The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Eight): Laura Cronk [by Angela Ball]

TO MY TWENTIES

Stop what you’re doing

and come with me. We’ll

walk out into the wild

cold, you in your pink

sequined shell from the

consignment shop –

you can have my coat.

Let’s be out together

in the world, the wind

beating against us, the

sidewalks cracking with

ice. Though you shrink

from the cold, my twenties,

you’re still lustrous, still

throwing off heat. We’ll

walk past the schizophrenic

piano player and the junk

dealer poet, there are bad

boyfriends around every

bend, but we’re together

now and we don’t have

to stop. We’ll go back

to my apartment and

open the door and the

kids’ faces will pop

with happiness. They’ll

run toward us, ram their

heads into our stomachs,

so eager to be held.

It’s not the kind of

greeting you’re used to.

After dinner I’ll get you

a cab, my twenties,

but you’ll take the shape

of a great gray bird

and fly away.

-Laura Cronk first published in StatoRec Included in Ghost Hour

Laura Cronk is the author most recently of Ghost Hour from Persea Books. She teaches writing and pedagogy courses at The New School in New York.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Eight): Laura Cronk

Laura Cronk’s sparkling “To My Twenties” takes after a poem of the same name by Kenneth Koch that begins

How lucky that I ran into you

When everything was possible

For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart

And so happy to see any woman–

O woman! O my twentieth year!

Though Koch’s poem is more “excitable,” to use Frank O’Hara’s term for Koch himself, it is a poem of retrospect and nostalgia. It ends this way:

You never, ever, were stingy. What you gave me you gave whole

But as for telling

Me how to best use it

You weren’t a genius at that.

Twenties, my soul

Is yours for the asking

You know that, if you ever come back.

In contrast, Cronk’s poem, a direct rendezvous with her twenties, functions as a kind of sequel to Koch’s. Her twenties catch up with her somewhere in the city, and she invites them home—her invitation an arresting demand:

Stop what you’re doing

and come with me

What a brilliant way to involve the reader! We are now part of the poem, impersonating we know not what, exactly. Years? A person? A set of attributes?

Cronk’s twenties—and we—come alive in thrift shop threads, “a pink / sequined shell” both vulnerable and outrageous. It is fun to live them again, both as revealed here and through inserting our own experience. Koch talks about what things were like when he was “in” those years; Cronk diegetically reunites with them in reanimated form. At first. By the time the second sentence has arrived, “We’’ll,” we’re in the hypothetical realm of the future—exactly where Koch hopes to meet his twenties. I’ve misread! But, I believe, reading is a process—and misreading can play a productive part. Cronk’s scenario somehow manages to be both real and projected as the poem details the perils that will greet her and her third, inclement decade—in which inner and outer weather conjoin:

Let’s be out together

in the world, the wind

beating against us, the

sidewalks cracking with

ice. Though you shrink

from the cold, my twenties,

you’re still lustrous, still

throwing off heat. We’ll

walk past the schizophrenic

piano player and the junk

dealer poet, there are bad

boyfriends around every

bend, but we’re together

now and we don’t have

to stop.

What more accurate evocation of a woman in her twenties than “lustrous”? Though the “schizophrenic / piano player” and the “junk / dealer poet” may be gone, bad boyfriends are eternal (a possible book title?). In the present tense inside the future tense, “we’re together”—and “don’t have to stop.”

But we do—it’s late, as Kenneth Koch’s poems often remind us. It’s often late in the New York School. Stars would shine through its big windows were it not for the city’s competing lights. Encountering the speaker’s kids in her apartment seems the beginning of the end. After dinner, a cab needs to be called for the brilliant girl, who–suddenly and scarifyingly–becomes Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”—and the cab goes wanting.

Experiencing Laura Cronk’s comic and poignant “To My Twenties” transports us to a past transfigured by a tangible future. Sadly, we watch the disreputable angel / past self’s flight—hoping, as so many poems hope, that togetherness returns. — Angela Ball