A poem of yours to which I’ve returned for many years is “This Yellow City” (from House of Fontanka). The poem begins as follows:
Van Gogh could’ve been born here or Van Gogh could’ve
lived here or Van Gogh could’ve died here but he didn’t
and he didn’t and he did not
stop here to paint this yellow city yellow.
I suppose there’s no explaining why one poem versus another seems to stick in a reader’s mind (or what its presence sets in motion in that reader’s formation). I’ve always said that, as poets, we have to let matter what matters to the reader to whom it matters. In fact, I’m often surprised (or perplexed) by poems of my own that readers take to themselves. So be it, though. We can’t really influence, much less determine, which poems resonate with readers. "The Yellow City" is just one such poem of yours that I've taken to myself and lived with for many years.
For me, I’m drawn to the speaker’s loneliness and wandering within a city not his own—that sense of displacement but also of connection. Maybe I, too, in my seeking after art, have this constant feeling of displacement and connection, and maybe that’s at least one reason I feel a kinship with this poem. I’m also drawn to the color yellow repeated so often throughout the poem, and I’m drawn to the poem’s use of repetition, a kind of music that both anchors the poem but also gives it a sense of soaring—a characteristic found throughout your work.
Plus, what does it mean that Van Gogh didn’t “stretch his canvas here to paint this yellow city yellow”? What does it mean that he “could’ve”? Are there places in the world—even major cities like St. Petersburg—we will never experience in their fullness because we live in the absence of what someone’s art might have brought to our understanding of those places? Through whose revelatory, miraculous eyes have we not seen the world? Can part of our loneliness be traced to the poverty of perspectives we hold?
Thank you for being one such perspective through whose eyes I get to think about existence. Without “This Yellow City,” I would not quite know myself in the same way. With “This Yellow City,” I carry a companion with me in my own wandering.
I’m curious: is there a poem of yours which now, after many years, you reread and find important in ways that an earlier version of yourself overlooked as central to your emerging body of work? Is there a poem whose implications, especially after decades of writing poems, deepen in ways that now surprise you? Has the poem come alongside you, an unlikely companion, but one which, now, you can’t imagine not having nearby as you continue your walk?
Ever your fan…