make yourself interrupt her, to mop behind your sweeping. And Pequita-I saw her wrap you up on the sofa when you had flu, and bring you orange juice, as they'd taught her in school, for she loved you, she was the person who loved you- I saw too, that of what I wanted the university to be for me-a tiny model of the city with its own rules and subsets: "Tell me each day who I am"-you'd found your part in Pequita; I followed the shape of your day touching center as it funneled into her hand and moving pencil-point. VI
For everything seemed natural to Pequita: the Credo, her photocopied choir music piled beside the tidy prie-dieu, our neighborhood of syringe-filled gutters, drug-stoops and pimps, her school's turkey cutouts, metal detectors, backed-up toilets ... Our human wilderness, half-urban, half-surreal to her was a matter-of-fact Eden, like the picturesque ruins and laughably rococo grottoes imagined
by the seicento as the Golden Age. -And I, I thought her whole world, it comes back- touching, as if her child's paradisial will were there for my affectionate recreation, like our still faithfully, occasionally, typed-up and dispatched protests from the Ramp Committee to the Mayor. Slight effects of perspective, tiny human gestures giving point to the city's vast, ironic beauty.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE DISPLACED OF CAPITAL by ANNE WINTERS Copyright © 2004 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsI. The Mill-Race
The Mill-Race
The Grass Grower
The Displaced of Capital
An Immigrant Woman
Cold-Water Flats
II. The First Verse
The Depot
Villanelle
A Sonnet Map of Manhattan
Wall and Pine: The Rain
Houston Street: A Wino
East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia
Greenwich Street: Sad Father with a Hat
MacDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements
East Eleventh Street: Three Images
Eighteenth Street: The Brown Owl of Ulm
First Avenue: Drive-In Teller
Sixty-seventh Street: Tosca with Man in Bedrock
100 Riverside: Waking Up at Mari's
One-forty-sixth Street: My Stepmother's Chloral
One-sixty-fifth Street: The Currency Exchange
One-sixty-eighth Street: The Armory
One-seventy-fifth Street: The Scout
The First Verse