This is the beginning and end of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poem 12, from the section ‘Pictures of the Gone World’ in ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’ (1958), with its distinctive font, looking like it was designed on a typewriter. A poem has no obligation to be true, only convincing, but I’d be disappointed to find he hadn’t actually found Yeats on the El (the Elevated Railway in Manhattan).
Whether or not it happened that way, it feels true because I bring to it my own vivid memories of train journeys and poetry. They have that quality Ferlinghetti writes about, of tying together two incompatible scenes: the poem, and what was happening through the window. I read Hannah Sullivan’s ‘Three Poems’ on a train journey from London to Wales. It’s a wonderful book which has nothing to do with Wiltshire fields, except in my own head. Years ago I read C.K.Williams ‘Flesh and Blood’ on the train to Leeds. I think I was visiting my sister at university: South Yorkshire and urban U.S.A.
I have my own New York memory too, reading translations of Pablo Neruda by James Wright and Robert Bly (which I had just bought at Mercer’s on Bleecker St) on the train from New York to Boston. Mixing Chilean landscapes, Latin American leftist politics and the New England coast.
And one very cold New Year I bought X/Self by Kamau Brathwaite in Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank. I was determined to buy something – I wanted that distinctive ‘Kilometer Zero Paris’ stamp at the front of a book. Which meant that Brathwaite’s fascinating explorations of European/African/Amerindian/Caribbean culture are all superimposed in my mind with hoarfrost on trees in rural France as the train headed north, and home.
I feel now that I was lucky to have a good number of years before the internet, before I could go online anytime. It meant fewer distractions, and a greater possibility of getting really immersed; a habit which still sometimes holds its own against the addictive pull of the phone.
the word-road home 