Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 1, April 2001
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WRITERS
by
Anyone hungry for a life in art,
visual or verbal, heads for Greenwich Village.
I knew I must try my wings in New York.
I read about the Beats,
on scented summer nights down south
I read Kerouac's On the Road and The Dharma Bums.
In my senior year in college
I wrote a paper on three rebels in the arts:
Dylan Thomas, Charlie "Yardbird" Parker,
and James Dean.
After graduation, I kept these heroes in mind
as I sat in the kitchen night after night
typing job application letters
on my old Royal portable
while I watched Playhouse 90
on the black and white TV that sat on top
the refrigerator of dreams.
I sent out 50 to 60 letters,
and got two invitations for interviews,
two out of fifty, enough for me to pack my bags
and head north to New York.
I wanted to live in the Village!
Writers determined the magnetic pull,
Ginsberg's Howl was in my suitcase,
the Beats were calling me.
My first good friend of the Village years
was a hellion from Connecticut,
and twice a week she and I
would go to a favored
coffee house to sip cappuccino
and listen to poetry readings
(what goes around comes around, etc.).
My first winter in New York,
our beloved city was hit by a big blizzard,
sufficiently massive
to bring traffic to a halt and release
the child in all of us.
We plowed gleefully through drifts
and hurled snowballs at a variety of
moving targets.
"I've got a great idea," she said,
"Let's go to the White Horse Tavern
and have a hot buttered rum."
I asked her where was the White Horse Tavern.
"I'll show you," she said.
"Haven't you ever been there?"
She looked at me
as though I had just arrived
from the boondocks
and, in truth, I had, only a few weeks
prior to that seminal snowy night.
"You have to go there!" she insisted,
"If you want to be a writer or an artist,
it really is the place to go."
I asked her why, of course.
"Didn't you write a paper on Dylan Thomas?
Well, that's where he used to hang out.
That's the bar where he left his sweater!"
Naturally I had to go.
Coffee houses
featured an amplitude of poets,
but only the White Horse had the Big Guy,
the head honcho in our pantheon.
I too had read "Fern Hill,"
and thus must pay homage.
It was 10 degrees above zero,
our boots were filled with snow,
we waded through drifts to Hudson Street,
to sample hot buttered rum
and listen to the waiter's anecdotes
about the poet of our time,
the poet loved by our generation.
Outside snow was falling,
inside writers were writing.
I could hear them.
I was happy.
previously published in the Fall 1996 issue of THE NEW WELSH REVIEW (Wales/UK).