Philadelphia in Poetry
I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry lately (and I do mean a lot - well over 300 poems in the past 3 months, oy my aching head!) and I’ve noticed that Philadelphia is a pretty popular city to throw into poems. This makes me proud, even though I’m not a Philadelphian - I have lived in and loved New Jersey for my entire life. But Philly has seemed like something of a second home to me since I was about 16, as I spent nearly every weekend prowling the shops on South Street, heading to concerts at the Troc, the Electric Factory and the TLA, or exploring the museums.
But one poem caught my attention during my recent spurt of reading: Ross Gay’s “Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street,” which was published in the American Poetry Review. Oh sure, I know the poem is from the September/October issue, but this is the reality of life as a working mother/student/poet - I’m just catching up on last year’s journals. But Gay’s poem is worth more than a second look - it’s worth a fourth, a fifth and a sixth, and more.
It was the casual mention of Philadelphia roads that caught my attention, but it wasn’t just the familiarity of setting that made me love this poem. No, it was the way Gay uses the impulse to stare at the unexpected: it’s normal, it’s harmless, everyone does it, although we all know it’s rude to stare (remember what your mother told you!). He presents this natural human impulse as the common denominator that allows me, as a reader, to forget that this narrator and I are gawking at an intensely private moment - we seemed to be inside that moment.
I mean, I really just lost myself in the senses of the poem - the fabric of the jackets, the rough chin-and-cheek stubble, the smell of these men. Whew. And in Philadelphia, on Broad Street, with the traffic and the noise and the people - it was authentic, and I fell right into it.
I think part of Gay’s success here is that he used Philadelphia as a backdrop, a setting which was able to fade out and leave the men embracing in a sort of EveryCity environment. He didn’t throw in super obvious landmarks (the clothespin, the Art museum), there were no cheesy references to Rocky or cheesesteaks or Yuengling. The poem was meant to be about this beautiful, intimate moment between two tough Men’s Men, and it was - Philadelphia was sort of a pleasant bonus, an extra layer to the poem, like finding two prizes in your box of cereal instead of just one.
4 Comments
Wow! What a poem!
Thank you for sharing this Rachel — it’s truly amazing… and also, feels to me, very Philadelphia — and not just because of the location.
For me, it feels like the fascination/ fear/ awe/ suspicion/ coming back to round again to just utter fascination with “the other”… the unexpected, as you say… is so very Philadelphia. This is a very territorial type of city… there are boundaries, between neighborhoods, between city/suburbs, between PA/NJ, that can be crossed, but only with a certain amount of trepidation. I wouldn’t say the speaker of this poem is making any judgment (as feels quite common in the city of Brotherly Love), but just the act of watching, being so caught up in that watching… its very Philadelphia… and also, of course, very human… which may be why I think this one of the greatest cities, and such a great “setting” for poetry… but that’s a whole other entry.
Yes, thanks for sharing this poem, Rachel! (And as “late” as you may think you are in your reading, you seem to be way more au currant than many of us!) Aside from my utter delight at the subject matter (;)), what I loved about the poem is something that both you and Autumn touched upon: its cursory but affectionate weaving of the city in the background. I think some of the best city poems are ones that take the city for granted, like a long-loved one. It is there, not as the subject matter, but the enabler of it, the necessary but loved detail.
Thanks first:
Thank you Eileen for presiding over the Mad Poets.
Thank you Autumn for starting and managing this blog.
And thank you Rachel for sharing this poem.
I am very new to Mad Poets. I’ve yet to attend a reading and I’ve written very, very little poetry.
I may be missing something in this poem, but for me, “Two Bikers Embrace on Broad Street” is a life-support system for these lines contained within it:
“which reminds you the million and one secrets exchanged
in nearly the last clasp between your father
and his brother, during which the hospital’s chatter and rattle
somehow fell silent in deference to the untranslatable
song between them”
This silent “brotherly love” image is what remains for me - after the bikers fade, the traffic fades and the city fades.
I am also curious about the last lines. In one sense they underscore the fleetingness of the drive-by moment by bringing me back so abruptly, to the “real” world and at the same time they distract me from the rest of the poem because I try to find an underlying meaning or connection that I sense might be there.
Hi John,
I’ve been thinking on your comments for a few days, and I think I’ve got a handle on what I wanted to respond with now:
I think you’re right in identifying those five lines about the father and brother as an important piece of the poem – but I don’t think they are the spine of the poem, on which everything else is predicated. No doubt Gay saw an opportunity here to play on the ‘brotherly love’ with some actual love between two brothers, but I don’t think this is the entire point of the poem. If so, why not enlarge this bit? Why write so many lines on something entirely separate? I think these lines represent an important turn in the poem, and they take you someplace a bit unexpected, but they’re not the whole point of the poem.
With regards to the last lines, especially the “as if we had nothing to kill” – I read this partly as Gay trying to bring my attention back to where we started: in the car. Here is this narrator watching a scene that’s happening on the street, and at his hands is a several thousand pound machine. He’s completely forgotten about the fact that he’s driving, so distracted is he by the scene on the street. And these last lines remind me, anyway, that we all have other things on our minds, despite our distractions.
Although it’s totally possible Gay meant to do something totally different with those lines. :shrug:
Anyway, each reads it as his own.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Rachel
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