Arts & Entertainment - Lubbock City remembers poet's influence

Published: Monday, June 08, 1998



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Monday, June 8, 1998 Last modified at 12:41 a.m. on Monday, June 8, 1998

City remembers poet's influence

NEW YORK (AP) - New York City's tough skin masked "a river of tender blood," Federico Garcia Lorca once wrote. It was a city that both shocked and seduced him.

Spain's greatest modern poet aimed his verbal lens at the metropolis where he fled in 1929 to escape deep depression. "New York, slime. New York, wire and death," he wrote. "What angel is hidden in your cheek?"

June 5 marked the centennial of Garcia Lorca's birth, and he's being remembered in the city where he wrote "Poet in New York," one of the most influential and disturbing books of 20th-century verse. Farrar, Straus & Giroux is printing a new edition based on the original manuscript, which was rediscovered last year in Mexico.

Already famous at 31 for his poetry, art and music, Garcia Lorca became a Columbia University student who lived in a dormitory and tried - without much success - to learn English. What he wrote in his native language later made him the most translated Spanish poet ever, and a thorn in the side of the Fascists, who executed him during the Spanish Civil War.

"Like Walt Whitman, he created the figure of a poet in New York. He created this Prometheus, this prophet who wrote the New York poems," says Garcia Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer. "He let his hair down as a poet here, in a howl of metaphysical loneliness.

"The actual, flesh-and-blood Garcia Lorca who wandered around the city was having a great time. He was fascinated by the place."

Maurer recently introduced a reading of Garcia Lorca's work at the 92nd Street Y by American poets Robert Bly, Philip Levine and Galway Kinnell, and Spanish poet Angel Gonzalez.

At home in Spain, Garcia Lorca, son of a prosperous farmer from Andalucia, had focused his artistic microscope on himself and a rural Roman Catholic society. New York shook him up. Cut off by the language barrier and often writing home for more money, he roamed the big city seeking "the earthworm in the landscape of fire escapes."

The iron stairs hanging from buildings became his metaphor for the city.

"Dawn in New York groans

on enormous fire escapes

searching between the angles

for spikenards of drafted anguish."

Walking streets that were a "feast of pneumatic drills," he watched people working, a mass of toiling automatons that "drowns itself in machinery and lament."

He humanized them: "I denounce everyone who ignores the other half, the half that can't be redeemed, who lift their mountains of cement where the heart beats. ... The other half hears me, devouring ... flying in their purity."

The poet witnessed the merciless power of the new industrial society during the stock market crash of 1929, rushing to Wall Street to watch the trading.

He decried "the cruel silence of money," reflected at night in "the conspiracy of these deserted offices that radiate no agony."

"New York awoke his social consciousness," says Charles Saliba, a Columbia student who grew up in Garcia Lorca's region of Spain and who lived in the poet's old dorm room last year.

On a recent Sunday morning, Saliba led a walking tour of the neighborhoods and buildings that were home to Garcia Lorca during the academic year 1929-30, when he helped teach Spanish literature while taking courses.

Stopping in front of a Harlem project a few blocks north of the university, Saliba read "King of Harlem," a poem about a popular, strong-willed man stuck in a menial job:

"Ay, Harlem," Garcia Lorca called out in Spanish to the primarily black neighborhood. "There is no anguish like that of ... your grand king, a prisoner in the uniform of a doorman. ... Cooks, waiters, and those whose tongues lick clean the wounds of millionaires seek the king in the streets. ... Ay, Harlem, threatened by a mob of headless suits! I hear your murmur."

Garcia Lorca was incensed by injustices like the "whites only" rule that excluded black guests from big-time clubs where they were often the star performers.

He spent many nights partying in Harlem, discovering jazz and the blues, and making friends using his charm and lively piano playing. He shared with them his love of flamenco, the music of Spain's persecuted Gypsies whose songs about death, lost love and betrayal are echoed in the furious rhythms of Garcia Lorca's New York verse.

On another day at the 92nd Street Y, Spanish music by composers Garcia Lorca knew and admired, including Manuel de Falla, was performed by guitarist Sharon Isbin and mezzosoprano Denyce Graves. Soprano Ana Maria Martinez sang Garcia Lorca's arrangements of five Spanish songs.

It was the type of folk music that had inspired his earlier poetry.

In New York, Garcia Lorca dipped his poetry into new ethnic groups and cutting-edge lifestyles, carousing with friends like poet Hart Crane. He saw his own troubled homosexuality reflected in "the men with that green look in their eyes who love other men and burn their lips in silence."

But he abhorred their decadent prostitution, their "tumescent flesh," and instead embraced his own torn, private soul.

"I want neither world nor dream, divine voice,

I want my liberty, my human love

in the darkest corner of the breeze no one wants."

He was discovering himself, a changing man "bumping into my own face, different each day," as he wrote after an afternoon stroll in Riverside Park near Columbia. At times, he was "not a man, not a poet, not a leaf, only a wounded pulse."

Still, in the harsh city, he found bits of beauty.

"I was on the terrace, wrestling with the moon.

Swarms of windows riddled one of the night's thighs."

And he came alive:

"This isn't a strange place to dance, I tell you.

The mask will dance among columns of blood and numbers,

among hurricanes of gold and groans of the unemployed."

At the end of the academic year, Garcia Lorca took his social rage home to Europe, speaking out against fascism and class differences. His vociferous protests drew charges that he was a Soviet spy, leading to his execution in 1936 in his beloved Spanish countryside.

The New York experience had pushed Garcia Lorca to voice stinging words that swept his soul "toward the cobra's tongue," as he said in one poem.

His words eventually cost him his life.