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The poet Vincent Katz has a keen eye for the composition of a scene, and visual artists have influenced and sparked his poems. He first met the painter Paul Resika in Maine, one day in the mid-1970s, when he accompanied friends who visited Resika at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They looked at the canvases, introduced Vincent to Paul, and the two talked briefly about their mutual interest in poetry. “I told him I was reading Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Carlos Williams,” Vincent recalls. “He said he loved Shelley. In my memory, this instant connection lasted a mere five minutes.” Vincent admired Resika’s work as he got to know it after that day, “for its blending of abstract and representational elements, his often bright colors that seemed to evoke Baudelaire’s (and Matisse’s) luxe, calme, et volupté, and his seaside visions, which I learned derived from summers spent in North Truro, Massachusetts.” He continues, “As the decades went by, I always remembered our brief meeting in Skowhegan. It stuck with me as a kind of iconic affirmation of the importance of poetry (or the importance of anything, really) in the lives of two people, that they can share something.” Finally, in 2017, Vincent made an effort to meet Paul again, and began regularly visiting his studio in New York. The title poem of Katz’s Broadway for Paul was written after one such afternoon; the poems in its second section, including this one, take their titles from a series of gouaches Resika did in North Truro in the 1990s.

Encounter

for Oliver

Yesterday, as we walked from the town, And the light faded from the sky, I thought, How striking The dark shapes of buoys and barks In front of the still bay, and land opposite

And I thought, Poetry cannot suffice For this, only painting could evince This light, and evincing, might Reach an equivalent sense of calm Or overview, photography could not

Then my son said, Don’t under- Estimate the power of the word, And I thought, Perhaps? This morn, Again I see the sea, land opposite, Boats and air and clouds, and wonder

“Encounter” by Paul Resika, 1990 (gouache on paper, 7 x 10 1/4 )

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More on this book and author:

Learn more about Broadway for Paul by Vincent Katz and follow him @broadwayforpaul on Instagram. 

Learn more about Paul Resika and view Resika’s “Sails” online at MoMA, “Still Boats and Moon” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a few of his other works online at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

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Broadway for Paul, published tomorrow, gathers Vincent Katz’s new poems about our civic and private life, set mostly in New York City. Katz takes joy, where he can, in our daily rounds, and where there can’t be unmixed joy, maintains a judicious, sunlit openness that invites a deepening of understanding.

Morning, or Evening?

Everywhere, right now, parents are making breakfast, Older people waking up alone, another day

Walking down platform, seeing the flood of faces coming into the city, One is taken, not by a Heinrich Böllian sense of dull sameness, But rather that this is an epochal moment We all share, we are all somehow in this together.

Repeated rhythms, every Thursday, placing coins or a bill or two Into the open valise of the trumpeter always there— Grand Central he plays, and the lineage, where that music flows from, Where it is going, an undeniable story in our midst, Woven into our fabric, that none, in their heart of hearts, can deny.

Important to be in one’s own head, not subject to advertising or even   others’ art.

Leaving tracks covered in snow, tracks in snow, rock imposing wall, Cross the river, gain speed, struts protect the building from falling    down.

Clouds travel faster than houses, farther back, we pass towns, Skirt highways, fly through wetlands, Faster than speed, we are bringing information, ways of seeing:

Transmit focus to fingers on controls, So blighted, threatened, scared as little children, terrified of own   ignorance.

This is a chapter; it will end, And there will be another chapter, and that will end, and so on, Until we come to the end of the book, and that’s that. But the thing is, what did your book add up to, what did it say? The Greeks believed your character determines your fate. You can veer here and there, but ultimately something inside you,    the way you are, Has already determined the kinds of choices you will make.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Broadway for Paul by Vincent Katz.

Learn more about Vincent Katz.

Follow Vincent Katz on Instagram, where he'll be celebrating the publication of Broadway for Paul by giving live readings throughout the month.

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

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Vincent Katz, a New York poet, whose collection Broadway for Paul is forthcoming from Knopf next year, reflects on the so-called “liberal bubble” inhabited by city dwellers like him. (This poem appeared in Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, a gathering in response to the divisive presidential election of 2016 and its aftermath, as well as in Resist Much/Obey Little, published by Spuyten Duyvil.)

This Beautiful Bubble

Everyone takes the subway, and you can look up, And look at all the people, and each one is different, And they look different, and each one has a story, and suddenly, You are awake and want to know each story, only you can’t, Don’t have time, they don’t, don’t want to maybe.

But some you do, you glean, you approximate yourself to something     of them, Like the beautiful, chestnut-skinned woman, who, leaning, Listened to the announcer before getting in, and, confused,     because the 2 was called a 5, Asked advice, and three people responded, Explaining in their different ways, some of them silent, Eyes met with approval, warmth only subway-known, Among equals, fellow travelers, denizens;

She sat and smiled, and looking at an infant, Smiled more, her hair was a flag of self-joy too, She was real, at ease among people. The rule is: to speak. Make contact, and you will find more people than you thought.

But back to our bubble. It is everywhere around us. Everywhere, walking in the city, you are seeing people, All different kinds, shapes, sizes, the best education You can give a child is to bring them up inside this Beautiful bubble. I complain, but I’ll never leave. I feed off the looks, the stories, the hungering here.

I’m aware, we’re all aware, what goes on outside the bubble. We’re not stupid. We just thought people outside the bubble wanted     the same thing: To live as variously as possible. Or, put another way: I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

It took us sixty years or so to understand What the word “boundless” meant. And now we know.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now

Learn more about Vincent Katz

Peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link