New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry-ranging from Walt Whitman's exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets' moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city.
All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes's Harlem to James Merrill's Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices.
Encompassing as many moods, characters, and scenes as this multifaceted, ever-changing metropolis has to offer, Poems of New York will be treasured by literary lovers of New York everywhere.

Foreword
WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)
Mannahatta
Broadway
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891)
The House-Top: A Night Piece
AMY LOWELL (1874–1925)
The Taxi
Anticipation
WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955)
Arrival at the Waldorf
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963)
The Great Figure
SARA TEASDALE (1884–1933)
Union Square
Broadway
MARIANNE MOORE (1887–1972)
New York

CLAUDE MCKAY (1889–1948)
The Tropics in New York
The City’s Love
A Song of the Moon

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)
Recuerdo
‘‘If I should learn’’

DOROTHY PARKER (1893–1967)
Observation

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)
“Taxis toot whirl people moving”

CHARLES REZNIKOFF (1894–1976)
“Walk about the subway station”

FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA (1898–1936)
Dawn

HART CRANE (1899–1933)
To Brooklyn Bridge
The Harbor Dawn
The Tunnel
LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)
The Weary Blues
Good Morning
Harlem
Juke Box Love Song
Subway Rush Hour

HELENE JOHNSON (1906–1995)
The Street to the Establishment
W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)
Refugee Blues
September 1, 1939
GEORGE OPPEN (1908–1984)
Pedestrian
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979)
The Man-Moth
Letter to N.Y.
MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913–1980)
Seventh Avenue

MAY SWENSON (1913–1989)
Staying at Ed’s Place
At the Museum of Modern Art
KARL SHAPIRO (1913–2000)
Future-Present
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1919– )
“The Pennycandystore beyond the El”
AMY CLAMPITT (1920–1994)
Dancers Exercising
GRACE PALEY (1922– )
The Nature of This City
Fear
On Mother’s Day
HOWARD MOSS (1922–1987)
The Building
The Roof Garden
DENISE LEVERTOV (1923–1997)
The Cabdriver’s Smile
JAMES SCHUYLER (1923–1991)
This Dark Apartment
An East Window on Elizabeth Street
March Here
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923– )
Photograph from September 11
KENNETH KOCH (1925– )
Girl and Baby Florist Sidewalk Pram Nineteen
Seventy Something

GERALD STERN (1925– )
96 Vandam
Let Me Please Look Into My Window
FRANK O’HARA (1926–1966)
Steps
Gamin
JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995)
An Urban Convalescence
164 East 72nd Street

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997)
I am a Victim of Telephone
My Sad Self
W. S. MERWIN (1927– )
St. Vincent’s
GALWAY KINNELL (1927– )
Room of Return
Running on Silk
JOHN ASHBERY (1927– )
A Sendentary Existence
So Many Lives
CHARLES TOMLINSON (1927– )
All Afternoon
PHILIP LEVINE (1928– )
Get Up
RICHARD HOWARD (1929– )
209 Canal
Among the Missing

L. E. SISSMAN (1929–1976)
Tears at Korvette’s
Visiting Chaos
ADRIENNE RICH (1929– )
Upper Broadway
GREGORY CORSO (1930–2001)
Eastside Incidents
The Whole Mess . . . Almost
DEREK WALCOTT (1930– )
The Bridge
AMIRI BARAKA (1934– )
Return of the Native
MARK STRAND (1934– )
Night Piece
AUDRE LORDE (1934–1992)
To My Daughter the Junkie on a Train
A Trip on the Staten Island Ferry
TED BERRIGAN (1934–1983)
Whitman in Black
HETTIE JONES (1934– )
Dust— A Survival Kit, Fall 2001
JUNE JORDAN (1936–2002)
Toward a City that Sings
“If you saw a Negro lady”
C. K. WILLIAMS (1936– )
Love: Wrath
From War
CHARLES SIMIC (1938– )
Couple at Coney Island
For the Very Soul of Me
THOMAS M. DISCH (1940– )
The Argument Resumed; or, Up Through Tribeca
In Praise of New York
BILLY COLLINS (1941– )
Man Listening to Disc
ERICA JONG (1942– )
Walking Through the Upper East Side

SHARON OLDS (1942– )
Boy Out in the World

NIKKI GIOVANNI (1943– )
Just a New York Poem
The New Yorkers
RONALD WARDALL (1947– )
Three Weeks After
DAVID LEHMAN (1948– )
The World Trade Center
October 11, 1998
September 14, 2001
LAWRENCE JOSEPH (1948– )
In the Age of Postcapitalism
DOUG DORPH (1949– )
Love
EDWARD HIRSCH (1950– )
Man on a Fire Escape
JORIE GRAHAM (1951– )
Expulsion
ROBERT POLITO (1951– )
Overheard in the Love Hotel
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER (1951– )
Construction Site, Windy Night
1972, #43
The Last Hours of Laódikê, Sister of Hektor
ELIZABETH MACKLIN (1952– )
A Married Couple Discovers Irreconcilable Differences
VICKIE KARP (1953– )
Glass
LAURIE SHECK (1953– )
In the South Bronx
The Subway Platform
CORNELIUS EADY (1954– )
The Amateur Terrorist
Dread
PHILLIS LEVIN (1954– )
Out of Chaos
VIJAY SESHADRI (1954– )
A Werewolf in Brooklyn
Immediate City
JUDITH BAUMEL (1956– )
You weren’t Crazy and You weren’t Dead
LI-YOUNG LEE (1957– )
From The City in Which I Love You
MARTÍN ESPADA (1957– )
The Owl and the Lightning
JAMES LASDUN (1958– )
Woman Police Officer in Elevator
REGINALD SHEPHERD (1963– )
Antibody
DEBORAH GARRISON (1965– )
Worked Late on a Tuesday Night
I Saw You Walking
MALENA MÖRLING (1965– )
Let Me Say This
WILLIE PERDOMO (1967– )
123rd Street Rap
DAVID BERMAN (1967– )
New York, New York
KEVIN YOUNG (1970– )
City-as-School
MELANIE REHAK (1971– )
Adonis All Male Revue, November 24
DAVID SEMANKI (1971– )
Rain
NATHANIEL BELLOWS (1972– )
Liberty Island
Acknowledgments

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, a former poetry editor at the New York Times Book Review, is the editor of the acclaimed anthology Poems of New York and The Poets Laureate Anthology. She lives in New York City and currently teaches American literature at Sarah Lawrence College.