Re-reading Federico García Lorca’s “Poet in New York.”
By George Murphy
“There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard, with his curious passion for the modernities of nickel and tinfoil and nitre, and for the eternities of the desert and the moon. He hated us, and rightly, for the right reasons.” - Conrad Aiken, “Homage to Lorca”
Illustration by Derin Ogutcu
Ninety-five years ago, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca arrived in New York, a city which made no sense. He was in some senses a fugitive—from love gone wrong, as his seven-year affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén had just gone down in flames, and from the suffocating fame caused by the success of his first major poetry collection. To occupy himself, he enrolled at Columbia, intending to learn English and write a book about life in the New World. Lorca was excited by the heady promise of American society—he had a deep love of Walt Whitman and was especially interested in New York’s burgeoning theatrical scene. However, Lorca quickly became disgusted with the city, writing that “New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world’s greatest lie.” This distaste for America was reflected in his poetry. Over the course of his time in the country he would write a collection of poems titled Poet in New York, which would express that disillusionment in surreal and surprising fashion.
My first encounter with Poet in New York was a puzzling experience. I had been in New York for less than a year and was still so swept up in the novelty of urban life that I could not imagine being disillusioned with the city. At first, I couldn’t even get past the first section of the collection, titled “Poems of Solitude at Columbia University.” Lorca’s vision of the city seemed almost like a photographic negative of my experience—where I saw light and color, he saw darkness and decay. Then, of course, President Shafik testified before Congress, the first encampment began, and things started to come apart at the seams. Daily life steadily became more and more surreal, and the lines between my New York and Lorca’s started to blur.
One night in late April, during the interminable period of campus lockdowns, I picked up Poet in New York and opened it to a random page. I found a poem called “Danza de la Muerte” or “Dance of Death.” It captured the strangeness of the moment:
I was on the terrace fighting with the moon.
The thigh of night was riddled with swarms of windows.
The sweet cows of the sky were drinking in my eyes
and the long-oared breezes
were tapping the ashy windows of Broadway.
The blood-drop was searching for the star-yolk’s light …
And now cobras will hiss on the highest floors.
And now nettles will shake patios and terraces.
And now the Stock Exchange will be a pyramid of moss.
The poem depicts a metropolitan apocalypse—everything returns to nature, with the only signs of contemporary New York being ashy windows and hulking structures hidden by moss. Of course, the University’s crackdown on the protest was not literally an apocalyptic moment, and the city continued to function as usual. But it was an ugly moment, a moment that I couldn’t make sense of. And as campus became a labyrinth of locked gates and security checkpoints, I kept coming back to Lorca’s visions of snakes curling out of windows and nettles creeping through the woodwork.
Even on the days when I was able to escape from the fortress-like atmosphere of campus, I was unable to avoid a vague sense of unease. It was like I suddenly had double vision. On one level, I was seeing the New York cityscape that I’d come to love, and on another, I was watching power exert itself in ways that I had never seen before. In particular, I started to notice the University’s ungainly tentacles of growth into Harlem more than I ever had before. Just then, I discovered a poem called “El Rey de Harlem,” or “The King of Harlem, ” in which Lorca writes “¡Ay, Harlem disfrazada! ¡Ay, Harlem, amenazada por un gentío de trajes sin cabeza!” (Ay, Harlem disguised! Ay, Harlem, threatened by a throng of headless suits!). It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that the gentrification of Harlem was noticeable even in Lorca’s time, but it was. I hadn’t realized the extent to which displacing the local community was one of the longstanding features of institutional growth in New York. At first, I was surprised that Lorca had seen that trend so clearly. But that, I realized, was the point of Lorca’s project in Poet in New York: to see through exteriors, to look beneath the standard triumphal story of the city, and locate the dark strangeness within.
This election season the critique of American society in Poet in New York seemed more relevant than ever. I wasn’t sure how to make sense of Lorca’s visions of an America on the verge of breakdown, but as the presidential campaign wore on, they seemed to exert a magnetic pull. I paid more attention to the poems in the collection that decried the injustices prevalent in American society. And when the election culminated in its Trumpian finale, America itself started to seem just as surreal as Lorca’s poems: directionless and fragmented and amoral. Out of a vaguely masochistic desire to see what Lorca might have thought, I started aimlessly paging through the book once again, though I was sure he would just confirm my pessimistic thoughts about the nation’s trajectory. The poem I eventually came to was called “Ciudad sin sueño” or “Sleepless City,” which moves subtly from insomniac paranoia to an encounter with the monstrous:
Nobody sleeps in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody sleeps.
The creatures of the moon sniff and circle the cabins.
They’ll sell live iguanas to bite the men who can’t dream
and he who flees brokenhearted will stumbles at the corner
on the incredible quiet crocodile
beneath the tender protest of the stars.
The Spanish word “sueño” can mean both “sleep” and “dream.” In referring to New York as a “ciudad sin sueño,” Lorca may have been simply writing about “the city that never sleeps” (as the cliché goes), but it seems more likely that he was describing New York as a city that can’t dream. What does it mean to live in a city where we can’t dream, can’t find a better way out, a way to escape from the maze? Lorca always had a way out, he could go back to his Andalusian countryside, back to his mystical poetry about moonlight and desert sands—I do not. My dreams are American dreams, for better or worse, if only because this is a country that I want to live in, to grow with, to improve, and to love. I cannot reason away the weight of American history, and cannot wave away the American sins that Lorca sharply articulated, but I want to dream of something new.
Reading Lorca teaches you that love is a dangerous thing. He loved the antiquated country romances of Spain at a time when they were not fashionable, and it cost him the respect of his peers. He loved a man deeply for years on end, and it cost him a decade of happiness. He loved Spain so much that he refused to flee when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and it cost him his life. And despite all that, love is the theme that he never tired of in his poetry, as in my favorite poem of his, “Living Sky”:
I fly cool as always over empty beds.
Over groups of breezes and beached ships.
I trip unsteadily through hard fixed eternity
and dawnless love at last. Love. Visible love!
Maybe it’s senseless, maybe it’s dumb, but I like to believe that Lorca’s right. Even though we live in a uniquely cynical moment, when the mythologies of both the nation and the University seem to be crumbling before our eyes, life goes on—and so can our dreams of working toward a world in which love for everyone is visible at last.
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