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New
York Times ()
A
Shoe That Fits: A Bohemian Poet's Life
by Julie Salamon
Don't
make me seem too picturesque," Samuel Menashe urged,
making a difficult request.
It
is tempting to regard Mr. Menashe as an heirloom from
a more colorful era. He is a poet, both lauded and obscure,
who has lived in the same Greenwich Village tenement
apartment on lower Thompson Street since 1956. His rent
was $29 a month when he moved in. It has been raised
since then, but is still a small fraction of what his
newer neighbors pay.
Mr.
Menashe remains a striking figure at 78, speaking with
a resonant voice, his leonine silver hair swept back
from his forehead. He frequently illustrates a conversational
point by reciting, with elegant diction, one of his
own short poems — which Stephen Spender once described,
in The New York Review of Books, as "intense and clear
as diamonds." There is neither computer nor typewriter
in his apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up building;
Mr. Menashe composes his poetry with a pen, often in
Central Park, to which he travels several times a week
by subway.
"I
suppose I am a classic bohemian," he admitted, sitting
on a sagging couch in one of his three tiny rooms.
The
ancient bathtub, perched on legs, stands in the kitchen,
near a large refrigerator that Mr. Menashe has unplugged
and uses as a storage closet. (He has a small refrigerator,
containing food, in the living room.)
It's
a light, airy space packed with phenomenal clutter,
mainly books and papers. The walls, which haven't been
painted in 25 years, are decorated with lively paintings,
works of friends. Near the center of the room is a large,
unlikely burst of greenery, a tree produced from seeds
that Mr. Menashe saved from a grapefruit he had eaten.
He
is an anachronism, a purist who has remained apart from
the network that makes a career. Not that Mr. Menashe
has been dismissed as a Village character, or that his
poems have gone unnoticed. He has been published in
prestigious journals like The Partisan Review, The Times
Literary Supplement and The New Yorker, as well in as
anthologies and textbooks. His work has been widely
reviewed.
He
has been helped by well-known writers. Dana Gioia, chairman
of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote the introduction
to Mr. Menashe's seventh collection, "The Niche Narrows"
(Talisman House), published in 2000. Two years ago Billy
Collins, then the United States poet laureate, invited
Mr. Menashe to read his work at the Library of Congress.
He
regularly gives readings, often in his local library,
the Jefferson Market branch in Greenwich Village (where
he will appear on Dec. 6), and he can be heard tomorrow
at the public library in Fort Lee, N.J.; on Oct. 21
at the Williams Club in Manhattan; and on Nov. 18 at
the Society for the Advancement of Judaism on West 86th
Street in Manhattan. Or you can hear him read his work
on a CD released by rattapallax.
A
`Singular Talent'
Considering
the significant recognition that he has received from
other poets, he has remained remarkably unknown. "The
public career of Samuel Menashe demonstrates how a serious
poet of singular talent, power and originality can be
largely overlooked in our literary culture," Mr. Gioia
writes.
In
his essay Mr. Gioia offers several reasons, especially
the brevity of Mr. Menashe's poems, which generally
finish within 10 lines. It has not helped that he has
been a throwback, preferring not to teach or to work
at a literary publication. "He has lived a bohemian
life in an age of academic institutionalism," Mr. Gioia
observed.
Mr.
Menashe's poetry resonates with biblical themes and
metaphysical concerns, though there are works specific
to Central Park, to Greenwich Village and to Thompson
Street. One day, sitting in the little asphalt park
between Thompson and Sullivan Streets, he recalled an
old woman in the tenement across from his, who used
to lean out the window every day, from dawn to dusk.
The neighborhood was then primarily Italian, with a
substantial Portuguese subculture. The memory of that
woman inspired a recitation, lines from a poem called
"Tenement Spring."
There
is a pillow
On the window sill —
Her elbow room —
In the twin window
Enclosed by a grill
Plants in pots bloom
On the window sill
"That
was the custom of the place," he said. "People would
be watching the street all day, old people at the windowsills.
As far as I knew that woman's feet never touched the
ground."
Then
he laughed. "Now I am the old man on the street!"
The
street has changed considerably. This part of the South
Village is now generally considered part of SoHo and
is far more chic than shabby. Mr. Menashe's "hovel,"
as he calls it, is on the same block as 60 Thompson
Street, a trendy hotel where a standard room goes for
$325 a night. DKNY has an outpost up the street; at
the nearby Chocolate Garden, a single morsel of exquisite
chocolate sells for $1.25.
Rocco's
is still around, however — not the nouveau Rocco's of
reality television, but the still popular, homey Italian
restaurant north of Houston Street where Mr. Menashe's
mother took him almost 45 years ago, when he was depressed
about something. Now, though, across the street, people
also line up at Tomoe Sushi for Japanese food.
The
poet neither apologizes for nor sentimentalizes his
circumstances. "You could transport me to a big apartment
uptown overlooking the Central Park lake, and I would
be very happy," he said. "But this shoe fits."
Streets
Full of Writers
When
he arrived on Thompson Street 47 years ago, romantic
notions of artistic purity prevailed, still reminiscent
of Anatole Broyard's description of the area just after
World War II:
"Rents
were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it seemed to
me that happiness itself might be cheaply had," Mr.
Broyard wrote in "Kafka Was the Rage," his Greenwich
Village memoir. "The streets and bars were full of writers
and painters and the kind of young men and women who
liked to be around them. In Washington Square would-be
novelists and poets tossed a football near the fountain,
and girls just out of Ivy League colleges looked at
the landscape with art history in their eyes."
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Mr.
Menashe expresses no nostalgia for those bygone days;
in some ways he's still living in them. "It's very poetic,
the bathtub is in the kitchen," he said ruefully. "But
if I had any foresight I'd now be the owner of a proper
middle-class apartment."
He
offered a poem, called "At a Standstill." For a spontaneous
orator like him, his living room couch makes a fine
podium.
That
statue, that cast
Of my solitude
Has found its niche
In this kitchen
Where I do not eat
Where the bathtub stands
Upon cat feet —
I did not advance
I cannot retreat
Mr.
Menashe considers himself an accidental bohemian. He
grew up in Queens, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants;
his father owned a laundry and dry-cleaning store. They
were educated people, Mr. Menashe stipulated. "It is
assumed that immigrant parents means ignorant parents,"
he said. "Part of the American image of your achievement
is that you are a self-made man, that you are totally
other than your parents rather than you are a continuation."
He
graduated from the elite Townsend Harris High School
at age 16 and then studied biochemistry at Queens College,
thinking of perhaps becoming a doctor — the more predictable
path for someone from his background.
But
when he was old enough, he enlisted in the Army to fight
in World War II, and everything changed. At the Battle
of the Bulge, Mr. Menashe's company started with 190
men in the morning; 29 were left by evening — the rest
dead, wounded or taken prisoner. At the war's end, he
was just 20.
"When
I came back, I heard people talking about what they
were going to do next summer," he said. "I was amazed
that they could talk of that future, of next summer.
As a result, I lived in the day. For the first few years
after the war, each day was the last day. And then it
changed. Each day was the only day."
This
thought is echoed in what he referred to as the "war
poem," called "Winter."
I
am entrenched
Against the snow,
Visor lowered
To blunt its blow
I am where I go
Yet
Mr. Menashe rejects the notion of the "počte maudit,"
the suffering poet. "It's very important not to present
me as a grim person because I'm not," he said.
With
that, he recited "Family Silver":
That
spoon fell out
Of my mother's mouth
Before I was born,
But I was endowed
With a tuning fork
Before
moving to the Village, Mr. Menashe studied in Paris
at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill and received a doctorate
in literature there. He had decided to become a writer,
but of short stories, not poetry. "As far as I knew,
poets were dead, they were immortal, one didn't decide
to be a poet," he said.
Leaving
Academia
Yet
that is what he became, supporting himself at first
with teaching jobs but then preferring to be a waiter,
a tour guide, a French tutor, a poetry lecturer on cruise
ships. Why did he leave academia? He answered with the
story of a student who never missed a deadline for a
paper — but the papers were terrible. Then, one day,
Mr. Menashe saw the young man through the window of
a dormitory, playing jazz piano with incredible joy.
"I told him he was better off spending the time he wasted
on term papers playing the piano," Mr. Menashe said.
While
he spends most of his time alone, he isn't a recluse.
"If people meet me at a dinner party, they can't tell
that I had to bend my head under the kitchen sink to
wash my hair," he said. "I have a good suit."
Only
one; he has no closet space. He once went to Hollywood,
driving cross country in hopes of breaking into the
movies. He stayed a year, but on the day he was finally
scheduled for an interview for a studio job, he was
in a car accident. "I thought I was punished for worshiping
the golden calf," he said of the concussion he suffered.
He returned to New York.
Balance
and Poetry
He
travels by the C train from Spring Street to Central
Park almost every day, with a pen and a work-in-progress
in his pocket. Often he is joined there by an old friend,
John Thornton, a retired banker, whom Mr. Menashe met
when they were both young recruits in the Army. He enjoys
company but is happy to be alone.
"I
find I like to walk a poem to its completion, even before
I write it down," he said during a recent excursion
through a lushly green Sheep Meadow. "I don't feel that
I am writing — maybe sculpting. You know, "poet" means
"maker" in Greek. Sometimes I feel like someone working
on an algebra problem, and you're coming to the conclusion,
and it has to be perfectly balanced."
Mr.
Menashe, elderly without seeming old, might have been
describing his outlook on life as well. Later, in another
conversation, repeating his concern that he not seem
grim or despairing (he does not), Mr. Menashe invoked
a favorite poem, "Promised Land."
At the edge
Of a world
Beyond my eyes
Beautiful
I know Exile
Is always
Green with hope —
The river
We cannot cross
Flows forever
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