Philadelphia Fringe Festival marks a particular point in many transplant artists' stories of moving to Philly. My first Fringe (2016) included an artistic baptism of sorts, dancing in the Philadelphia Museum of Art fountain in Boris Charmatz's community workshop.
The 2018 Fringe Festival was Micah Greenleaf's first as a Philadelphia resident. We met at a show (I was volunteering, Micah working box office), got to talking, and found out that we were both writers without a Philadelphia community. We started Left to Write, a get-what-you-need, meet-when-we-can writer's group. We've sat across from each others' laptops for a year, but never collaborated until this ArtDate.
The Other City
(A Poem in Seven Halves)
The other city calls me
I feel her breeze around my neck
But I feel your ground beneath me
I can’t take root in air
Maybe I’m there now
In a crush of people
Underground
Waiting for a train
The me who figured out how to hack it
Who lost weight and shaved her legs
And learned to live with my mother a little longer
Maybe in that other city
When a heart lies in two places
In two people
In two states:
Independent and broke
It lingers in both
But lives in one
And beats itself for loving none
Process
We started with these common themes we were feeling:
The other city
Skylines
Forking paths
We went off to write on our own for ~15 minutes. That's when Micah came up with the last stanza (which I think also stands on its own as a small poem). Here's his original with the first two stanzas that he wrote:
When my eyes fall
On this city I’ve found
When it’s autumn
But concrete blocks
leaves from the ground
When I go back to one home
And I miss the other
When I bake pumpkin pie
I think of apron strings
Tied to my mother
When the heart lies in three places
With three people
In three states:
Independence, ocean, and broken
It answers calls from two
And waits for replies in one
And beats itself when there is none
I wrote a long free-write that you can read at the end of this blog post, from which we pulled the first two stanzas of our collaborative poem (the stanzas that we pulled are in bold).
We wanted to create something out of our two ideas, but when we placed the stanzas next to each other, something was missing. Micah's referenced three places, where my poem only talked about two. It flowed from first person "I" to third person "she" to a removed narrator talking about "the heart." We decided to try adding a second person "you" stanza.
Micah got the idea to write collaboratively by passing the computer back and forth and trading single lines or couplets, writing to each other as our respective "you"s. This became its own half-finished poem, which we tried to edit to coherency and crumbled when we messed with it:
You came here
To find the home you left
The one that flows with the tides
But you stuck like a buoy
Afloat, going nowhere
A guiding point for travelers
Until
Sunk but not stuck
Dug your heels in
A solid foundation
For a sail to catch wind
It's pretty language, we said, but not where we're really going, though it was a very cool process and one that I'm definitely going to steal. Reminded me of David Bowie and Laurie Anderson's telephone drawing experiment.
When we went back to the original poem after that exercise, we decided to slim down what we had instead of adding a stanza. We edited; Micah changed that last stanza quite a bit. For the record, both of us love Philadelphia, we just felt that last line fit the poem. During editing, one writer would read what we had out loud while the other listened. We continued this practice by recording the final poem, which you can listen to back at the top of this post.
My free-write is below. Thanks to Micah for writing with me!
View more ArtDates HERE.
When I got fed up with New York
I stopped wanting to be underground for
hours every day
I stopped smelling piss in the subway and thinking
I'm home
I never understood when people said
my city was just so big
too much
overwhelming
Until I spent a few years our in Ohio
in between soyfields in a small college town
I came back to the subway and the crush of people standing shoulder to shoulder on the F and its not even rush hour and I understood what my friends from Kentucky meant
my city's too bit too much
she sucks you in with promises and the grayed-out times are a necessity
because where else could you _______, or _________, or ____________,
except here?
I've taken a lot of buses
30th St
South Station
Penn Station
Hudson Yards
and getting off that bus in Philadelphia
seeing the skyline, the skyscrapers few enough that I can name most of them
William Penn greets me personally every time I come back
My sister's friends ask me
how many years until they qualify as New Yorkers
(no dice, she says, you have to be born here),
but I wonder meanwhile how long
till I can say jawn in my everyday speech
without feeling like an imposter
(forever maybe)
The city of hard-won opportunities
of building slowly
I don't want to disappear into you, Philadelphia
Because you know me
I don't want to be anonymous
Could be anybody, could become anybody
The people at the tea shop know me
my teachers, my friends
Yet traveling around Manhattan
I see potential
Maybe even the glory of what I used to posses
(or so I think)
Skylines and starlight
and music meant for me to feel
like I can conquer the world
Planes flying overhead and people
endless people
I could see anyone, meet anyone, be anyone
The other city call me
I feel her breeze around my neck
But I feel your ground beneath me
I can't take root in air
Maybe she lives there now
The me who figured out how to hack it
Who lost weight and shaved her legs
Who learned to live with my mother just a little longer
Hardened to the cycle of rejections
Maybe she's really an artist in New York
Or maybe she's as miserable as I was
And on that note, wow! Thanks for reading this far! Go see more ArtDates HERE.
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