New York City
Poems On Arrival
Introduction
In the group, or book to be titled--"New York City, Poems On Arrival", the
subject is arrival.
My own arrival in NYC, around 1970 and of course my own arrival as an artist. (Well, maybe). Through various techniques, and poetical devices I experience the city. First, assaulted by the mysterious vast size of the city, the strangeness of its new places. Then the tumultuous arrival into the vast worldly nature of its boulevards and museums, and at once privy to the many thoughts and passions of the strangers of the big city and the strange places encountered, moving in and out of generations, providing multiple viewpoints on a poem by poem basis, alternating variously between drug lords, slumlords, stock brokers, bankers, homeless people, rock stars, drug pushers, prostitutes, leaders of the community and workaday folks. The topics always the same. A past tense perspective on their lives, an obituary, a summing up.
The effect one of variousness and multi-dimensional viewpoints. An attempt be as large as the city itself, all encompassing, and Byronic by its nature and broad sweep.
Anyway, there's a large feeling to the manuscript. I suspect I shall write over a thousand pages, and not be through even to the end.
I was born in Elizabethton, Tennessee and grew up in Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia. Attended East Tennessee State University. I have been widely published in The Laurel Review, Voices International, Plains Poetry Journal, The Lyric, Sow's Head, Light: The Quarterly of Light Verse (Chicago), NY Times, Reader's Digest and the Bedford Introduction to Literature, St Martins Press.
Currently my novel is running at my homepage as well as Dream Forge.
A book of poetry as well is running at The Garrett County Journal. It's called Decadent Verse or Light Verse For A Decadent Age. It's main subject is social criticism and social activism.
Ernest Slyman