New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe’s European Legacy

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Poe’s pocket watchA hundred years ago the Edgar Allan Poe Museum was founded in Richmond, Virginia. To celebrate the anniversary author and preeminent Poe collector Susan Jaffe Tane donated the pocket watch that Poe carried on him whilst writing his short story The Tell-Tale Heart shortly before he moved to the city of New York where he spent his last years.

In this tale the murderous narrator compares the thumping of his victim’s heart to the ticking of a clock. [Read more…] about Edgar Allan Poe’s European Legacy

Poetry: Toward a Covid School of Poetry

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Toward a Covid School of Poetry

Dante self-quarantined for the Black Death,
which killed his muse Beatrice, as well as
Francesco Petrarch’s muse Laura, inventing
modern poetry, even as it killed one-third
of Europe’s population. Folks fear bears
and mountain lions now, but lowly fleas,
rat-vectored, proved the executioners,
to become the world’s most deadly being.

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Walt Whitman On How To Read Leaves of Grass

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how Fred Vaughan, an omnibus driver, might have looked Walt Whitman’s original essay, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” was printed at the end of the 1891-92 edition of Leaves of Grass. The following adaptation is an attempt to quite radically “translate” its disorganized, disgressive, awkward “Whitmanese” into the standards of prose clarity expected by 21st century readers.

When I say prose clarity, I am not only referring to a very aggressive copy edit. I have also subjected it to a critical, discerning lens of historical perspective. The result is Whitman’s clearest directions on how to read Leaves of Grass. — Mitchell Santine Gould, Curator, LeavesOfGrass.org. [Read more…] about Walt Whitman On How To Read Leaves of Grass

Poetry: Metaphysics with No Sunblock

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Metaphysics with No Sunblock

If the crescendo of soundbites
holds you back from that inner
silence touted as metaphysical

just turn your eyeballs inward
where it’s dark inside your head.
Now, conjure up a placid river

Then watch just how cautiously
deer come down to drink as you
imagine floating by on your back

trusting the river’s buoyancy.
But try not to think things
like: “I should wear sunblock.”

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Poetry: Lunacy

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Lunacy

Inflation is the whip, greed is its master,
Scheming megalomaniacs creating mass disaster,
For all of those people, psychological slaves,
Caught up in the whirlwind, a shuttle to their graves.

Life too complicated for mankind to enjoy,
Overpopulated, the Land being destroyed,
Hard to find a place alone, with room to wander free,
Now plugged in from dawn to dusk, electronic lunacy.

Wires dangling from the ears, fingers pushing keys,
Prisoners in concrete towers, away from Nature’s breeze,
Glued to screens for endless hours, not outside in the sun,
Better re-evaluate, for time is on the run.

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Capital District in 1852

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Ralph Waldo Emerson courtesy the Library of Congress Throughout the 1840s, members of the commercial and professional classes of New York’s Capital Region cities established “Young Men’s Associations,” loosely based upon the Young Men’s Christian Association recently founded in England. In Schenectady, ten prominent men formed their own Young Men’s Association in an attempt to bring culture to their growing city of 10,000.

Although the Association required an annual fee of $2, members and ladies were allowed to attend the lectures for free. The entrance fee for men who were not members was 25 cents. “The association is the only place in our city, aside from the pulpits, where you are able to find any discoursing,” announced its founders in the Schenectady Reflector. “It is the only place where an amusement of a miscellaneous nature is to be found…It is the only place where the clerk, the mechanic, or lawyer, can spend an hour (profitably) out of his store, workshop, or office.” [Read more…] about Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Capital District in 1852

Alfred Billings Street: Albany’s 19th Century State Poet

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Alfred Billings Street engraving by Welch & WalterAlfred Billings Street was born in Poughkeepsie on December 18th, 1811. He was descended from an Englishman, the Reverend Nicholas Smith, who immigrated to Connecticut around 1659.

His father, Randall Sandal Street, was a general in the New York Militia and served in the War of 1812. A practicing lawyer, Randall Street was also active in politics; he was a two-term district attorney and a Democratic congressman from 1819 until 1821. His wife, Cornelia, was the daughter of Revolutionary War veteran, Andrew Billings. [Read more…] about Alfred Billings Street: Albany’s 19th Century State Poet