Welcome to the first in a series of posts featuring poems that have ever appeared in journals. I’m calling this series Pub Crawl. Clever, no? Each poem will be accompanied by some notes—background on the genesis of the poem, some craft discussion, some whatever else comes to mind. Here we begin with “What the Falconer Sees,” the first poem I ever published. It appeared in the spring 2000 online edition of the Brooklyn Review.
What the Falconer Sees
Past the powerful bird poised for flight on my wrist,
it’s a mild winter day in Central Park—
Of the view from atop this terraced drive,
much has stayed the same in the century I've stood:
Pedestrians still mistake me for Robin Hood
in my medieval tunic and my feathered cap.
And the seasons, they come and they go—
The dry eyes of the weeping willow
will soon pour forth their tears again,
crying for joy at the coming of spring.
Or are they only green with envy
at the yellow ribbons in the forsythia's hair?
Meanwhile, cum drips from your ass
’cause you just got fucked in the Ramble.
***
Note: The Falconer is a bronze statue in New York’s Central Park. The Ramble is a wilderness preserve of tangled pathways that serves as a cruising ground for gay men.
Geez, I sure was a potty-mouth from the get-go, eh?
The Brooklyn Review is produced by the students in the MFA program at Brooklyn College. In the spring of 2000, Tom Devaney was editing what I think may have been their first attempt at an online edition of the annual print journal. I met Tom through Martha Rhodes, early in my tenure running the weekly Saturday afternoon poetry series at the Ear Inn on Spring Street. Martha’s neighbor, Ear Inn co-owner Martin Sheridan, asked her to take the series over in 1998 after the Language poets decamped to other pastures. Martha at that time had her hands full organizing and hosting a series at the Tribeca Synagogue (then called the Civic Center Synagogue) on White Street, so she invited me, a fledgling student in her private workshop, to helm the series at the Ear Inn.
Back then I knew virtually nobody in the poetry scene, so Martha gave me a list of local poets to reach out to. That list included Tom Devaney, whose first book, The American Pragmatist Fell in Love, appeared from Banshee Press in 1999. He was kind enough to reach out to me when he was editing the online edition of the Brooklyn Review. Those were early days for online poetry journals and, as I recall, it was Tom’s own, somewhat renegade idea to include poems in the online journal that had not appeared in the print edition. And thus did “What the Falconer Sees” become my first poetry publication. Yeah, it took me quite a while to get there, but when I did, my first publication was a solicitation! Forever grateful to you for that, Tom.
From a craft perspective, “What the Falconer Sees” combines elements of persona poetry and ekphrastic poetry. It’s a persona poem in that (to quote the definition on the Academy of American Poets website) the poet speaks through an assumed voice. It would be fun to think that our community sage Alfred Corn, writing on the Academy website, nods at me knowingly when he writes of the term “ekphrasis” that, while originally a rhetorical term designating a description of an art object, it likewise “could designate a passage providing a short speech attributed to a mute work of visual art.” Indeed, “What the Falconer Sees” is, simply put, the bronze figure of the falconer engaging in some apparently idle chitchat with the reader.
I am a devote of Gregory Orr’s craft essay classic, “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” (it’s the basis of a six-week online workshop I am teaching at Poet’s House this fall). The four temperaments are story, structure, music, and imagination. Two of the temperaments—story and structure—Orr calls “finite” or “limiting,” and the other two—music and imagination—he calls “infinite” or “limitless.” Orr argues that poets tend to have a primary temperament and a secondary temperament, and that of these two, one tends to be finite, while the other tends to be infinite. I believe I am primarily a poet of story (a finite temperament) and secondarily a poet of music (an infinite temperament). I say this here because—well, I like to talk about Orr’s four temperaments every chance I get—but also because I think “What the Falconer Sees” is a potentially illuminating example of these aspects of my poetry, and of how they interact in precisely the way Orr describes, lending the poem “unity” through the “stability and dramatic tension that comes of a marriage of contraries.”
The music of this poem lies not in any regular meter, but rather in a fluid and intuitive rhythm, as well as in a jaunty deployment of alliteration, assonance, and consonance (and a teeny bit of rhyme). I swear swear swear swear swear, none of these characteristics of this poem were premeditated per se. It’s just the way my mind worked twenty-some years ago.
When I wrote “What the Falconer Sees,” I lived in an apartment on W. 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, around the corner from Columbus Circle and Central Park. I often composed verse in my head as I strolled in the park, as I did pretty much every day, often after a run. I think at some point I specifically wanted to write something about gay sex in the Ramble. In fact, okay, let me hazard a guess here, knowing who and what I am, so to speak. I suspect I was coming out of the Ramble after having had sex in there myself. I suspect I look up at one point and there’s The Falconer, which, to be sure, is a sight I loved. I suspect I thought, My God, he knows what I just did! I suspect I then thought, Huh, good premise for a poem.
So...I don’t remember if I was carrying a notebook or if I kinda thought of the general idea and then started scribbling when I got home. But in either case, I thought it would be cool if the falconer offered a sort of commentary on the decades of sexual activity he had observed from his lofty vantage point, not only standing on his pedestal, but his pedestal in turn erected atop an outcropping of rock that gave the falconer quite a view of the goings on around him. And that eventually turned into the first six lines of the poem.
Past the powerful bird poised for flight on my wrist,
it’s a mild winter day in Central Park—Of the view from atop this terraced drive,
much has stayed the same in the century I've stood:Pedestrians still mistake me for Robin Hood
in my medieval tunic and my feathered cap.
Except that that second line actually got its start somewhere else. You see, on a previous walk in the park, I had thought about personifying the changes that come to the foliage as spring arrives. That’s when I wrote, either in a notebook right then and there, or memorized in my head, or maybe I had the idea and then wrote it down when I got home:
A mild winter day in Central Park,
when winter has begun to turn to spring.The dry eyes of the weeping willow
will soon pour forth their tears again,
crying for joy at the coming of spring.Or are they only green with envy
at the yellow ribbons in the forsythia’s hair?
Now, I suspect some people—perhaps including a certain ex of mine—would think these lines were absolute drivel. But I loved them! And yet—What was I going to do with them? I mean, sure, they’re clever, and imagistic, and musical—but what’s the context? See—That’s what I mean when I say I’m primarily a poet of story. I loved these lines, but I thought of them as a stone that needed a setting, and if that setting was going to be a Michael Broder poem, then that setting would have to be a story of some kind.
Then I started coming up with this “Falconer” thing. And I thought, okay, so he’s going to talk a bit about himself, who he is, where he comes from, how he got here, and then he’s going to start talking about what he sees around him, how that has changed so radically over the decades, even as he himself has remained exactly the same. But how am I going to navigate those transitions? And that’s when I thought—Ah! That thing about the “dry eyes of the weeping willow” and the “yellow ribbons in the forsythia’s hair”!
So...
A mild winter day in Central Park,
gets yanked out of its original fragment to set the scene for the falconer poem. And then, once we’ve located the falconer in time, space, and a cutesy bit of circumstance (the Robin Hood bit), we slide back into the anthropomorphizing of the foliage with this new line:
And the seasons, they come and they go—
To a degree, that whole passage—
The dry eyes of the weeping willow
will soon pour forth their tears again,
crying for joy at the coming of spring.Or are they only green with envy
at the yellow ribbons in the forsythia’s hair?
—is there merely to lull the reader into a false sense of pastoral security. Oh, isn’t this a cute little poem. This century-old statue is personified, and he’s kinda miffed because people think he’s Robin Hood, and nature goes on playing out the same drama of leaves and flowers year after year...
...and then, BAM!
Meanwhile, cum drips from your ass
’cause you just got fucked in the Ramble.
NOW it’s a Michael Broder poem.
And—while this is something not every reader will identify, or will identify with—it’s also an AIDS poem. And—like so many AIDS poems—it is also a poem about internalized homophobia, and how—particularly during the part of the AIDS epidemic prior to the development of effective treatment (and certainly prior to the period of pre-exposure prophylaxis)—gay men in New York literally risked their lives going into the Ramble to find some modicum, however fleeting, however degrading and demoralizing, some modicum of intimacy, of intimate human contact, sexual contact—something the vast majority of the world was allowed to pursue openly, to pursue under the approving eyes of heteronormative society, with its heteronormative rituals of dating, senior proms, spring break at Daytona Beach, engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, and on and on and on.
So, yeah, that’s Michael Broder’s brain on poetry.
Stay tuned for next time, when we will read—and I will yammer on a bit—about my second-ever publication, “After,” which appeared in Daniel Nester’s La Petite Zine (Issue 5; Winter 2000). Lemme warn you now, it’s another poem about AIDS and the challenges of gay male intimacy—and this one won’t even have cute bits about men in tights or envious trees and ostentatious shrubs.
If you liked this post, please consider clicking the ❤️ below. I welcome your comments, too, on the poem itself, or any aspect of this post, or anything you would like to share about the writing or reading of poetry.
Though I don't recall the date, I remember hearing you read that at the Ear Inn, decades ago. It stayed in memory. I also remember you being reproached for contracting the bug, which struck me as totally unfair and callous. You didn't mean to, it just happened. "Not marble nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme," thus Shakespeare. So I sense contrast between a bronze statue and the mortal body, eager for pleasure and subject to mortality. The statue won't seroconvert and will outlive us all; but also can't have sex. Also, the contrast between those two things and the "powerful rhyme." I second your proposal that there is some internalized homophobia in the poem. People are traditionally not supposed to use rear entry for sex, a prohibition ignored by very large numbers of people both homo- and heterosexual in orientation. The sin of Onan is also implied because of the spillage. It's not a pretty line, indeed, is a bit on the disgusting side, but it adds thought and weight to the poem. I also like the pretty line about forsythia wearing yellow ribbons. No way am I against poems having pleasing sensory details in them. Stevens: "It must give pleasure." It must.
The poem and the story of the poem — another layer or version of music and story (the elements). This morning, I was especially struck by the contrast between statue and action, and the hunting prowess (if I may say that) suggested or embodied in both.