Linda Lerner

City Woman

Nothing Is Just

an old sound  from
outside our downtown Manhattan  apartment
four years later breaks thru
a Brooklyn garden a few feet
from my window
freshly dug  earth    a hole
easy to slip / fall into
a grave that doesn’t exist....

two years after jack hammers
began breaking up  concrete foundations
every percussive bang
signaled his worsening cough
as in a macabre end of century
call & response

he reminded me of
his chain smoking hard drinking Irish grandfather
who lived into his 90’s
 
realty developers spoke of improving
the neighborhood   ripped up trees 
to plant benches 

hip hop night voices broke thu sleep
angry words coughed out of our windows
worsened....

we visited the poets cemetery in Wakefield
impressed by that huge rock marking Emerson’s  grave
said  he might prefer burial to cremation
in case he wanted to come back.

that was before 
ahses   enough to fill thousands of urns
descended on our streets
and they couldn’t put out the fires for months...

I’m back in brownstone Brooklyn now
face a garden

as in our first apartment 
no building higher than five floors here
careful not to get too close to anyone

                  got a cat...  
that was two  years later
& I was beginning to forget...

my landlord says
it will be a beautiful house
when I complain of the noise

every  bang  brings back what’s gone without
returning it  rips thru tense

like that  rope workers put up
to divide their property from this one 
a stong wind keeps  pulling down

dirt flies against my  windows
so I can’t see clearly anymore...

most people I know have stopped smoking
& some who never did 
are still dying of lung cancer..

I’m not sure where 
      I’m going 
            in this poem  
                  this life
scared when my cat coughs / throws up
the vet says it’s just hairballs
but nothing is just....


ISBN 1-59661-053-0
  47 pages $9

Linda Lerner, City Girl turned City Woman, traces the birth and resurrection of New York City as well as her own, or her persona’s, beginning and rebirth. While she travels to other cities, New York is her city of “possibilities” and promises. She points out both what is missing or lost and what remains as the landmarks of her world. Along her roadmap, “hunger sharpens its blade” and this “outlaw daughter” journeys for love, sex, poetry, and for bits of magic and knowledge. As she makes her way through ghosts and shadows, the sounds of piano music and the blues, all with “a desperate pulse beating/ a woman’s oceanic cry,” appearing are historical figures and poets such as Whitman and Crane and all types of artists. These function as signposts as she moves through time, passes drug addicts, finds herself in “impenetrable darkness” and “silence.” She moves through night and nightmare into dawn, always a desire for peace and a need for direction driving her onward where, quite possibly, there are none to be had.
—Dr. Maura Gage Cavell, Professor of English, Louisiana State University at Eunice

“Do you recall what d. a. levy said (about Cleveland)...I’ve got a city to cover with lines...and the city...New York and the rhythm of that CITY pounding poems of jack hammers and cat feet of lions...lines by Linda Lerner...like a busy subway station...arriving from the dark tunnel of imagination...first syllable of each line propels the poetry there and then in an instant gone again. Like in a city...The impact clear and ruthless and beautiful fills the empty space day or night. And surrounding all of the sounds that silence that is the white noise of the poem...deafening.”
—Michael Basinski, SUNY at Buffalo

Linda Lerner was born and educated in New York City. She has published eight collections of her poetry: A Koan for Samsara (Ibbetson Street Press, 2003), Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2002), No Earthly Sense Gets It Right (Lummox Press, 2000), Anytimeblues (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 1999), and New & Selected Poems (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 1998).

She’s published in New York Quarterly, Patterson Literary Review, Onthebus, Louisiana Review, Black Bear Review, South Boston Literary Review, Ragged Lion Anthology, and others.

Review (of City Woman) in Small Press Review: "In times of stress when the causes are political, the poet is put in a difficult position. Poems that concern themselves with the news become ephemeral because they go out of date while the function of a poem is to survive change and daily distractions. I have been looking at contemporary work, including my own, and I don't see any confrontation with current events. Yet it is the poets who should be establishing a voice for all of it. It's been done before for both World Wars. Linda Lerner is the first I know of to handle the subject these days. Perhaps that subject with its evasions and deceptions on the part of all out representatives, makes it impossible to take a stand. She approaches it not with accusations toward the actors, but in defense of the victims. She offers no panacea."
--Kirby Congdon

There's a brief review of a previous book, Bowery, in a zine called The Chronogram at http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2005/02/bookshelf/shorttakes.php
It a mag that comes out in upstate NY, near Woodstock.
The review is “Lerner's geographical turf is the Lower East Side, her emotional turf the defiant New York loneliness which refuses to give up hope in a city where ‘A jazz band out of Brighton Beach/is tuning up the July heat…’
She will return to the Colony Café as a featured reader in August.” (The Colony is a venue in Woodstock.)

I remember when I was in my teens I frequently ventured into New York from the tony suburbs of Long Island, to go “slumming” in the city. I remember seeing a young man sweeping the sidewalk outside a gone-to-seed bar in the Village. I asked him: “Is this the way to the Bowery?” He replied: ”Sadly,” and nodded his head dejectedly. So for me the Bowery with its flop houses, its discarded, broken men, its off-limits allure, has always held a certain fascination. When Linda Lerner sent me her new collection: “The Bowery and other Poems” I knew I was going to revisit this neck of the woods through Lerner’s well-honed skills as an observer and thusly, a poet. In the poem “Sixty” we visit a smoky Gin-Joint where a man of sixty holds on to the all too-fleeting youth of the youngish poet. Here--we have a portrait of a man as an open wound, and his object of desperation: “6...0 he said as though/ he couldn’t grasp the/sudden wound ripping/flesh sense of it./ His rock gray eyes never/ budged from where I sat;/all night in a boozy dark/ he clutched a woman’s/ last fling of youth/ like a tourniquet/ and wooed her girl-heart.”

[about The Bowery, an earlier book] Throughout this collection Lerner probes the love, the loss, the lovers, and the losers of the “naked city.” The Bowery, I hear, has changed a great deal over the decades. But the name the “Bowery” has a certain name brand recognition for a certain slice -of-life. This collection will help explain why.
—Doug Holder/Aug 2004/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass.

Linda Lerner, born and educated in New York City, has published eleven collections of poetry. The most recent, Living in Dangerous Times (Presa Press, 2007), Because You Can’t I Will (Pudding House, 2005) and The Bowery and Other Poems (March Street Press, 2004) a Small Press Pick of the Month, A Koan for Samsara (Ibbetson Street Press, 2003) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2002). In 1995 she and Andrew Gettler began Poets on the Line (http://www.echony.com/~poets) the first poetry anthology on the Net, for which she received two grants. She’s published in the New York Quarterly, Onthebus, Louisiana Review, Paterson Literary Review, Ragged Lion Anthology, Tribes, Van Gogh’s Ear, and others.