Allyson Paty
I live on the first floor and I like to read by the window, for the light and also for the noise, when people walk by. During the pandemic, I’ve missed reading on the train because I like the counterpoint of human conversation in the background. The broadsides on the wall are from Parallax, (clockwise from the bottom left): Ru Puro and Valerie Hegarty, Ama Codjoe and George Ferrandi, Lucy Ives and Mairikke Dau, Marwa Helal and Amber Heaton; and Sawako Nakayasu and Ayamint. In the center is a painting of Duk Duk dancer’s costume, which my Parallax co-editor Norah Maki brought back from her time living and working in Papua New Guinea.
Readings
The first poem you remember loving (and how you feel about it now):
There’s not one first, but a few overlapping firsts.
Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” (1962)
This poem appeared in the reading comprehension section of a standardized test I took in the fourth or fifth grade. I was really interested in the shifting sense of presence throughout the poem. The first stanza offers an intimate portrait of the father, dressing in the pre-dawn on his day off to build the fires that will warm the house. But it’s an unwitnessed moment. The speaker is asleep until the next stanza, and remains in a different room for most of the poem. I loved that telescoping attention. It interested me that information was tucked into other information: “Sundays too” telling of all other days as much as Sunday; “blueblack cold” suggesting a temperature but also a quality of light and time of day; the father’s “cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather” revealing more of his life even as he remains in the action of building the fire; and of course the famous line that shifts the poem without looking away from the scene it describes—the speaker “fearing the chronic angers of that house” while he gets out of bed. I got so interested in the poem that I didn’t go on to the questions until the proctor, my teacher, made an announcement. I had to rush to finish the test. I still love this poem, and I teach it in an introductory creative writing course. Hayden’s precise sentences move with great clarity but in a dialectic of description and withholding.
William Carlos William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1921) and Gertrude Stein’s “Susie Asado” (1922)
When I was a senior in high school, I had the great fortune of taking a course in twentieth century American poetry. The teacher was fantastic and several classmates were as into the reading as I was, so not only was I introduced to texts, I had the pleasure of talking about them seriously with my peers. Poetry did things to language that I wasn’t used to in prose, and that excited me. It blew my mind that the Williams’s poem was a single declarative sentence that unfolded line by tiny line. I loved that I could hold the whole text—its words and the image it conveyed—in my mind at once. Yet it wasn’t static (I disagreed with a classmate who likened the poem to a “snapshot”); the form demanded attention to sequence, to the work of each word, which altered the cumulative effect of the sentence, which was also an image. “Susie Asado” is first off a pleasure to read and hear for the sounds. The words didn’t seem to point at meaning outside or “beneath” the language itself. At that time, I used the word “immediacy” to describe what I liked about these poems, and a lot of poetry in general. I thought that Williams (through syntax) and Stein (through sound) put the reader in very close contact with their language, much more so than the texts I was used to reading, where what was important was not words themselves but what they conveyed, always in relation to context. Now I completely disbelieve the idea that language can ever be “immediate”; reading is an inherently mediated experience, and that is more interesting to me. As with many first loves, I feel a mix of tenderness, longing, and embarrassment for the feeling I had toward these poems, one of outright devotion and real urgency surrounding the possibilities of meaning they conferred. That is the best thing about not knowing very much; things feel charged with importance simply because they are new to you. I was 17 then, and I’m 34 now, so that was half my life ago. I try to avoid re-reading the works I most loved at that time so as to not cover over the intensity of that love with a more informed—and therefore tempered—perspective.
“The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes (1906) and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth (1807)
It wasn’t “The Highwayman” I liked but Anne’s recitation of it in the CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which I watched as a very young child, before I was even really literate. My mom, who watched the VHS tapes of the recorded show with me, then showed me Noyes’s poem in an anthology called 101 Famous Poems that both she and my dad had grown up with. Not knowing anything about popularity or the canon, I thought the poem’s appearance among their books was not only amazing coincidence but a bond between me and the fictional Anne. I liked the slim volume, which was hard-bound in faux leather with gold inlay, and the poems included portraits of the writers—all white British and American writers, several women among them—in oval frames. I looked at this book and at the poets’ portraits a lot as I was learning to read and also had my parents read parts of it to me. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was a favorite. The first poem I ever wrote ripped off its first line: “I wander lonely as the wind.” I don’t remember feeling any shame about it, or that I had stolen in any way. In fact, for a number of years, I forgot Wordsworth and when I read the poem again—also on a standardized test, I think in middle school—I felt robbed, not by Wordsworth but of my early authorship, even as I recognized that the thief was me.
A book of poetry from the past year:
Glaring by Benjamin Krusling (Wendy’s Subway, 2020)
This is an incredible book from an incredible press. In it, Krusling breaks open elements of the lyric that had been stumping me, like directionality, boundedness, and the strange density that facts can make inside a poem. The poems are porous, bringing in other texts, ideas, and real-world events and places in virtuosic, agile, but not especially performative modes. Krusling takes up a wide range of affects and distances from those affects, which strike me is tactical more than spectacular. If there’s a constant in these multivalent poems, it’s that they all press against the structures of violence that mediate contemporary life, their twin ability to interpellate and obliterate. It’s one of very few books I immediately re-read as soon as I finished it, and I suspect I’ll be going back and back.
A poet or book of poetry from before 1800 / A book of poetry from the past ten years:
Enigmas by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695), translated from the Spanish by Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015)
I’m a big fan of the Señal series, started in 2015 as a collaboration between Ugly Duckling, BOMB, and Antena, which publishes bilingual chapbooks of contemporary Latin American poetry. Enigmas was one of the first publications in this series (obviously challenging the idea of the “contemporary”), and each poem is a four-line question. To me, there’s magic to a single-sentence poem that unfolds line by line, vanishing as soon as the thought completes. Here’s one of my favorites, in Villarreal’s translation:
What is that torment
wherein, with equal tyranny,
to hush it lacks bravery,
to speak it is neglect?
This question holds out a suffering that demands to be carried, somewhere that is not silence and is not speech. It feels “timeless” in that the conflict resonates across the centuries, and yet, the book is always making you aware that you’re reading Sor Juana’s words as reconstituted in the present, because of the mediation of the new translation, and because of your own positionality in the present. (Luis Filipe Fabre’s Sor Juana y Otros Monstruos, also published in this series, takes up these concerns directly). There’s also a magic to bilingual editions, which seem to me to point to the insufficiency and impossibility of translation—if you’re thinking about translation purely as a point of entry to the original text—while also showcasing the art of translation, the collaboration between the author and the translator. Also, for me personally, there’s a functional aspect: I can read in Spanish, but only poorly; understanding and friction come in equal parts. With the aid of translation, I can enjoy the jagged access of reading back and forth between the translation and the original, two texts that are also one text.
Writings
In the Allée
Backlit, white stone
Summer sun makes ragged the edges
of the underfunded library
and the woman I watch
through balusters of sculpted lime
knot up her extravagant hair
Her bun subtends an angle
equal to the monument
to the person for whom the park is named
A poet I’ve never read
but heard paraphrased
by Rev. Dr. King in a scratchy recording
played each January of my youth
in U.U. Sunday school:
“Truth crushed to the earth
will rise again.” A kind of eclipse
Between the woman and her companion:
pastry two bottled waters
they speak a little (in Italian)
but mostly look at their phones
beaded bracelets, sugar on their hands
Some facts:
The library before us
rose from the family fortune
of Governor Samuel J. Tilden
accrued in patent medicine
specifically, an extract of Indian hemp
i.e. colonial weed lozenge
The building sits on the site
of the city’s first public reservoir
approved only
after an eighth of the population died
one summer, the cholera epidemic of 1832
Though the disease
had been attributed in part
to the moral failings of the poor
things had not been helped the city allowed
by the Manhattan Company’s
exclusive rights to water supply
The contract (
granted after tannery runoff
poisoned the glacial lake
at heart of the Munsee village Werpoes
(where now stands a jail
and two parks, fountains and concrete))
infamously permitted the Company
to use surplus funds in banking
Unsurprisingly the waterworks
they ran cheaply as a front
boring few wells. running wood pipe
while directing their efforts
to the financial institution
now known as Chase
I’m gathering this info
here on the green
metal-slatted chair next to a row of hollyhocks
with a few more good weeks of bloom
skeptical whether this process
of assimilating facts
i.e. “learning” can stop me
sucking on the surface of the obvious
I eavesdrop on the Italians
relying on ok Spanish
and pricks of English
when they refer to New York landmarks
they’ve visited or maybe are planning to
I never saw the painting of Bryant
talking an outcrop with Thomas Cole
fictive mountains and light streaming from behind
when it hung here in the Edna Barnes Solomon Room
In 2005, the NYPL sold it to Alice Walton,
Wal-Mart heir, for $35 million
She was founding a museum
and the library needed cash
a spokesman said
for acquisitions
Its original collections
comprised the personal collection
of James Lenox lifelong bibliophile
and a reference library endowed by John Jacob Astor
whose name I associate
with the mixed portfolio of beaver, opium, and real estate
but foremost a certain traffic triangle
from which, in my youth,
two Starbucks could be seen at once
To those of us who met between them
in a style
two or three decades late
this sight meant something
about the particular future
we aimed to nettle
At the very moment I recall this
a worker in a guacamole-colored polo
reaches gloved hands into the tulip-shaped trashcan
(is there really no better way?)
and the twin-tailed siren
crests on the wave of refuse
he lowers into his own rolling bin
A sparrow hops sideways
into the flowerbed. Come late fall
an ice rink will cover the lawn
and novice skaters will grip
the Bank of America-branded half-wall
to make their unsteady way
Halo
whatever you’re feeling
about your face
cast back all day
on video call
about the easy tread
and uncrossable plains
via oblique
intervention of tasks
the dryer lint fluffs apart
you can’t help thinking
like lived time
ever licking
the stupid grimy corners
at the end of humanism
a helpful automated voice
extends the possibility
of simple resolution
however facile
action’s promise
it’s a comfort
to do as “she” says
fantasy cocoon
in the teeming
produce section
“pure goodness”
on netted bags
of clementines
while others bear
a small sticker:
a drawn fruit
who zips off her skin
Allyson Paty grew up in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn. She holds a BA from NYU Gallatin and an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Her poems have appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly’s F I V E S, among other publications. She’s the author of three chapbooks, Five O’clock on the Shore (above/ground press, 2019), Score Poems (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and The Further Away ([sic] Detroit, 2012). With Norah Maki, Allyson is co-founding editor of Singing Saw Press. She is Associate Director of the Writing Program at NYU Gallatin, where she runs a website for student writing, art, and research, and produces a print journal with the students in NYU's Prison Education Program.