In reading Aaron Poochigian’s new book of poetry, Four Walks in Central Park: A Poetic Guide to the Park, I found that a few lines of one of his poems could substitute for the whole book, which is a long, guided poetic tour of Central Park in New York City through four distinct walks. In the poem, “The Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre” from Book Three, the author describes a marionette puppet performance:
Now Perfect Rightness dances to convince
our doubts it lives, and we applaud, and now,
each fastened to a handler on a rafter,
the dolls that have convinced us take a bow.
Of course, the puppets aren’t real, and yet, with childlike belief, we can, for a while, enter into this artificial world.
Likewise, Central Park is an artificial world, almost completely planned, except perhaps for the largest boulders, but otherwise maintained, trimmed, cut, mowed, pruned, planted, mended, into this marvelous theatre, in a way, where, for a few hours we can suspend our disbelief and think that we really are worlds away from Manhattan. But we aren’t!
Poochigian reminds us of this from time to time. For example, in “Seneca Village” from Walk Three, we discover that halfway up the park on the West Side there once existed a village filled with blocks of Irish, German, and free-state Blacks, mostly working people, living in “multi-story houses.” But the City had different plans for the neighborhood:
Us sitting here is why that ward is gone.
Commissioners with eminent domain
bought out the landowners to pave the way
for this abscondment known as “Central Park.”
Real homes were razed to house synthetic wonder.
Or here in “Belvedere Castle,” also from Walk Three:
All local shist, it seems to grow out of
the grayish Vista Rock it stands above—
a natural bastion.
Each an eager vassal
of the commanding spectacle, we gape
north at the Great Lawn and the Turtle Pond.
So green and groomed and grand, and then beyond
the greens’ reach, crenelated cityscape.
We have to wonder, with the build-up hike
behind us and this view before us, like:
What should we make of this contraption?
This thesaurus of Linnean nomenclature?
What should we make of manufactured “Nature”?
Of large-scale truly fruited artifice?
Those are great questions. What should we make of a marionette production? What should we make of an artificial park? What should we make of a book of poems in which a writer has credibly written poems in the image of a park, which is the image of nature, which is the image of the first mover, a god, the God, Perfect Rightness? It’s an interesting concept to ponder.
I’m assuming this book is autobiographical although it’s possible Poochigian has created a persona for the book. I don’t know for sure. In the poem, “Interlude: A Secret” at the end of Walk One, the author confesses that he loved reading Latin as a child, preferring Virgil’s Georgics. Think of it. Out of all the books he could find, this urban child could latch on to arguably the most famous collection of rural poetry ever written, and then find Central Park, of all places, large enough to give scope to a rural imagination. Not only does that say something about Poochigian’s mind but also about how large the masterpiece called Central Park truly is. As an aside, it could also be noted that Ezra Pound famously compared Robert Frost’s first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will, to Virgil’s Georgics.
I see a lot of Robert Frost’s influence in Aaron Poochigian’s poetry. This could be me projecting because I’m not necessarily a wide reader of poetry, but I’m a deep reader of my favorite poets, and Frost happens to be one of my favorites.
For example, Poochigian writes his entire book using iambic pentameter, Frost’s preferred meter. It’s the perfect number of metric feet for an amble and a ramble. Also, like Frost, he uses colloquial, conversational English. After all, he’s giving us a guided tour of Central Park in four distinct walks, stopping at significant points of interest, natural or historic: Walk One: For the Overworked; Walk Two: For the Fallow; Walk Three: For the Melancholy; and Walk Four: For the Disillusioned.
Poochigian uses rhyming couplets, employing a special rhyming technique that Frost fully developed. The couplets generally are not adjacent. Instead, the rhyming end word from one line “couples” with the end word in another line but often in another part of the stanza, the next stanza, or even the next poem, so that his rhymes don’t obtrude but rather interlock each series of poems into a continuous walk. It’s a lovely device that works.
Poochigian uses another connecting technique often used by Frost. He breaks iambic lines in two so that part of the line starts at the end of one stanza, and the rest of the pentameter begins the next stanza. There are dozens of examples, like this one from Walk Two’s “The Zoo”:
Saki monkeys, white-faced little devils,
sleep, leap and nibble mushu pears, while naughty
tamarins, hunched atop a platform, moon
thrilled children.
Downstairs on the jungle floor
we see a ring-tailed western dwarf coati
(a sort of hose-nosed, sausage-shaped raccoon)
just chilling like he’s home in Ecuador
However, Poochigian takes this technique to another level. He often breaks a line from one poem to another. Look how gracefully he links “The Ramble” to “Balcony Bridge” in Walk Three. From the end of “The Ramble”:
Lighting at last on sun and lakeshore, sources
of sure intelligence, we make our way
over the Oak Bridge over Bank Rock Bay.
We have survived the Ramble
No more doubt
will dim today’s excursion.
From the beginning of “Balcony Bridge”
Following
a thoroughfare that skirts the Lake’s west side,
we pass row boats, then promenade across
the asphalt-paved yet quatrefoil-refined
Balcony Bridge.
He fills his book with moments of beauty, and appropriately so because the park is beautiful. For example, if you’ve ever walked through the Mall south of the bandshell you’ll know that this is true, based on how many people flock there. From Walk One, “The Mall”:
The only trees they let in there are elms,
and lamps in them add romance to the dark
and little shadows when the toothed leaves fall.
Or this, from Walk Three, “The Turtle Pond”:
Dark watered though it is, the Pond reflects
an oval sky encroached on by the sheer
excelsior of turrets on a bluff.
And this beauty leads Poochigian to love Central Park. From Walk Two, “The Model Boat Pond”:
Nothing of note could ever happen here --
that’s why it’s one of my most favorite places.
Or from Walk Two, “Graywacke Arch”:
Sometimes it seems like all that ever was
is in Manhattan. What would we leave for?
We’ve got this park.
Or from Walk Four, “The Bernard Family Playground”:
Though desolate, these acres are as rich
as real uncultivated wilderness.
Poochigian also seems to love America; not in some jingoistic unrealistic manner, but in the way Shakespeare loved his England or Frost his New England. If he has any quarrels at all, they’re lover’s quarrels. (There’s Frost again.) For example, in “The Daniel Webster Monument” from Walk One, he writes:
Think of how this bronze remains
unshakeable in every kind of weather –
rainstorms and hailstorms, blizzards, hurricanes.
That’s how unshakably the real guy tried
to keep fragile America together
while needing freedom for us all. He died
then came the War Between the States.
Divided
again, we wait. I hope that some slickensided
healer like him can staunch the fault before
the big one and a second civil war.
Rather timely and full of hope.
Even when Poochigian touches the dark side of Central Park’s history in one of his longer poems, “The Preppy Killer” from Walk Two, which recounts that infamous murder, he only hints at the worst of it, and then steers us back to the right path.
No more homicide.
Let’s home in solely on the present tense
and end the day with light stuff. It would be, um,
better, you know, much better for morale.
He does it again in “Strawberry Fields” from Walk One. Strawberry Fields is a section of the park remodeled to commemorate the life of John Lennon and located directly across the street from The Dakota apartment building, the site of Lennon’s assassination.
So now in June
like now, across the street, we get a stand
of blazing yet blazé azaleas,
and struggle-toughened strummers sit and croon
songs like “Imagine” in the afternoon.
They shrive a crime the world will never pardon
America gives prayers and a peace garden.
In fact, whenever the subject gets a little too dicey, rather than launching into a polemic or a diatribe, as he could have done in “Pilgrim Hill” in Walk One, he prefers instead to write some variation of, “I would rather / move along.”
The only event he missed, in modern memory, was the wind sheer that ripped across a northern section of Central Park on August 18, 2009 and destroyed over 500 trees, including many old timers in the area that Poochigian writes about in his poem, “The Ravine” from Walk Four.
So many trees. The whole northwestern ridge
is densely trunked and shaded: river birch
and willow, black, red, white and swamp white oak.
They’d rather be alone. When deep in here,
I catch the beast, like, panoramic fear
of wilderness oblivious. No joke.
Despite the disaster, the ravine has regrown, retaining its sense of wildness and danger. It really does feel like no-man’s land. I like how Poochigian cleverly compares walking through it to straying off the true path in Canto 1 of Dante’s Inferno: “Still worse, the light and lornness here evoke / a desperate Dante.”
I wanted to review Aaron Poochigian’s book not only because he writes metrical poetry, which I prefer, but because I lived in New York City for thirty years. Central Park was my sanctuary and refuge. Frankly, I don’t know how I could have lived in that city without Central Park. In fact, in an odd way, Poochigian writes about me when he writes about turtles purchased as pets and later released into “The Turtle Pond”:
Many of those out there were pets before,
the kind a kid keeps in a cardboard box
until his parents say the little guy
will have to go back home. That “home” is here.
I’m that turtle! I grew up in a little village of 250 people in rural upstate New York, transplanted to New York City and “purchased” by a company for work wages. Central Park kept me sane. I’ve walked every part of that park many, many times, from when I first arrived in 1985 when a person didn’t dare enter the park after dark or walk above 96th Street, until 2015, well after its remarkable and almost miraculous refurbishment by the Central Park Conservancy in the late 80s and early 90s.
For example, before a small fenced-in nature sanctuary on the south side opened to the public, I’d think about sneaking in, but it was verboten. However, when it did open, I entered with awe, as if I were being let into the Garden of Eden. Poochigian captures that feeling in Walk One, “The Hallett Nature Sanctuary”:
When I walk here alone, I get that funny
frisson that sneaks up in an empty church.
You know, like something science just can’t square
has breached the boundary and is in the air.
Notice how those we meet, like monks and nuns,
are whispering in awe, and we are, too.
The Bethesda Fountain area received extensive renovation. Before the Conservancy spruced it up, it was a dump. As Poochigian writes in Walk One, “Bethesda Terrace”:
It’s a hive
for tourists, but the corbels, pommels, bevels
and trefoils, neo-Something doodads, all
so hifalutinly solicit them
that they don’t catch this pair of pillars that
exhibits prime a.m. and grim p.m..
In the mid-80s, pieces of these architectural doodads, including angels’ wings and laurel leaves, were broken off, and had to be carefully, piece-by-piece, molded and replaced. Meanwhile, that arcade under the terrace “inlaid with fifteen thousand vintage Minton tiles,” was too scary to walk through, but if you did, you had to listen to the creepy caterwauling of that street musician, Thoth.
Poochigian only has a lover’s quarrel with Central Park, just as Frost did with the world. This is how he’s able to place his book with Familius, a “company that publishes books and other content to help families be happy.” However, I don’t get the sense that Poochigian feels in any way constrained by this company’s philosophy. On the contrary, it’s a perfect fit.
A writer could easily go into the dirty details of what really occurs in the rambles, or the gory details of the preppy murder or the wilding incident, three subjects he mentions in his book. But Poochigian’s interests aren’t prurient or sadistic. He’s not a rubbernecker. Most normal people enter the park to enjoy it, not to smoke pot, pick pockets, or rape. If you’re looking for the seamier side of Central Park, this book isn’t for you. In fact, even when Poochigian cites “the mad home truth of King Lear’s rage,” in the poem “Delacorte Theatre” from Walk Three, he doesn’t mention Lear plucking out his eyeballs. We get the implication without the explicit horror.
The physical beauty of Poochigian’s book warrants a mention. Many modern poets, including prolifically published ones, will never see a book as beautifully bound. It looks and feels like a guidebook (which in many ways it is), published in a binding and a cover made to endure for many years. It has maps detailing his four walks, as well as pictures and drawings. I could easily foresee this book as a staple in the shop at The Cloisters, or at the museum store by Rockefeller Center, or at the souvenir shop at The Met.
Poochigian also includes a short, informative prose section, “Central Park in Literature,” that mentions writers who have discussed the park: Stephen Crane, Henry James, Dorothy Parker, Robert Lowell, JD. Salinger, and many more.
This book offers many delights, and more could be said. Instead, I’ll close with Poochigian’s own Frost-haunted words from “The Conservatory Garden” in Walk Four:
We could, of course, spend hours
idling here (that’s what it’s for), but we
have miles to go and butterflies to see.
Image Credit: William A. Coffin, “Central Park and the Plaza” (1917-18) via Smithsonian American Art Museum.
