The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Eight): Laura Cronk [by Angela Ball]

TO MY TWENTIES

Stop what you’re doing
and come with me. We’ll
walk out into the wild
cold, you in your pink
sequined shell from the
consignment shop –
you can have my coat.
Let’s be out together
in the world, the wind
beating against us, the
sidewalks cracking with
ice. Though you shrink
from the cold, my twenties,
you’re still lustrous, still
throwing off heat. We’ll
walk past the schizophrenic
piano player and the junk
dealer poet, there are bad
boyfriends around every
bend, but we’re together
now and we don’t have
to stop. We’ll go back
to my apartment and
open the door and the
kids’ faces will pop
with happiness. They’ll
run toward us, ram their
heads into our stomachs,
so eager to be held.
It’s not the kind of
greeting you’re used to.
After dinner I’ll get you
a cab, my twenties,
but you’ll take the shape
of a great gray bird
and fly away.

                           -Laura Cronk                  first published in StatoRec  Included in Ghost Hour

Laura Cronk is the author most recently of Ghost Hour from Persea Books. She teaches writing and pedagogy courses at The New School in New York.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Eight): Laura Cronk

Laura Cronk’s sparkling “To My Twenties” takes after a poem of the same name by Kenneth Koch that begins

     How lucky that I ran into you

     When everything was possible

     For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart

     And so happy to see any woman--

     O woman! O my twentieth year!

Though Koch’s poem is more “excitable,” to use Frank O’Hara’s term for Koch himself, it is a poem of retrospect and nostalgia. It ends this way:

     You never, ever, were stingy. What you gave me you gave whole

     But as for telling

     Me how to best use it

     You weren't a genius at that.

     Twenties, my soul

     Is yours for the asking

     You know that, if you ever come back.

In contrast, Cronk’s poem, a direct rendezvous with her twenties, functions as a kind of sequel to Koch’s. Her twenties catch up with her somewhere in the city, and she invites them home—her invitation an arresting demand:

     Stop what you’re doing

     and come with me

What a brilliant way to involve the reader! We are now part of the poem, impersonating we know not what, exactly. Years? A person? A set of attributes?

Cronk’s twenties—and we—come alive in thrift shop threads, “a pink / sequined shell” both vulnerable and outrageous. It is fun to live them again, both as revealed here and through inserting our own experience. Koch talks about what things were like when he was “in” those years; Cronk diegetically reunites with them in reanimated form. At first. By the time the second sentence has arrived, “We’’ll,” we’re in the hypothetical realm of the future—exactly where Koch hopes to meet his twenties. I’ve misread! But, I believe, reading is a process—and misreading can play a productive part.  Cronk’s scenario somehow manages to be both real and projected as the poem details the perils that will greet her and her third, inclement decade—in which inner and outer weather conjoin:

     Let’s be out together

     in the world, the wind

     beating against us, the

     sidewalks cracking with

     ice. Though you shrink

     from the cold, my twenties,

     you’re still lustrous, still

     throwing off heat. We’ll

     walk past the schizophrenic

     piano player and the junk

     dealer poet, there are bad

     boyfriends around every

     bend, but we’re together

     now and we don’t have

     to stop.

What more accurate evocation of a woman in her twenties than “lustrous”? Though the “schizophrenic / piano player” and the “junk / dealer poet” may be gone, bad boyfriends are eternal (a possible book title?). In the present tense inside the future tense, “we’re together”—and “don’t have to stop.”

But we do—it’s late, as Kenneth Koch’s poems often remind us. It’s often late in the New York School. Stars would shine through its big windows were it not for the city’s competing lights. Encountering the speaker’s kids in her apartment seems the beginning of the end. After dinner, a cab needs to be called for the brilliant girl, who--suddenly and scarifyingly--becomes Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”—and the cab goes wanting.

Experiencing Laura Cronk’s comic and poignant “To My Twenties” transports us to a past transfigured by a tangible future. Sadly, we watch the disreputable angel / past self’s flight—hoping, as so many poems hope, that togetherness returns.  -- Angela Ball

Comments

[Nin Andrews]

Love this poem and the poem it is after. What a great way to start the day.

[Denise Duhamel]

What a great emulation and departure from Koch! Laura's poem is magic. Thanks, Angela, for writing about "To My Twenties" with such elegance.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, Nin--what a pleasure to write about this fine poem.

Thank you, Denise, for your generous comment!

[Karen Koch]

I liked the poem and the comparison to Kenneth's. I think he too would have liked it.
Karen Koch

[Angela Ball]

Thank you so much for your lovely comment, Karen. It more than makes my day.