New York City Through the Window: Poetry

In 1975 the poet Allen Ginsberg was in hospital. At a later poetry reading he explained the causes in an introduction to a poem that he had written from his hospital bed.: 

I got real angry and wound up sick in a hospital, for various karmic reasons, and woke up looking out the window, and started taking notes on what the universe looked like outside. New York Hospital, 72nd Street, East River.. “At gauzy..”  This was written May 20th at the time of the Mayaguez crisis – Anyone remember that at all? – or (has) that phantom faded into memorial history, memorial cello-time. (Henry) Kissinger and (Gerald) Ford bombed the entire Eastern hemisphere because they got mad one morning over coffee! 1975

Ginsberg implies that his illness and physical symptoms were somehow self inflicted and also the result of his response to the diseased state of the world.  Trapped in a hospital bed he contrasts his own temporary and pained  existence with the more eternal nature (and beauty) of the city skyline.

It reminds me of  W.H.Auden’s theory of the psychosomatic causes of illness.¹ He once ascribed Marx’s boils to frustrated love and near the end of his life he remarked to a friend that it was odd that Freud had died of  cancer of the jaw: “Who’d have thought he was a liar.”

It’s probably a very good thing that we have medical doctors for medicine and poets for something else.

Ginsberg’s poem Hospital Window opens with a description of a hazy dusk and the beauty of the buildings – the castles and the water towers of the skyline:

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building’s silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State’s 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil’d sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven–The East 
50’s & 60’s covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers’ blue domed medical arbor– 
Geodesic science at the waters edge

And then the intrusion of a harsher reality

Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital’s oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms.

But the view persists

Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances’re 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles. Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames 
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street, 
& Brooklyn Bridge’s skeined dim in modern mists– 
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible– 
U.N. Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on 
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod 
of a skull with a mild nerve ache.

And then “Dim dharma” –  the nature of reality regarded as a universal truth taught by the Buddha – what brought him to the hospital intrudes on the scene with the detailed immediate description of physical symptoms –  stark contrast with the enduring scene outside the tower window. And to his rage at the disease of the world that brought him there.

World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran.

At the end the poem circles back to enclose the scene outside and his mental state within.

 

^1. W. H. Auden: A Biography By Humphrey Carpenter